Polls reveal majority of Americans & Britians doubt statements about the war in Iraq by Derrick Jackson The Boston Globe 9:20am 13th Jul, 2004   July 26, 2004    Last month a New York Times poll found that 20 per cent of Americans believed that George Bush was "mostly lying" in his statements about the war in Iraq and 59 per cent said he was "hiding something". Only 18 per cent said he gave Americans the "entire truth".    In Britain, a poll last week in The Guardian found that 55 per cent of voters believed that Tony Blair lied over Iraq, compared with 37 per cent who believed he did not lie. Another poll last week in the Sunday Times found that 46 per cent of people believed that Blair distorted the evidence about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, compared with 43 per cent who said that Blair genuinely believed in the evidence he was presented by his intelligence agencies.    In Britain, the fallout from an invasion where no weapons of mass destruction were found has 61 per cent of the people in the Sunday Times poll saying that Blair should apologise for the war, compared with a mere 28 per cent who did not want an apology. This is despite the fact that this month the major British inquiry to date into the prewar intelligence cleared Blair of lying, though it did say he took the available information to the "outer limits" of legitimate conclusions.    In response to the report, Blair conceded: "I have to accept as the months have passed, it seems increasingly clear that at the time of invasion, Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy." He even said: "I accept full personal responsibility for the way the issue was presented." But he neutralised his "responsibility" by also saying: "No one lied. No one made up the intelligence. No one inserted things into the dossier against the advice of the intelligence services. Everyone genuinely tried to do their best in good faith for the country in circumstances of acute difficulty. That issue should now be at an end."    A week earlier Bush was in a similar defensive position when the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its own report on the prewar intelligence. That report did not address Bush's use of intelligence. But it said the invasion was based on information so wrong that the committee's chairman, Pat Roberts, a Republican, said the actual information would have made the war a "tougher sell".    Bush said: "Listen, we thought there were going to be stockpiles of weapons. I thought so; the Congress thought so; the UN thought so."    Oddly, even though these official inquiries do not indict the leaders, the people have begun to, on their own. Perhaps that is because Bush and Blair continue to exaggerate Saddam's threat.    Bush said: "I'll tell you what we do know. Saddam Hussein had the capacity to make weapons. See, he had the ability to make them. He had the intent. We knew he hated America. We knew he was paying families of suiciders. We knew he tortured his own people, and we knew he had the capability of making weapons. That we do know. They haven't found the stockpiles, but we do know he could make them. And so he was a dangerous man. He was a dangerous man. The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. America is safer."    That last statement flies in the face of just about every report that concluded that Iraq, decimated in the 1991 Gulf War, was not an imminent threat even to its neighbours, let alone to America or Britain.    Last Tuesday, Blair howled at the moon in a House of Commons debate. "It was absolutely clear that he had every intention to carry on developing these weapons, that he was procuring materials to do so," Blair said of Saddam. "The intelligence community throughout, like the UN, like most intelligence services in the world, certainly did believe he had Iraqi WMD capability and intent."    Blair and Bush continue conveniently to omit from history the fact that in the weeks leading up to the invasion, the UN weapons inspectors had yet to find any evidence of nuclear weapons production and had not come to a conclusion about the existence of WMD.    Hans Blix, the most famous of the weapons inspectors, originally believed, like most other people, that the weapons did exist. But it became clear to him that Bush and Blair "were not exercising sufficient critical judgement". Blix said in one interview: "It was a little like the witch-hunts of past centuries. You know, they were so convinced that there were witches that if they saw something like a black cat, they would say, 'Well, this is it.'    Blix in many interviews has cautiously said he does not think Bush or Blair acted in "bad faith". He said he wished that "they should have put some question marks" on their intelligence "rather than the exclamation marks that they did". They are still not listening to Blix. They are continuing to put exclamation marks on the evidence. It is no wonder that a minority of citizens in the US and Britain believe their leaders. Even though Bush and Blair got their war, they are still crying wolf.
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