Weapons are not all that is
missing
The spooks have failed to track down Saddam and Bin
Laden
Peter Preston
Monday June 2, 2003
The Guardian
The first problem - an old problem, not a new one - is that too
many of his foes think Tony Blair tells porkies in a jam. That's
been a Tory frontbench descant for six years or more. How can
a man who supposedly doesn't know his wife is blowing
half-a-million of their money on a couple of Bristol flats via a
convicted conman be trusted to tell the truth about weapons of
mass destruction? See the smirks as this holy roller loses his
road map and lands in a ditch.
The second problem - still longer in gestation - is that Alastair
Campbell has even more enemies than his master. He was too
cocky, too abrasive, long before the 1997 election. He let his
contempt for old non-mates in the parliamentary lobby show.
There was always going to be a payback time for that: and here,
in weakness, it comes.
Thus the third problem - the real and urgent one - is a stew of
perceptions ancient and modern, a poisonous pot au feu of
grudges and pressures and pervasive distrust. Will the great
British public stand by its elected man? No. 63% of them tell
YouGov pollsters he misled us over WMD (and 27% reckon he
lied). Clare Short does her Goneril act. Labour backbenchers
take their constituency phones off the hook. Those newspapers
already playing Bride of Brussels in a palace of dreams near you
get suddenly, ludicrously, affronted over spin. (Why fight a euro
referendum later when you can kibosh it now?) George Bush
contributes his usual pinch of toxic rhetoric. With friends like
Donald Rumsfeld, who needs enemies?
It all adds up to trouble with a capital T and summer with a
sibilant snarl. Trouble tomorrow when the unhappy warrior gets
back from taking the Evian waters and faces flak in the
Commons. Trouble a few days on as Europe - that terrible
"trust-me" issue - returns home to roost. Trouble through every
day, in every way, until some proper WMDs, discovered under
impeccably pristine circumstances, can be plonked in the forum
of world opinion. And Tony Blair's weekend reaffirmation that,
yes, they exist, and yes, he'll produce them shortly, merely
makes that last bind tighter.
But ... there is always a "but" when Smiley and Co are writing
the script. Caveats - and unwelcome questions. Where, for
instance, is Saddam Hussein? Not to mention sons Qusay and
Uday. We know they exist. We've seen not just the pictures but
the mass graves they helped to fill. You'd have thought that,
months on, a grateful, liberated Iraq would have turned them in -
or dug up the rubble that covers them. Yet, no. Most of the top
cards in the coalition deck remain missing, presumed fled. And,
of course, you could say exactly the same about Osama bin
Laden.
Now, who bears responsibility for that curiously unsatisfactory
state of affairs? Not Tony Blair personally. Not George Bush
either. When it comes to catching Saddam or arresting Osama,
Blair and Bush are as good as their people on the ground.
Which means, not very impressive. Which makes the present
pother of spooky briefings against Downing Street something
less than sacred writ.
Why should we, on the outside, prefer the word of unknown
insiders spouting off the record stuff to a BBC defence
correspondent to on the record briefing from Downing Street
which tells us that the chairman of the joint intelligence
committee was "content" with the suddenly contentious
September dossier, which now, he wrote, "reflects as fully and
accurately as possible" existing wisdom about weapons of
mass destruction?
Was John Scarlett so puny in the face of Blair's passion,
rendered so tremulous by Campbell's contempt, that he tamely
signed on the dotted line? Were Sir David Omand and Sir David
Manning, twin pillars of attendant Whitehall expertise, so
similarly craven? It doesn't say much for any of them if they
were. Yet that's the logic of the tales swilling copiously down the
Thames between Vauxhall and Westminster bridges - and from
similar detritus adrift on the Potomac.
It wasn't our fault, say the briefers of mass disassociation: they
made us do it. They took our finest info - a strand here, a hint
there - and wanted to publish it so that ordinary people might
understand the threat. Well, of course, you can't publish
material like that. It's written for nuanced dissemination, not
publication. Blame? Everyone knew that the Pentagon was in
hock to that Chalabi fellow's rumour factory. Don't blame us. It
was them, the politicians, wot made us do it.
Whatever you think about the war itself - good or bad, decent or
disastrous - you have to find this line of secret defence pathetic.
On the one hand stand Tony and Alastair, desperate men; on
the other hand, allegedly, stand single-sourced servants of
wisdom and probity so shamefully traduced that they must
blather at second hand to the BBC and flood Fleet Street with
the leaked memos of self-justification.
In the dismal days of the cold war, when Peter Wright and his
Spycatcher mates went to war with Downing Street, we used to
call it treason. Now - with Scarlett, Brian Dearlove et al half out
of the cupboard, with unacknowledged M15 and M16 lobbies
battling to rival Campbell's lot under cover of darkness - we treat
is as mere politics with a lethal twist.
Sure, we need our weapons of mass destruction. But Iraq needs
Saddam on a platter. And we, for the avoidance of more orange
alerts, more awful warnings and anxieties based on the same
webs of intelligence, need Bin Laden. First problems first,
chaps. |
