Blair, Cheney face no-show-WMD fallout
Blair insists Iraqi WMD will still be found, but White House backs off.
Following the
weekend revelation by David Kay that Iraq did not have any stockpiles of weapons of destruction before the war began, and US Secretary of State Colin Powell's admission that the Saddam Hussein regime may not have had any WMD, two men in particular appear to be taking the brunt of the no-WMD fallout: UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and US Vice President Dick Cheney.
Mr. Kay, who resigned Saturday as the head of the Iraq Survey Group, the US-led organization that has been looking for WMD in Iraq, said
in numerous interviews over the weekend that the stockpile of WMD in Iraq that US President George Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Powell, and Mr. Blair had talked about in many speeches,
didn't exist. Kay, who had also predicted that WMD would be found when he took the job last June, did say that Iraq did have WMD-related programs, but that none of them were in the active stage.
The Boston Globe reports that Kay concluded that
years of earlier UN inspections had "got rid of" WMD in Iraq.
A story in the Britain's
Daily Telegraph suggested Kay had said Iraq had
shipped some WMD to Syria, but in a later interview with
National Public Radio, Kay clarified the remark. He said there was evidence that Iraq was moving a steady stream of goods shipments to Syria before the war, but it was
difficult to determine whether the cargoes included weapons, in part because Syria has refused to cooperate with the weapons investigation. He also
blamed US intelligence agencies for not picking up the fact Iraq had no WMD.
On Saturday, during a trip to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia,
Reuters reports that Powell said it was "an open question" whether stocks of WMD will be found in Iraq and
conceded it was possible Saddam Hussein had none. Powell, however, continued to
defend the war in Iraq, telling
First Channel Russia that "military action was justified by Iraq's violation of 12 years of UN resolutions." A news analysis piece
New York Times reports that Kay's and Powell's statements confirm what intelligence experts have concluded in the past few months: Bush moved first, and most decisively, against a country that posed
a smaller proliferation risk than North Korea, Libya and Iran, or than even one of America's allies in the war on terrorism, Pakistan.
But the new information also shows that the National Intelligence Estimate, produced in 2002 by the CIA and other agencies, significantly overestimated Iraq's abilities. The document provided the rationale for going to war quickly, without waiting for the United Nations Security Council to become convinced of the threat. ... America's allies and competitors are likely to interpret Kay's findings very differently: that America's word – or at least its intelligence findings – cannot be fully trusted.
In Britain, the statements by Kay and Powell could not have come at a worse time for Tony Blair.
Time magazine reports that Blair faces "
the perfect storm" this week. He faces a vote Tuesday in the British Commons on raising university tuition that
his own backbenchers have sworn to defeat him on, and the release Wednesday of the Hutton Inquiry's report on the death of British WMD scientist David Kelly. If Lord Hutton, who lead the inquiry, says Blair lied about his role in the leadup to Kelly's suicide, it could cost him his job, says
Time. In an interview with the
Guardian, Blair admitted that his "
job is on the line."
While Blair and his Foreign Secretary Jack Straw
continue to defend their pre war statements about WMD, and
the intelligence they were based on, critics demanded that Blair finally "
tell them the truth" about WMD. The
Sunday Herald of Scotland reports that it has heard from
dozens of senior members of the intelligence community in Britain who, afraid that politicians will try to blame them, said "they are not prepared to be the whipping boy for the failure to prove the case for war, the death of David Kelly and the quagmire that the government is now in over the lack of WMD in Iraq."
The
Herald said the intelligence experts cited four key points in their defense:
- There was a systematic failure, the experts believe, in the way intelligence was interpreted. This was because they were under pressure to provide the government with what it wanted, namely that Iraq possessed WMD and that it posed a clear and present danger.
- Intelligence was "cherry-picked" about Iraq: that damning intelligence against Iraq was selectively chosen, whilst intelligence assessments, which might have worked against the build-up to war, were sidelined.
- A political agenda had crept into the work of the intelligence community and they found themselves in the position of taking orders from politicians.
- The intelligence community got into the habit of making worst-case scenarios and these were used to make factual claims by politicians.
A new book by
Financial Times journalist Philip Stephens won't help Blair's case. The
Guardian reports Mr. Stephens says that Mr. Straw was
opposed going to war in Iraq without the prior support of the UN.
The Financial Times reports that this was made virtually impossible by US Vice President Cheney, who "
waged a guerrilla war" against attempts by Blair to secure UN backing for the invasion of Iraq.
Stephens' book reveals a string of acid interventions by Cheney during critical talks between the president and prime minister at Camp David in September 2002. Once, he directly rebuked Alastair Campbell, Blair's communications director. In occasional contacts with British officials, [Lewis] 'Scooter' Libby, the vice-president's chief of staff, made little secret of his boss's scorn for multilateralism. He once jibed: "Oh dear, we'd better not do that or we might upset the prime minister." Cheney is also facing criticism in the US over recent statements he has made about the existence of WMD. In an interview Tuesday with
NPR, he reiterated the "
long-discredited claim" that military trailers found in Iraq were Saddam Hussein's so-called mobile bio-weapons labs. Kay's statements over the weekend confirmed that the trailers were
not related to WMD activities.
Scripps Howard News Service reports Cheney is also being
questioned about comments made
in an interview with Colorado's
Rocky Mountain News. In the interview, Cheney said the "best source of information" about alleged connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda was a magazine article, "Case closed," in the conservative publication
The Weekly Standard. But the
Rocky Mountain News reports that the
Pentagon itself discredit the
Standard's piece, saying its contents were "not accurate" and that it was "not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda ..."
AP reports that Monday the Bush administration said search for WMD would continue but for the first time, White House press secretary Scott McClellan
did not repeat past administration statements that forbidden weapons would be found. But most Democratic presidential candidates seized on Kay's comments to
criticize the Bush administration. While frontrunner Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts said he would not accuse Bush of intentionally misleading the public without more evidence, he said the record shows that Cheney repeatedly "exaggerated, clearly."
"When they talked about weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed in 45 minutes, there were none. When they talked about aerial devices that could deliver, there were none. When they talked about the linkage to Al Qaeda. ... I think there's been an enormous amount of exaggeration, stretching, deception," said Kerry. Meanwhile, Cheney gave a speech Friday to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he called on the world to have a
renewed focus on terrorism. But Fareed Zakaria of
Newsweek reports that the
speech fell flat.
"It's not that we don't worry about terrorism," a head of government (of a pro-American country) said to me. But for him, as for other leaders, it's not how he sees the world: "I have to grapple with a different set of issues. And I have the feeling that the United States has gone off into its own universe and cannot hear or say anything to me about my problems." There is a disconnect between America and the world. A few days before the Cheney speech, UN secretary General Kofi Annan, in a direct slap at the US, warned against following the "
laws of the jungle" in the quest for global security.
Also...
•
US sees significant role for UN in Iraq handover (
Reuters)
•
US trying to deal with Sistani's growing influence (
USA Today)
•
Iranian MPs defy ban and vote for reform (
The Scotsman)
•
Ben and Jen split over WMD (
The Spoof)
•
US threshold for Iraq 'success' is modest (
The Christian Science Monitor)
•
Guantanamo spy cases falter (
The Washington Post)
•
Our man in Baku (
Washington Post)
•
Female GIs reporting rapes by US soldiers (
Denver Post)
• Feedback appreciated. E-mail
Tom Regan
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