Dr Kay is not the useful idiot the anti-war party claims
By Melanie Phillips
(Filed: 01/02/2004)
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Hardly had Lord Hutton finished summarising his report than the goalposts were promptly moved. Among those who were apoplectic that he had exonerated the Government and eviscerated the BBC, the cry arose that he hadn't addressed the "wider" issue.
This was that the Iraq war was based on false intelligence that Saddam posed a threat with his weapons of mass destruction. This myth has been reinforced by widespread media reports that Dr David Kay, who recently resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, has said that no WMD actually existed in Iraq, thus proving that Saddam was no threat and we were led up the garden path to war.
If you look, however, at what Dr Kay actually said last
week to the Senate Armed Services committee and in media
interviews, a very different picture emerges. Certainly,
he claimed there had been a major failure of intelligence
which had misrepresented the situation. But he was
specifically referring to large weapons stockpiles which
he now thought were not there after all, and to the large-
scale weapons programme which he said had been wound down
after 1991.
Intelligence agencies, he said, had failed to grasp that in the corruption and chaos of the Iraqi regime, Saddam himself was being told lies about his weapons programmes, whose large-scale production had stalled under the pressure of UN inspections.
Such a serious intelligence failure is clearly a huge political embarrassment for both President Bush and Tony Blair, prompting even the US National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to acknowledge that mistakes had been made and President Bush to say he wants to "know the facts".
But Dr Kay was not saying Saddam was therefore no threat
on the WMD front. On the contrary, not only did he say it
was possible that smaller WMD stockpiles remained hidden
in Iraq, but that "right up to the end" the Iraqis were
trying to produce the deadly poison ricin.
"They were mostly researching better methods for
weaponisation," he said. Not only that, Saddam had
restarted a rudimentary nuclear programme. And he had also
maintained an active ballistic missile programme that was
receiving significant foreign assistance until the start
of the war.
Such revelations corresponded with Dr Kay's interim report
last autumn, which detailed "dozens of WMD-related
programme activities" which had been successfully
concealed from Dr Hans Blix's UN inspectors.
These included a clandestine network of laboratories
containing equipment suitable for chemical and biological
weapons research, and new research on the biological
agents Brucella and Congo Crimean Haemorrhagic Fever.
Furthermore, a scientist who had hidden a phial of live
Botulinum in his house had identified "a large cache of
agents" that he had been asked, but had refused, to
conceal and for which the ISG was now searching.
This all suggested, said Dr Kay, that after 1996 Saddam
had focused on "smaller covert capabilities that could be
activated quickly" to produce biological weapons agents.
And last week he told this newspaper that he had
discovered, from the interrogation of Iraqi scientists,
that before the war Saddam had hidden WMD programme
components in Syria.
So according to Dr Kay, Saddam had posed a very live
threat indeed from WMD. Yet this evidence has been almost
totally disregarded, as an nearly unanimous chorus of
journalists has asserted that even Dr Kay said Iraq had no
WMD.
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Dr Kay's evidence has been brushed aside because of the
assiduously promulgated myth that we only went to war
because we were told that Iraq had WMD that were ready to
use. But this is not so. We went to war because Saddam was
grossly in breach of UN resolutions instructing him to
prove he had dismantled his WMD programme.
True, Bush and Blair asserted that he had WMD stockpiles
which would be found. But this was not the reason for war.
Such claims were only made to bolster the case to a public
that seemed incapable of grasping that the reason for war
was not the presence of WMD but the absence of evidence
that it had been removed.
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Failure to make this case successfully led Bush and Blair
to claim - according to Dr Kay, in good faith but on the
basis of flawed intelligence - that since these stockpiles
were unaccounted for they were probably still there. That
claim has now spectacularly backfired, since the failure
to discover any WMD has merely led people to conclude that
this proves the war was indeed ill-founded. But this is
not so.
For the fact that Saddam was actively engaged in WMD
programmes, large-scale or not, shows he was indeed in
breach of the UN resolutions, and was indeed the threat he
had been assumed to be from his record, temperament,
regional ambitions and links to terrorism.
How much ricin, after all, do you need to kill thousands
of people? To listen to anti-war critics, it would seem
that modest amounts of biological agent somehow don't
count as WMD, or a re-started nuclear programme is no
threat because it is only rudimentary.
To Dr Kay, the war was absolutely necessary because Saddam
had become "even more dangerous" than had been realised,
and, he said last week, "it was reasonable to reach the
conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat". Yet
virtually no one has reported these remarks. Instead, Dr
Kay is being quoted out of context to sustain the charge
of Government duplicity by the anti-war brigade.
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They have implied that Dr Kay resigned because he realised
no WMD ever existed. But actually, he threw down his bat
and stormed off the pitch in fury at the Bush
administration for failing to give the ISG the money it
needed to search for WMD, and for its incompetence in not
preventing crucial evidence being destroyed by Iraqi
looters.
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Those who know him well say he is so angry that he has been determined to embarrass the administration as much as possible. The result is that he has enabled the British media and anti-war politicians to take his finding that Saddam posed a different sort of threat, even deadlier than had been thought, and turn it instead into the false claim that he said no threat had existed at all.
History is constantly being rewritten over Iraq by people
who were against the war from the start and have presented
every development in the most malevolent light to prove
that Bush and Blair took us to war on a lie. Logic,
rationality and judgment have been suspended; and Dr Kay's
testimony is but the latest casualty.
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opinion.telegraph.co.uk |
