Scandal continues to brew in England
By Sebastian Rotella
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Sunday, July 27, 2003
LONDON — The lives of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and British government scientist David Kelly intersected July 17, juxtaposing disparate images that are the stuff of history. For Blair, the day brought public triumph. He gave a well-received speech in the U.S. Congress defending the war on Iraq and rhapsodizing about Anglo-American friendship and ideals. His eloquence won him repeated ovations, reminding Britons that many Americans admire their leader.
But the day also left Britons with an image of loss and despair. A few hours before Blair spoke in Washington, D.C, Kelly left his house in an English country village. The gentlemanly microbiologist walked about five miles to a forest where, police say, he took painkillers, slashed his left wrist with a knife, and bled to death in the rain.
In the aftermath, a debate about Britain's decision to join the war on Iraq has grown into a crisis over the credibility and trustworthiness of politicians and the media. The futures of one of Blair's closest advisers and his minister of defense are in doubt. Blair himself will be questioned by a judge investigating the circumstances leading to Kelly's apparent suicide.
More broadly, the corpse in the countryside has forced Britons to reflect on the thousands of corpses in Iraq. In a process similar to current debate in the United States, critics are scrutinizing the gravest decision a leader can make: sending soldiers to war.
"There's a lot that might still explode here," said Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. "This is going to have a big impact on the shape and character of British politics. There comes a point in any government's life where things don't change. It's distinctly wounded in a way that may not be easily recoverable."
Kelly, a defense ministry expert and former U.N. arms inspector in Iraq, was the secret source of reports by a BBC journalist in May that accused the government of exaggerating evidence about Saddam Hussein's arsenal. Kelly's family and friends say he became angry and despondent after government officials made his name public this month in a campaign to rebut the BBC report, a disclosure that led to him being questioned in Parliamentary hearings.
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq poses a greater risk to the Blair government than it does to the Bush administration. Resistance to military action without U.N. approval was more intense in Britain than in the United States, so before the war Blair needed desperately to convince the public that Saddam's unconventional weapons were an urgent threat.
Blair has been besieged in past weeks by accusations that his government politicized intelligence and overstated dangers. The Kelly case injected another element into the uproar: the idea that a distinguished expert with doubts about the case for war was treated shabbily as part of a feud with the BBC. If the judicial inquiry goes badly for the government, the repercussions could be destructive.
The government, for its part, insists that it made a careful, responsible case against Iraq based on the best intelligence available at the time.
"We shouldn't judge in hindsight," said an official in the Blair government, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue. "Decisions are taken on the day. ... On the point of substance, the things of which we are accused didn't happen."
The angriest accusations come from antiwar leftists in Blair's divided Labor Party.
"I think that Blair lied to us," said legislator Tam Dalyell, a veteran Laborite. "I think every sinew was stretched to justify a war on which he'd decided months before. If it were not for weapons of mass destruction, he would have never persuaded Parliament."
Blair suffers from a "Gorbachev syndrome," Dalyell said, comparing him to the former Russian president who once basked in applause overseas while his stock sunk at home.
At this point, however, Blair can still take comfort in the domestic political math. The Conservative opposition lacks strong challengers for the prime minister's job and robustly supported his Iraq policy. The future depends on Blair's proven resilience, events in Iraq and the outcome — sometime in September or October — of the inquiry into Kelly's death by Lord Hutton, a member of the Law Lords, Britain's highest court.
Despite the expectations in some quarters, it may not be easy or appropriate for the inquiry to assign blame for something as complex and enigmatic as a suicide.
Member of Parliament Glenda Jackson, a former Cabinet official, declared that Blair bears responsibility for the alleged decision to use Kelly as a pawn in a "phony war" with the BBC that was intended to distract from embarrassing questions about Iraq's arsenal.
"He should resign," said Jackson. "It beggars belief to think that such a strategy could have taken place without the prime minister knowing it."
Blair, however, has denied involvement in the decision to reveal Kelly's identity. And some say that the media have nothing to be proud of in an episode that shows how a spirited media culture can cross the line into voracious excess. During testimony in a Parliamentary hearing, Kelly complained he had not been able to retrieve documents he needed because his home was staked out by reporters.
"I think the media has a lot of blame for the way this whole thing got out of hand," said a former U.N. arms inspector who also worked in Iraq.
The BBC defends its aggressive coverage of a government whose emphasis on media strategy and "spin" has been a continuing source of friction. The weakness of the political opposition has pushed the venerable BBC
into a frontline role as a watchdog and critic of the Blair government, analysts say. Simmering enmity between journalists and officials such as Alistair Campbell, Blair's communications director, have worsened the acrimony of the Kelly case.
Finger-pointing aside, the motives for the suicide remain unclear. Kelly, who was a 59-year-old father of three, did not leave a note. Before the dispute erupted, he had reportedly looked forward to an upcoming assignment to return to Iraq with a new Anglo-American team of experts assembled to search for weapons of mass destruction.
After Kelly's death, the BBC confirmed that he had been the main source of the May 29 report by radio journalist Andrew Gilligan about allegedly hyped intelligence on Iraq. That revelation could help explain the scientist's anguish: In legislative testimony two days before his death, Kelly said he doubted he was Gilligan's main source.
There is also speculation that his bosses in the ministry of defense threatened him with retaliation; news leaks can be a serious transgression in Britain's rigid civil service culture. Yet none of that offers a satisfactory explanation for his decision to kill himself.
"He was an extremely grounded, level-headed, calm and confident man," said Toby Dodge, a professor and Iraq expert at Warwick College who knew Kelly.
Kelly was the veteran of numerous harrowing inspection missions in Iraq, where the scientist won a reputation for wearing down Iraqi scientists with quiet, patient questioning despite the presence of the regime's thuggish intelligence agents, according to Dodge.
Responding to what it called "continuing inaccurate media speculation," the defense ministry issued a statement Friday asserting that Kelly had received only a verbal reprimand. The ministry did not "threaten Dr. Kelly's pension or threaten him with action under the Official Secrets Act," according to the statement.
Kelly may nonetheless have been devastated by the perception that the episode destroyed his professional reputation, observers say. Being pushed into a crossfire between swarming journalists and irate politicians must have been traumatic for a man who was at home in the fields and horse trails of rural Oxfordshire.
The Kelly case has become perhaps a worst-case example of how scandals can chew up people who get caught in the way. Two days before the day of Blair's speech and Kelly's death, a legislator asked the scientist what lessons he had learned from his experience.
"Never to talk to a journalist again, I think," Kelly said. |
