Jimmy Carter Savages Blair and Bush: 'Their War Was Based on Lies'
By Andrew Buncombe
The Independent UK
Monday 22 March 2004
Jimmy Carter, the former US president, has strongly criticised George Bush and Tony Blair for
waging an unnecessary war to oust Saddam Hussein based on "lies or misinterpretations". The 2002
Nobel peace prize winner said Mr Blair had allowed his better judgement to be swayed by Mr Bush's
desire to finish a war that his father had started.
In an interview with The Independent on the first anniversary of the American and British invasion of
Iraq, Mr Carter, who was president from 1977 to 1981, said the two leaders probably knew that many of
the claims being made about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were based on
imperfect intelligence.
He said: "There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq recently. That was a war based on
lies and misinterpretations from London and from Washington, claiming falsely that Saddam Hussein
was responsible for [the] 9/11 attacks, claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And
I think that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair probably knew that many of the allegations were
based on uncertain intelligence ... a decision was made to go to war [then people said] 'Let's find a
reason to do so'."
Before the war Mr Carter made clear his opposition to a unilateral attack and said the US did not
have the authority to create a "Pax Americana". During his Nobel prize acceptance speech in
December 2002 he warned of the danger of "uncontrollable violence" if countries sought to resolve
problems without United Nations input.
His latest comments, made during an interview at the Carter Centre in Atlanta, are notable for their
condemnation of the two serving leaders. It is extremely rare for a former US president to criticise an
incumbent, or a British prime minister. Mr Carter's comments will add to the mounting pressure on Mr
Bush and Mr Blair.
Mr Carter said he believed the momentum for the invasion came from Washington and that many of
Mr Bush's senior advisers had long ago signalled their desire to remove Saddam by force. Once a
decision had been taken to go to war, every effort was made to find a reason for doing do, he said.
"I think the basic reason was made not in London but in Washington. I think that Bush Jnr was
inclined to finish a war that his father had precipitated against Iraq. I think it was that commitment of
Bush that prevailed over, I think, the better judgement of Tony Blair and Tony Blair became an
enthusiastic supporter of the Bush policy".
Mr Carter's criticisms coincided with damaging claims yesterday from a former White House
anti-terrorism co-ordinator. Richard Clarke said that President Bush ignored the threat from al-Qai'da
before 11 September but in the immediate aftermath sought to hold Iraq responsible, in defiance of
senior intelligence advisers who told him that Saddam had nothing to do with the conspiracy.
With an eye to November's presidential elections, Mr Bush sought on Friday to use the anniversary
of the Iraq invasion to say that differences between the US and opponents of the war belonged "to the
past".
Speaking at the White House, he told about 80 foreign ambassadors: "There is no neutral ground in
the fight between civilisation and terror. There can be no separate peace with the terrorist enemy."
But in the US and Britain, and elsewhere, there is growing anger among people who believe the war
in Iraq was at best a deadly distraction and at worst an impediment to the war against al-Qa'ida -
diverting resources and energy from countering those groups responsible for attacks such as the train
bombings in Madrid.
Over the weekend millions of anti-war protesters poured on to the streets of cities around the world
to call for the withdrawal of US-led troops from Iraq. It was estimated that in Rome - which saw the
biggest crowds - up to one million turned out.
Mr Carter, 79, has recently published a novel. The Hornet's Nest is centred on America's
revolutionary war against the British. That period had many lessons for the present day, Mr Carter said.
Go to Original
Iraq War Wasn't Justified, U.N. Weapons Experts Say
By CNN
Sunday 21 March 2004
Blix, El Baradei: U.S. ignored evidence against WMDs
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United Nations' top two weapons experts said Sunday that the
invasion of Iraq a year ago was not justified by the evidence in hand at the time.
"I think it's clear that in March, when the invasion took place, the evidence that had been brought
forward was rapidly falling apart," Hans Blix, who oversaw the agency's investigation into whether Iraq
had chemical and biological weapons, said on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."
Blix described the evidence Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the U.N. Security Council
in February 2003 as "shaky," and said he related his opinion to U.S. officials, including national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
"I think they chose to ignore us," Blix said.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, spoke to CNN
from IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria.
ElBaradei said he had been "pretty convinced" that Iraq had not resumed its nuclear weapons
program, which the IAEA dismantled in 1997.
Days before the fighting began, Vice President Dick Cheney weighed in with an opposing view.
"We believe [Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr.
ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong," Cheney said. "And I think if you look at the track record of the
International Atomic Energy Agency in this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have
consistently underestimated or missed what Saddam Hussein was doing."
Now, more than a year later, ElBaradei said, "I haven't seen anything on the ground at that time that
supported Mr. Cheney's conclusion or statement, so -- and I thought to myself, well, history is going to
be the judge."
No evidence of a nuclear weapons program has been found so far.
Blix, who recounts his search for weapons of mass destruction in his book "Disarming Iraq," said
the Bush administration tended "to say that anything that was unaccounted for existed, whether it was
sarin or mustard gas or anthrax."
Blix specifically faulted Powell, who told the U.N. Security Council about what he said was a site
that held chemical weapons and decontamination trucks.
"Our inspectors had been there, and they had taken a lot of samples, and there was no trace of any
chemicals or biological things," Blix said. "And the trucks that we had seen were water trucks."
The most spectacular intelligence failure concerned a report by ElBaradei, who revealed that an
alleged contract by Iraq with Niger to import uranium oxide was a forgery, Blix said.
"The document had been sitting with the CIA and their U.K. counterparts for a long while, and they
had not discovered it," Blix said. "And I think it took the IAEA a day to discover that it was a forgery."
Blix said that during a meeting before the war with the U.S. president, Bush told him that "the U.S.
genuinely wanted peace," and that "he was no wild, gung-ho Texan, bent on dragging the U.S. into
war."
Blix said Bush gave the inspectors support and information at first, but he said the help didn't last
long enough.
"I think they lost their patience much too early," Blix said.
"I can see that they wanted to have a picture that was either black or white, and we presented a
picture that had, you know, gray in it, as well," he said.
Iraq had been shown to have biological and chemical weapons before, "and there was no record of
either destruction or production; there was this nagging question: Do they still have them?" ElBaradei
said.
Blix said he had not been able to say definitively that Iraq had no such weapons, but added that he
felt history has shown he was not wrong.
"At least we didn't fall into the trap that the U.S. and the U.K. did in asserting that they existed," he
said.
ElBaradei faulted Iraq for "the opaque nature of that Saddam Hussein regime."
"We should not forget that," he said. "For a couple of months, their cooperation was not by any way
transparent, for whatever reason."
ElBaradei said he hoped the past year's events have taught world leaders a valuable lesson.
"We learned from Iraq that an inspection takes time, that we should be patient, that an inspection
can, in fact, work." |
