World Editorials question WMD Rationale for Iraqi War by The Times / The independent / The Australian 11:12am 30th Jan, 2004   London. January 30, 2004.    "Hutton Misses Blair's Deceit" by Clare Short. (The Times / UK).    IN recent statements Prime Minister Tony Blair has rested his case - that there were WMD in Iraq - on the intelligence he received. But the truth is that the intelligence was exaggerated. The intelligence agencies thought that Iraq had chemical and biological programs and probably some capacity to use some chemical weapons within Iraq. The continuing failure to find any WMD confirms that they were wrong in that assessment.    But there is no doubt that the intelligence was exaggerated for political reasons. This issue is causing enormous controversy in the US and it has been repeatedly made clear by former security services staff in the US and Australia that the intelligence was exaggerated in order to make the case for war.    But behind all this, and the tragedy that befell David Kelly, lie the big questions on which the Hutton report, released this week, does not comment. It is still clear that Britain's Prime Minister committed himself to support a US war in Iraq before the northern summer of 2002. He therefore lost the leverage that Britain could have exercised to persuade the US that, since there was no imminent threat from Iraq, we should start with implementing the road map to Palestinian statehood.    He should have also insisted that we should work through the UN and exhaust all possible means before resorting to war. This was the proud role Britain could have played -- acting as a bridge between the US and Europe and helping to end the central cause of division and bitterness in the Middle East.    Instead, it remains the case that the Prime Minister promised the British people that there would be war only if authorised by a second UN resolution. But he had also promised the US we would be with them. When the Security Council would not support war before Hans Blix had completed his work, he excused his failure to keep his promise on the second resolution by misleading us on the French position.    In fact, President Jacques Chirac said he would veto any resolution at that time, but would support a resolution authorising war if UN weapons inspector Blix's efforts failed. Instead we were repeatedly told that the French had said they would veto any second resolution.    On top of all this, the Prime Minister promised a UN mandate for the reconstruction of Iraq. But when the US refused to allow the UN its proper role in bringing into being an interim Iraqi government, the Prime Minister gave in again and thus failed to legitimise and internationalise the reconstruction process.    Hutton does not deal with the big question of whether Blair was less that honest with his country on the road to war. I am afraid it remains my conclusion that through a series of deceits, half-truths and omissions, Blair took the UK into a war in support of America which has strengthened al-Qa'ida, further destabilised the Middle East and increased the suffering of the people of Iraq.    I have no doubt that Blair thought he was doing the right thing and still thinks he did the right thing by going to war. The question remains whether it is acceptable for a Prime Minister to be economical with the truth when committing the country to war.    (Clare Short was international development secretary in the British Government from 1997 to 2003. This is an extract from The Times).    January 30, 2004    "Don't mention the war" by Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent. (Published by The Australian).    YES, the journalists and managers of the BBC made serious mistakes in the row over David Kelly and Iraq's supposed weapons arsenal. But what about the big issue?    Did the Blair Government mislead the public by exaggerating the case for war with Iraq, either deliberately or by relying on faulty intelligence?    That question was not the main focus of Brian Hutton, who was commissioned by Tony Blair to investigate one death - Kelly's - rather than into the whole "weapons of mass destruction" rationale for a war that has claimed thousands of lives.    But it is the question British opposition parties say should now be the subject of a separate judicial inquiry, and at least some light was shed on it by Hutton's 100,000 pages of evidence and statements from dozens of witnesses.    Similar questions have dominated the debate about Iraq in Australia and the US, but it is only the Hutton inquiry that has come even close to an independent judicial examination of the main issue.    Without looking at the veracity of the intelligence used by the British Prime Minister, which looks shakier with each extra day that WMD are not found in Iraq, Lord Hutton found there was no evidence Blair or any of his ministers had knowingly used false intelligence or misused real intelligence to advance their case for going to war.    It was quite proper, Hutton ruled, for Blair's spin doctors to be involved in drafting the British Government's contentious September 2002 public dossier on Iraq, even though the dossier was released under the auspices of the country's intelligence services.    Hutton, a member of the House of Lords, generally endorsed the integrity and judgments of the politicians, officials and intelligence officers who came before him rather than supporting the scepticism of BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and some government scientists who felt the intelligence used to argue the case for war was deeply flawed.    