Alarmist Iraq Hype Backfires
by Gordon Barthos
Prime Minister Tony Blair is paying a fierce price for torquing the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Blair's tireless cheerleading for U.S. President George Bush's drive for "regime change" now looks like folly.
The PM's postwar "Baghdad bounce" in popularity has become a dead cat bounce, with his Labour party slumping to 38 per cent, its worst showing in a decade, to the Tories' 34 per cent.
The British media are howling that Blair's staff "sexed up" evidence of banned weapons, falsely said Saddam could launch them on 45 minutes' notice and published a "dodgy dossier" to spook the country. Yesterday, Blair's top spin doctor admitted "a mistake."
Bush, too, is beginning to see his credibility head south. He claimed Saddam had active ties to Al Qaeda, held horror weapons, was trying to purchase nuclear materiel and had mobile germ labs.
None of it has proved true.
Saddam posed no imminent threat to the U.S., and Bush's suggestions to the contrary were deliberately alarmist.
Most Americans remain persuaded that the war and 8,000 Iraqi deaths were justified, to topple an America-hating, murderous despot.
But nearly one American in two now believes Bush intentionally misled them about Saddam's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
Bush's credibility would be lower still, except that a sturdy core of invincibly ignorant people — one American in three — is convinced that these weapons already have been found. Not so. More than 1,400 U.S. and allied experts have scoured 230 Iraqi sites for months without turning up an atom of plutonium, anthrax or sarin.
Chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix is scathing about Washington's "shaky" intelligence.
And senior Democrats smell blood.
At a time when Washington has adopted a policy of "pre-emptively" hammering regimes it deems a threat, it behooves the president to have solid evidence, they suggest.
"If we are going to hit first, based on perceived dangers, the perceptions had better be accurate," says Sen. Robert Byrd. "Whether or not intelligence reports were bent, stretched or massaged to make Iraq look like an imminent threat to the United States, it is clear that the administration's rhetoric played upon the well-founded fear of the American public about future acts of terrorism."
That chippiness will gain traction as U.S. casualties — now at just under 200 — rise, along with the $30 billion cost of the war, and the occupation.
There's crabbiness elsewhere, too.
A recent Ipsos-Reid poll found that 71 per cent of Canadians feel Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was right to refuse to join the war. Before the campaign, 66 per cent felt that way, but during the conflict opinion was evenly split.
Internationally, British Broadcasting Corp. polling has found 60 per cent of people have a negative view of Bush, and believe the war was wrong.
Barely one in four feels America's military might is making the world safer.
So it's no surprise that Canada and other nations are now lobbying for U.N. Security Council reform, precisely to check the ability of the major powers to have things their own way.
The Chrétien government wants the U.S., Russia, Britain, France and China to refrain from using their vetoes to block resolutions authorizing military interventions to prevent mass slaughter in places like Rwanda, if a council majority favors getting involved.
Canada also wants the U.N. General Assembly to weigh in on crises, rather than shovel them up to the big powers.
This reflects a growing lack of confidence that the U.S. and others can be relied on to do the right thing.
Pushing war, Bush and Blair shouted the roof down, claiming Saddam was itching to hand terrorists weapons of mass destruction. Whatever weapons may eventually turn up — and some will — it is now abundantly clear that neither knew for a fact that what he was saying was true. It was all hype.
Yet Bush and Blair blew away the Baghdad regime on a bogus pretext, and tried — largely unsuccessfully — to bully the world into joining them.
<font color=red>If their leadership, credibility and trustworthiness are fast eroding, they have only themselves to blame. <font color=black>
Gord Barthos writes the Star's editorials on foreign affairs.
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