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To: Vitas who wrote (70445)	7/11/2003 4:52:29 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

UK leaders say finding Iraqi arms is unlikely Warren Hoge/NYT NYT Friday, July 11, 2003 LONDON Senior officials in Prime Minister Tony Blair's government say they no longer believe weapons of mass destruction will be uncovered in Iraq, British news organizations reported Thursday. . Correspondents from the BBC and Reuters who cover 10 Downing Street said that unnamed officials were putting forward the argument that the weapons had indeed existed but that they were dismantled or hidden beyond discovery before allied troops entered Iraq in March. . Both accounts said that the best hope now expressed by officials was that interviews with Iraqi scientists and military officers would determine how the concealment or destruction took place. . Blair's spokesman disputed the reports at the Downing Street briefing on Thursday and turned aside suggestions that the government was backing off its previous insistence that what justified going to war was the threat of weapons. . The failure to discover them has undermined Blair's credibility, dented his public support and turned a majority of Britons against a war they once supported. . "The prime minister is absolutely confident that we will find evidence not only of his WMD programs, but concrete evidence of the product of those programs as well," said the spokesman, who, under government rules, cannot be identified. . In an appearance before a parliamentary committee Tuesday, Blair suggested that only "evidence of weapons programs" rather than the weapons themselves would be uncovered. . Combined with reports of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's statement that the United States had not been acting on new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder, Blair's modified language appeared to indicate a coordinated tactical retreat by Washington and London. . But Blair's spokesman on Thursday said that news reports focusing on the differing claims were wrong. "The prime minister believes, and is absolutely confident, that we will find material" relating to biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, he asserted. . This week has been one in which Blair and the undiscovered weapons have dominated the political debate in Britain and served to cut into the prime minister's six-year-long sustained popularity and the bonds of public trust. . The House committee on foreign affairs said Monday that the government had massaged intelligence findings to make them more "assertive" and convincing. Blair had to withstand more than an hour's grilling by another committee Tuesday defending his government from charges of exaggerating the menace of Saddam Hussein's weapons to bolster its case for going to war. . The Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, sensing Blair's vulnerability over the issue, was the most aggressive he has ever been in Wednesday's question-time debate with Blair. He shouted, pointed an accusatory finger at him and growled what has become his weekly attack on the prime minister's credibility - "Nobody believes a single thing he says anymore." Polls show a majority of Britons have withdrawn the backing for the war they supported after British troops entered Iraq in March. Surveys of party preference show the opposition Conservatives neck and neck with Labor, and in one case slightly ahead, for only the second time since Blair took office in 1997. . While those same polls show that Duncan Smith has made little impression on the voters and therefore poses little threat to Blair's re-election prospects, they portray a public increasingly dubious about Blair's ability to reform Britain's lagging public services. . Former Prime Minister John Major, who, along with Duncan Smith, supported the war, on Thursday joined those calling for an independent inquiry into how intelligence was used to persuade Parliament and the public of the need for imminent military action. He noted that the government had conducted one after the Falklands War two decades ago, and he suggested that without similar clarification in this instance, the public would not trust the government the next time it seeks to send troops into combat. The New York Times