Blunder of boundless proportions
February 10, 2004
By Allister Sparks
The damaging conclusion by David Kay, America's recently returned weapons inspector, that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction at the time of the US-led invasion last year, has much more serious implications than the political embarrassment this is causing the Bush Administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The political damage is grave enough, for it implies that the leaders of the world's two leading democracies took their countries to war under false pretences. President Bush's latest justification - that "the world is better off without Saddam Hussein" - is not good enough, for that was not the justification either he or Blair gave to the world and to their own people for overriding the United Nations Security Council and launching a war in violation of international law.
They stated emphatically and repeatedly that they were going to war because they knew Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that these presented a real and present danger to their own national security and to world peace.
"There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more," US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Security Council on February 5 2003.
With George Tenet, the chief of intelligence, sitting behind him, Powell went on to assert that the evidence in America's possession added up to "facts, not assertions" that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that it was reconstituting its nuclear weapons programme and building a fleet of advanced missiles.
And to prove these "facts" Powell presented satellite pictures that purported to show sheds where these weapons were stored and vehicles used to move them around.
At the same time Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser, wrote an article for The New York Times under the headline: "Why we know he (Saddam Hussein) is lying."
And then there was Tony Blair's famous dossier presented to the House of Commons with the emphatic assertion that Iraq not only had these weapons but was capable of deploying them within 45 minutes of receiving the order from Saddam.
So the danger was imminent. The governments argued that they could not afford to wait for the slow process of UN weapons inspections or for multilateral agreement to launch an attack. They had to act immediately, unilaterally if necessary, to pre-empt the imminent danger.
We now know all that was untrue. There was no imminent danger. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The photographed sheds did not contain any. Powell's "facts" were false. The justification for unilateral action, for violating international law, was invalid.
Both Kay and the British judge, Lord Hutton, have tried to give Bush and Blair some political insulation, saying they believe the leaders acted in good faith according to the information placed before them by their intelligence services. They did not "sex up" those reports, as the BBC alleged of Blair.
Two things strike me about this. Firstly, if the political leaders did not sex up the information to justify a course of action they had already decided on, then who did? Presumably the intelligence services themselves. For sexed up it certainly was - Viagra scale!
Who, then, must take responsibility for this? Lord Hutton, who chose to apply a shamefully narrow interpretation to the terms of reference for his inquiry into the death of weapons expert David Kelly - who was the BBC's source for its allegation - threw a heap of blame at the BBC while exonerating Blair and his government completely. This has now resulted in the resignation of the corporation's chairman, Gavyn Davis, and its excellent director, Greg Dyke.
Davis's resignation statement is worth noting. "There is an honourable tradition in British public life," he said, "that those charged with authority at the top of an organisation should accept responsibility for what happens in that organisation."
I couldn't help wondering, as I watched Blair's triumphalist reaction to the Hutton report on BBC-World, whether he had given any thought to that honourable tradition in British public life. Or Bush to his country's similar tradition. For it was an American President, Harry Truman, who famously kept a slogan on his desk which read: "The buck stops here!"
But what is more important by far than this purely political issue is the matter of gross delinquency on the part of the intelligence services. For this punches a huge hole in what has been proclaimed as the "Bush Doctrine".
This doctrine asserts that September 11 2001 radically changed all existing concepts of foreign policy. The old Cold War strategy was based on the concept of "containment": one knew who one's adversary was, from where and in what form an attack might come, and therefore one could put in place military and political strategies to contain the danger - building up a counter-strike capability, establishing distant early warning systems, and taking political initiatives, including hot-line links, to reduce the risk of surprise or accidental nuclear attacks.
Now all that was obsolete, the Bush strategists argued. Now the adversary was shadowy, his identity and whereabouts unknown, the attack could come from anywhere in a form that could be anything from an airliner flying into the World Trade Center to a dirty bomb brought in a suitcase on the New York subway. The danger of an attack with weapons of mass destruction was omnipresent, and the suicide bomber was now the most deadly accurate delivery system ever devised.
All this, according to the Bush Doctrine, means that a nation can no longer protect itself in the old way. If it has evidence of an imminent threat it has to assert the right to act unilaterally and pre-emptively to "take out" that threat.
It all sounds very logical and reasonable. Except for one big flaw. It is totally dependent on the accuracy of intelligence information about such threats. And we now know just how flawed that information can be. As David Kay has so devastatingly put it: "We all got it wrong." Even George Tenet has admitted that his agencies may have erred.
Nor are they the only ones. Here at home the Hefer Commission has just revealed how flawed the ANC's intelligence services were in investigating suspected apartheid spies. And the apartheid spies themselves were even more delinquent, given to such outlandish acts as trying to demoralise a liberation-struggle figure by hanging a baboon foetus outside his home.
These people have been glamorised in literature, but in the course of a long career I have developed a profound disrespect for them. They are a curious bunch who live in an underworld imbued with a culture of conspiracy which can inflate imaginations and egos and make them prone to confusing suspicion with fact. They are also dependent on informers who, as we journalists know, can sometimes misinform - especially if they have an axe to grind or a political goal to pursue, which was certainly the case with the Iraqi exiles.
In sum, a seedy lot with a shabby record. God help us if we have to depend on them for maintaining world peace in this perilous age with its threat of WMD terrorism. There has to be a better way, which is a subject I shall return to at a later date.
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