But the law lord did include one intriguing line in his report about the way the dossier was put together.    "It can't be ruled out," Hutton found, "that the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett, and his officials were 'subconsciously influenced' by No 10's desire for as strong a case as possible, compatible with the intelligence, to be made in the dossier."    Indeed. As Blair told the inquiry, he and US President George W. Bush agreed in August 2002 they needed to convince the public of both countries that Saddam Hussein had to be dealt with, by showing some of the intelligence material that had been crossing their desks. Blair said on September 3, 2002, that he would release a dossier of intelligence on Iraq later that month.    The masses of material released at the inquiry suggest there was an inherent conflict in how that was done -- the dossier was designed to argue the case for taking military action against Hussein, but it was to be portrayed as a neutral assessment of intelligence, signed off by Scarlett, the top adviser to the Government, representing the nation's three intelligence services.    Scarlett, an MI6 employee for 30 years, would have "ownership" of the document to bolster its credibility.    Scarlett had already spent two years working closely with Blair and his top aides in the cabinet office post.    Evidence at the hearing established that Scarlett did not pass on disquiet among some members of the intelligence services -- disquiet shared by Dr Kelly -- about some of the claims in the dossier. Scarlett left out certain pieces of intelligence that weakened the case for war, like an assessment that a war could destabilise Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, and actually undermine the wider "war on terror".    One email tendered to the inquiry left little doubt Scarlett was part of a hunt for worrying intelligence rather than a neutral assessment of what was available. In a "last call" for any further pieces of intelligence that might help, the email was sent to intelligence agencies saying "No10 through the chairman (Scarlett) want the document to be as strong as possible within the bounds of available intelligence".    When it came to the wording of the dossier Alastair Campbell, Blair's spin doctor, requested 15 changes, usually to strengthen the impression of an imminent threat posed by Hussein, and Scarlett responded: "We have been able to amend the text in most cases as you proposed."    In one case, for example, the statement that the Iraqis "may be able to deploy WMD within 45 minutes" was amended to say they "are able" rather than "may be able" to do so - a crucial difference.    Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, asked Scarlett to redraft another paragraph that suggested Hussein would only use WMD if he were attacked. That qualification was dropped the day before the dossier was printed, so the final statement suggested Iraq might use the weapons without first being attacked.    An internal email from Powell warned that the available intelligence did not show any "imminent threat", but that did not stop Blair telling parliament on September 24 that Iraq posed a "serious and current threat".    The contentious claim that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons in as little as 45 minutes was presented in a way that gave the impression it related to long-range missiles, when it actually only related to short-range battlefield munitions like mortars and grenades.    What is now clearer than ever is that Blair treated "neutral" intelligence as material to be used selectively to push one side of the argument for war.    January 30, 2004     "The CIA has a lot to answer for" by Maureen Dowd. (The New York Times)    The awful part is that George Bush and Saddam Hussein were both staring into the same cracked spook-house mirror.    Thanks to David Kay, we now have an amazing image of the President and the dictator, both divorced from reality over weapons, glaring at each other from opposite sides of bizarre, paranoid universes where fiction trumped fact.    It would be like a wacky Peter Sellers satire if so many Iraqis and Americans hadn't died in Iraq.    These two would-be world-class tough guys were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to show that they couldn't be pushed around. Their trusted underlings misled them with fanciful information on advanced Iraqi weapons programs that they credulously believed because it fitted what they wanted to hear.    Saddam was swept away writing his romance novels, while Bush was swept away with the romance of rewriting the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War to finish off the thug who tried to kill his dad.    The men each had a copy of Crime and Punishment - Condi Rice gave Bush the novel on his trip to Russia in 2002, and Saddam had Dostoyevsky down in the spider hole - but neither absorbed its lesson: that you can't put yourself above rules just because you think you're superior.    When Kay spoke these words on WMD - "It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgement, and that is most disturbing" - both America and Iraq learned that when you try too hard to control the picture of reality, you risk losing your grasp of it.    