[lit-ideas] Blair (& Bush?): hoisted on a fork?
- From: Stephen Straker <straker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2004 15:28:22 -0700
Here's an interesting twist I haven't seen brought up before. According
to Andrew Brown, Tony Blair wasn't just told Saddam had WMDs;
intelligence also told him that Saddam intended to use them. That makes
Blair's judgment as dubious as his credulity, and his conduct rash &
dangerous. Bush too?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Andrew Brown, "A worm's eye view,"
Guardian Unlimited (16 July 2004)
See Brown's weblog: <http://www.thewormbook.com/helmintholog/>
Lord Butler may have let Tony Blair off the hook. But he has impaled him
on a fork instead, and this time I can't see any way out.
Lord Butler's fork has two prongs, which are the two possible answers to
the question: "Did Tony Blair sincerely believe what the intelligence
services were telling him?"
The answer to this question will probably depend on whether you support
the war or not. If you think the war was a mistake, you will tend to
argue either that Blair didn't believe Iraq had chemical and biological
weapons, or that he shouldn't have done. Conversely, supporters of the
war must argue that he made a perfectly understandable and even prudent
mistake.
The braver supporters of this view - and there was obviously one on Lord
Butler's commission - maintain, as does the prime minister, that it
wasn't a mistake at all and that these weapons may have been there all
along; indeed, may still be found.
But the report makes it wholly clear that the raw intelligence does not
back this confidence. The dossier that came to the prime minister looks,
in hindsight, like thinly based guesswork which turned out to be
mistaken about important matters of fact. But, it is said, no blame
attaches within the intelligence service for these mistakes. They were
entirely understandable: there was a great deal of necessary uncertainty
about these conclusions, which the professionals would have understood,
even if it was all removed from the versions of the dossier presented to
the public.
Most of the fire of the anti-war movement will be concentrated, I think,
on the notion that the intelligence services exaggerated the evidence
for Saddam's possession of these weapons. But we can't prove this,
except to a moral certainty. Given a sufficiently robotic reading of the
motives and character of senior civil servants and politicians, it is
possible to maintain piously that the presentation of intelligence was
not distorted by the political climate of the time. That's what the
Hutton enquiry concluded, and that result stands.
But the defence of the intelligence services has a cost for defenders of
the war as a whole, which the Butler report makes plain for the first
time.
The accusation that Mr Blair should have distrusted what his spooks were
telling him is one prong of Butler's fork. If he defends himself by
saying he was right to trust them, he is impaled in the second prong -
for Lord Butler's reports has enough raw quotes from the intelligence
given to the prime minister to show that he was told that if the war
went ahead, the chemical and biological weapons would be used.
Lord Butler quotes from the Joint Intelligence Committee summary from
which the notorious dossier of September 2002 was prepared: "Iraq has a
chemical and biological weapons capability and Saddam is prepared to use
it. Faced with the likelihood of military defeat and being removed from
power, Saddam is unlikely to be deterred from using chemical and
biological weapons by any diplomatic or military means."
"Intelligence indicates that Saddam has identified Bahrain, Jordan,
Qatar, Israel, Kuwait as targets. Turkey could also be at risk. ...
Saddam is prepared to order missile strikes against Israel, with
chemical or biological warheads, in order to widen the war once
hostilities begin."
In other words, if Mr Blair was right to trust the intelligence he got
from the JIC, he knew, as surely as he knew that there were chemical
weapons, that these would be used. He knew that an invasion of Iraq
would lead to biological or chemical attacks on Israel as well as the
Gulf states. He knew, when his creatures were scoffing at people like
Tam Dalyell who talked of the war leading to a general conflagration in
the Middle East, that his own intelligence services believed that this
was the most likely outcome.
He knew all that, and he still took us to war. This is not a prime
minister who will get much support from Labour voters once this fact has
sunk in. It can't even be argued that Saddam was such a madman that he
had to be eliminated sooner or later. On the contrary, the JIC treated
him as rational and capable of being deterred by threats so long has he
still had something to lose: "The use of chemical and biological weapons
prior to any military attack would boost support for US-led action and
is unlikely."
Until the publication of the Hutton report, the argument against the war
was that Mr Blair had knowingly and culpably exaggerated the danger
posed by Saddam. The Butler report tells us that the only alternative to
this view is that he knowingly and culpably suppressed the dangers of a
war. Those are the only alternatives. Lord Butler's fork has no third
way.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
posted by
Stephen Straker
<straker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Vancouver, B.C.
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