WASHINGTON, 1 February 2004 — On both sides of the Atlantic, the game of “weapons, weapons, where are Iraq’s weapons” gathered dangerous political momentum for US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair this week.
For more than a year, both leaders were able to stave off questions about the credibility of intelligence used to justify invading Iraq.
Saddam Hussein had a nuclear missile program that was within six months of becoming operational, had vast stores of chemical and biological weapons and could launch them within 45 minutes, and had connections to Al-Qaeda terrorists, Bush and Blair insisted their intelligence reports proved.
In leading a maverick coalition to war over the objections of the United Nations, the two leaders assured the public that war was the last resort to prevent deployment of such weapons.
The evidence started crumbling over the summer, when Washington officials and a former US diplomat revealed that documents about Niger’s supplying Iraq with yellow cake uranium ore had been forged.
The issue took a tragic turn in July with the suicide of former British weapons inspector David Kelly, a microbiologist, after his name was revealed as the source for a BBC story alleging that Downing Street had “sexed up” its Iraqi weapons intelligence to justify the war.
This week, however, the world finally got the news straight from the horse’s mouth: Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
“We were almost all wrong ... and I certainly include myself here,” David Kay, the former head of the 1,400-member CIA team that searched for the weapons in Iraq, told an astonished Congressional panel on Wednesday.
Through the week, Kay revealed how the CIA had failed to detect Iraq’s actual reduction of weapons stockpiles through the 1990s, and how chaotic and corrupt Saddam’s government had become in the years before the war.
“The scientists were able to fake programs” to bilk the government for funds, Kay told The New York Times.
To head off the political fallout, Kay said there was no evidence the White House had manipulated or pressured the CIA to tint their reports, as some, including Democratic presidential candidate hopeful Howard Dean, have charged. Rather, Kay said, the faults were exclusively in the intelligence community.
Nonetheless, Kay’s call for an independent probe of the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and other documents set political logs rolling toward the November elections, and got deep backing from Democrats, including contenders for the party’s presidential nod.
Even Republicans in Congress set their sites on the intelligence scandal. Independently of Kay’s probe and separately from each other, two Republican-led House and Senate intelligence committees over the past months arrived at the same conclusions as Kay about a flawed US intelligence apparatus, The Washington Post reported Friday.
“It was like a runaway train,” Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican committee chairman, was quoted as saying. “Once it left the station, it kept going faster and faster. Some analysts may have been trying to slow it down, but it just kept going.”
Heavy clouds over Iraq intelligence were also looming across the Atlantic. In England, Tony Blair scraped through his most difficult week since coming to office seven years ago, barely surviving a revolt by Labour back benchers over a university fees issue.Underlying the rebellion was simmering anger over the prime minister’s decision to take the country to war in Iraq, a move that has cost Blair two Cabinet resignations, disaffection deep into his own party, public skepticism over the Kelly suicide and continuing doubt about the credibility of the weapons evidence.
Although a report from Lord Brian Hutton this week dismissed Blair’s culpability on the suicide and found that Blair had not authorized the leaking of Kelly’s name, the public reacted with disbelief. One poll showed more than half the electorate found the Hutton report was a “whitewash”.
British MP Robin Cook, Blair’s ex-foreign secretary, demanded that Blair admit that weapons of mass destruction will not be found in Iraq.
In Washington, Bush had already started ramping down his assertions about Iraq’s weapons threat. In the State of the Union speech on Jan. 20, Bush no longer talked of the weapons Iraq had but rather the “dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities” that had been found.
The awkward phrasing struck some observers as strange, and in hindsight, almost portentious of this week’s events.
Last winter, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose international stature was nearly unassailable, lent the credibility of his reputation to Bush’s charges in his speech before the United Nations.
Using aerial photography, precise amounts of biochemicals and diagrams of aluminum tubes used in nuclear weapons programs, Powell convinced many fence sitters at home and abroad that an invasion of Iraq was justified.
On Sunday in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Powell started backing down, saying the weapons issue was an “open question” and expressing his first doubts that evidence would be found.
With US elections looming in November and the death toll growing in Iraq, the storm over Iraqi intelligence is expected to blow harder as the months go by, especially if Bush rejects an independent probe, as he has indicated.
Meanwhile, Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam Veteran who voted to give Bush a blank check before the Iraq invasion, now says that Bush broke his promise to Congress that war would be a last resort.
“I think (Bush) fails the test as commander in chief,” Kerry, the frontrunner in the Democratic race, said this week in the South Carolina debate. “I intend to hold him accountable in this election, because ... our troops are at greater risk than they needed to be, and we deserve leadership that knows how to take a nation to war if you have to.”