In interviews, Kay defended the war with Iraq, saying that the US "has often entered the right war for the wrong reason", and he defended Bush, saying: "If anyone was abused by the intelligence, it was the President."    Testifying before the US Senate's Armed Services Committee, the former CIA weapons sleuth compared the CIA with a lousy stockbroker: "If I were your broker and you were investing on my advice . . . and at the end of the day, I said Enron was the greatest company in the world, and you had lost a substantial amount of money on it because it turned out differently, you would think I had abused you."    "The CIA has a lot to answer for. America's intelligence aces have been spectacularly off their game."    Certainly the CIA has a lot to answer for. America's intelligence aces have been spectacularly off their game. They failed to warn about September 11 and missed the shame spiral of Saddam, hoodwinked by his top scientists.    They were probably relying too much on The Arabian Nights tales of Ahmed Chalabi, eager to spread the word of Saddam's imaginary nuclear-tipped weapons because it suited his own ambitions - and that of his Pentagon pals.    But while he is skittering away from his claims about Iraqi weapons, President Bush is not racing towards accountability. It's an election year.    The President wants to act as though he has a problem but not a scandal, which he can fix without rolling heads - of those who made honest mistakes or dishonest ones by rigging the intelligence.    Dick Cheney, who declared that Saddam had nuclear capability and who visited CIA headquarters in 2002 to make sure the raw intelligence was properly interpreted, is sticking to his deluded guns.    The Vice-President pushed to go to war partly because he thought that slapping a weakened bully like Saddam would scare other dictators. He must have reckoned there would be no day of reckoning on weapons once Saddam was gone.    So it had to be some new definition of chutzpah on Tuesday, when Cheney, exuding more infallibility than the Pope, presented the pontiff with a crystal dove.    (Maureen Dowd is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with The New York Times)    January 31, 2004    "Inquiry demands over WMD Intelligence Fiasco" by Rupert Cornwell & Ben Russell. ( Published by The independent / UK)    Tony Blair and the Bush administration were facing growing demands yesterday for independent inquiries into the intelligence debacle over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.    In the United States, even some influential Republicans in Congress say only a full-scale and non-partisan investigation can provide the answers.    The pressure intensified this week with the admission by David Kay, the outgoing chief weapons inspector, that "we were almost all wrong" in the belief that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons.    Downing Street brushed aside calls for an independent inquiry into the approach to the war in Iraq. But the clamor for answers mounted yesterday when the Conservatives joined anti-war MPs in demanding an investigation.    Mr Blair is likely to face renewed questioning from MPs when he faces members of the Commons Liaison Committee on Tuesday, while the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee was said to be planning to examine the intelligence used in the run-up to war.    Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, appealed to Mr Blair to admit the intelligence was "wildly wrong". He said: "Now that even the White House has admitted they may have got it wrong, it's getting embarrassing to watch our government still trying to deny reality. The game is up."    In the United States, even some influential Republicans in Congress say only a full-scale and non-partisan investigation can provide the answers. For the White House such an investigation might open an election year Pandora's box, and for the moment it appears to be stalling, a tactic that may be helped in the short term by the apparent rejection of a similar exercise in Britain by Mr Blair.    Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush's National Security Adviser, said this week that, although the President was determined to get to the bottom of the matter, the Iraq Survey Group, which Mr Kay used to head, must finish its work first.    Michael Ancram, the shadow Foreign Secretary, said: "Condoleezza Rice's comments show once again that a full independent inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the lead-up to the Iraq war and its aftermath is absolutely essential."    "I want to know the facts," Mr Bush told reporters yesterday, refusing to commit to an independent inquiry. But such delay may no longer be possible.    In a blistering criticism of the CIA, Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, described events as "a runaway train". The result was "a world-class intelligence failure".    The case for an outside independent investigation is strengthened by the likelihood of deadlock on the Senate and House intelligence panels which are due to finalize draft reports on the WMD fiasco. Mr Roberts left little doubt that his report would be highly critical.    Even so the Democratic minorities on the two committees are likely to issue dissenting reports, claiming the White House deliberately exaggerated claims about Saddam's weapons.    © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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