LONDON, 4 February 2004 — On Sept. 2, 2002, the Hutton report reminds us, I quoted in the Guardian a source who told me: “The dossier will no longer play a role. There’s very little new to put in it.” The next day, Tony Blair, just back from a visit to George Bush, said the government would publish a new dossier on Iraq’s weapons program. My source was completely wrong on his first point, completely right on his second. He knew what was in the existing dossier and the weak case it made for military action against Iraq.
He could not believe that the government could use a dossier based on what little British intelligence really knew about the state of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons program to justify war.
The answer, we now know, is that Blair and his closest advisers were determined to abuse intelligence to produce a document to try and convince parliamentary and public opinion to back an invasion of Iraq. A train of events was set in motion leading to the greatest scandal involving the intelligence agencies in modern times.
The scandal is all the greater since the published dossier was used to support a decision which, according to senior Whitehall officials, was made not as a result of anything it contained, but simply because of Bush’s decision to go to war. It is inconceivable, they say, that Blair would have allowed Bush to go to war on his own. Whatever Bush does, Blair is not far behind. But that position, the prime minister learned on Monday, is not always comfortable. Bush’s decision to set up an inquiry into the issue of intelligence and Iraqi WMD left Blair with no choice but to set up his own.
A UN Security Council resolution supporting an attack on Iraq would have got Blair out of a corner. But as the chances of that were thin, a convincing dossier painting a picture of an Iraq building up a dangerous arsenal of WMD that threatened British interests was essential. The intelligence agencies were told to come up with scarier information than the original dossier contained. Robin Cook and Clare Short, who both saw the intelligence reports, said Monday night it would be unfair to blame the agencies for exaggerating the threat.
There is ample evidence from what the Hutton inquiry heard — though the former law lord chose to ignore it — showing how Downing Street, notably Alastair Campbell, succeeded in persuading intelligence chiefs to “sex up” the dossier. The dossier, Campbell told the inquiry, had to be “revelatory, we needed to show it was new and informative, and part of a bigger case”.
Hutton notes that a draft of the preface to be signed by Blair contained the phrase: “The case I make is not that Saddam could launch a nuclear attack on London or another part of the UK (he could not).” It was taken out of the published version. That was a sin of omission. There was plenty left in Blair’s preface — and the dossier — that has a hollow ring to it now. Saddam’s WMD program, Blair said at the time, “is active, detailed and growing. The policy of containment is not working”.
Just as the CIA was bullied by elements in the White House and the Pentagon, here senior intelligence officials succumbed to pressure from Downing Street. They say the hyping up was done by the politicians, not by them. There is, however, one glaring example for which intelligence chiefs, as much as ministers, have yet to answer. The claim that Iraqi forces could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes is made more than once in the dossier, most emphatically in Blair’s preface. Scarlett told the inquiry the claim referred only to short-range, battlefield weapons, not long-range missiles as the dossier implied. Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, reflected his frustration just once — telling Hutton that MPs’ criticisms of the way the 45-minute claim was described in the dossier were “valid”.
Whitehall officials now privately admit it was dishonest to describe the 45-minute claim as “recent intelligence”, since it could have been gleaned from old Iraqi military manuals. “Why now and why Saddam?” asked Ann Taylor, chair of Parliament’s intelligence and security committee when she first saw the dossier. The same questions were being asked by intelligence chiefs. The fight against terrorism was far more important, and an attack on Iraq would make it more difficult, a view echoed on Monday by the Commons foreign affairs committee.
The intelligence agencies are servants to their elected political masters. Blaming them for bowing to Downing Street’s demands would be a bit rich. These are the issues an inquiry must address. They are more crucial at a time when Blair has adopted Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, whose success or failure — and legality — will depend on accurate, not politicized, intelligence.
