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On the BBC news last night, a reporter pointedly ask Blair, while still in
Iraq, about WMDs. Blair turned his back and wouldn't answer.
Question: Were all those people killed and a country put into ruin because
people in positions of power and trust consciously lied?
Ed Weick
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2003 10:32 AM
Subject: [Futurework] Thus far, but no
further
Professional Blair-watchers are saying that Tony
Blair is now showing signs of extreme nervousness as he continues to try and
justify the reason for going to war in Iraq. (Certainly the pitch of his voice
seems to be getting a little out of control from time to time.) At the time
that Blair threw in his/our lot with Bush, 140 of his own MPs voted against
him and we had the biggest-ever demonstration in London with over 1 million
people attending from all over the country. Many (including me) thought then
that Blair was close to being forced to resign.
But he scraped by in
Houdini fashion. However, now that it is becoming clearer by the day that
Saddam Hussein was of no danger to other countries around him, never mind
America or the rest of the world, the pressure against Blair is mounting
again. He is being forced to choose his words very carefully indeed. As in his
speech in Poland today, every sentence he utters is true, but there's no
logical connection between them that amounts to a valid case. As the FT says
below, he and Bush have deceived us and it's going to be increasingly
impossible for Blair to convince most of this country (or at least most of
those who care about the matter) otherwise.
Because I was wrong before
about Blair's resignation, I hesitate to make another forecast. However, on my
dogwalk this morning I bumped into a retired senior businessman (that is, much
more senior than I'll ever be!) whom I occasionally meet (whose son, by
coincidence, is an officer in Iraq and coming home tomorrow) who said quite
bluntly, after we'd circled around each other conversationally: "Blair will
have to resign."
And then, in the remainder of my dogwalk I read one of
the editorials in today's FT. I thought that this was a pretty good summary of
what's been going on so far. The FT is arguably the most respected newspaper
in England -- by both left and right -- and if this is what the FT says then I
rather think that Blair is in a much deeper hole than he's realised so far.
What follows may seem rather sotto voce to most non-English, but to us
it's pretty strong stuff. If Rumsfeld and Bush start taking silly decisions
about Iran -- as it seems they are threatening to -- then I don't see how
Blair can support them this time.
<<<<
WHERE ARE
THEY?
It is time for a reality check: we have been deceived.
The
US/UK occupation of Iraq has done nothing to prove the case for war. On the
contrary, it has undermined, possibly fatally, their casus belli
against the Iraqi regime -- namely that it was stockpiling chemical and
biological, if not nuclear, weapons. The reality is that, 45 days after the
war's end, all the US and UK appear to have found is two empty trailers
suspected of having been mobile bio-weapon laboratories. This newspaper
suspected as much all along.
Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, now
says Iraq may have destroyed its stocks of weapons of mass destruction before
the war. In other words, he does not expect anything more to be found. Tony
Blair is still expressing confidence in the existence of WMD. But he would;
far more than President George W. Bush, the prime minister justified the war
on the need to rid Iraq of its weapons.
So did the US and UK
intelligence services get it wrong, or were their political masters lying? It
seems a bit of both. Most of the evidence that Iraq might have WMD was
based on what Iraq had at the end of the Gulf war of 1991, on what a
high-level defector alleged in 1995 that Iraq was still concealing and on what
chemical and biological material Iraq was believed to have made or imported
after 1998. UN and intelligence assessments were, mainly, a series of
questions, based on known or suspected stocks or inputs.
But in the
mouths of US and British politicians, questions turned into assertions
embroidered with assumptions. In its WMD dossier, Downing Street claimed Iraq
had WMD ready for use in 45 minutes, based on a source that even UK
intelligence apparently regarded as questionable; this could be the time
required to launch a WMD-armed Scud - but only if it had a ready
warhead. The same UK dossier also contained a fabricated claim of a recent
Iraqi search for uranium from Niger. For their part, the Pentagon hawks
apparently turned to their own Iraqi exile sources in preference to more
doveish estimates of the Central and Defence Intelligence Agencies.
One of
these hawks, Paul Wolfowitz, has now tellingly admitted that WMD was chosen as
the casus belli "for bureaucratic reasons, because it was the one
reason everyone could agree on". "Everyone" included Mr Blair. He knew that
few outside the Washington Beltway, and even fewer in Britain, would buy the
regime change argument, whereas the WMD case against Iraq was enshrined in 12
years of UN resolutions.
The intelligence failures in Iraq raise many
questions, not least why Saddam Hussein was so unforthcoming to UN inspectors,
if he had little left to hide. But there is one overwhelming caution for the
Bush administration. If it ever wants to put its doctrine of pre-emptive war
into practice again, it will need to come up with far more convincing proof of
threats than it showed in Iraq.
>>>>
Financial Times;
May 30, 2003
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath,
England
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