World>Terrorism & Security
posted February 2, 2004, updated 11:00 a.m. ET. Also updated at 7 a.m. Feb. 3, 2004

Blair agrees to hold WMD inquiry

Public opinion, US actions, lead Blair to reconsider commission.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

The Guardian reports that after US President George W. Bush decided to establish a full-blown investigation into the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the pressure was on British Prime Minister Tony Blair to do the same thing. And the BBC reports that Tuesday, before a meeting of senior MPs, Mr. Blair said there will be an independent inquiry into the intelligence which led Britain to war over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. But Blair also said that, regardless of the findings of the inquiry, he would not accept that it was wrong to invade Iraq.

The Guardian reports that ex-cabinet secretary Lord Butler, who served Blair and former Prime Minister, Lady Margaret Thatcher, will head the probe. The key question now, reports the Independent, will be the make up of the committee. The sticking point is understood to be the scope of the inquiry – in particular whether it should encompass the political use made of intelligence.

Public opinion likely played a role in Blair's decision to hold an inquiry. Two surveys published in The Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times showed 61 percent and 54 percent respectively in favor of an investigation into the Blair government's evidence of Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

01/30/04

Report: Humanitarian reasons didn't justify Iraq war

01/29/04

Blair, Cheney face no-show-WMD fallout

01/28/04

Dismantling Libya's nuclear program: so far, so good

Find out more.

Just last week the Hutton Inquiry into the death of WMD scientist David Kelly said the government did not "sex up" evidence to support its claims on WMD, and blamed the BBC for not properly editing the story. Yet even after surviving one of the toughest weeks in his political career, Blair is losing ground with the public and the media.

Several polls last week show a majority of Britons believe the Hutton Inquiry's findings were a "whitewash", and that Britons still trust the BBC more than they trust the Blair government, particularly on the issue of WMD. A YouGov survey for an the British TV network ITV on Sunday found that 44 percent of people trusted the BBC to tell the truth, compared with 12 percent who trusted the government. An ICM poll for News of the World, a British newspaper, found 54 percent of voters thought Blair's reputation has been damaged by the Hutton report. Just 14 percent thought his status had improved after Lord Hutton cleared him of any wrongdoing.

There was also great dissatisfaction with the way Blair is going his job. Polls in the Guardian and in The Times of London showed that Blair had been damaged about as much as the BBC by the Kelly affair. Thirty-six percent felt less favorable now towards Blair, and 34 percent less favorable to the BBC, according to the Populus survey of 500 adults.

There was some good news for the Blair government. More than two-thirds –69 per cent – of the people surveyed in the Times poll said that, regardless of whether or not Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, the war was justified because it led to Saddam Hussein's removal from power.

Much attention has been also turned on what the Hutton Inquiry didn't say. Last week's former Iraq Survey Group head David Kay told a US Congressional committee that there are no WMD in Iraq and that the "intelligence was all wrong." Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, writing in the Guardian, says Kay's report has given the findings of the Hutton inquiry an " Alice in Wonderland aura" and Blair little room to maneuver.

By focusing on a single news story broadcast by the BBC, Hutton has created a political smokescreen behind which Blair is seeking to distract the British public from the harsh reality that his government went to war based on unsustained allegations that have yet to be backed up with a single piece of substantive fact. Lord Hutton was in a position to expose this; he chose not to. It is left to the public, therefore, to carefully examine his report, looking not for what it contains but for what is missing.

The Straits Times of Singapore reports that Lord Hutton, who has come under fire for not addressing the larger WMD issue, says that it was not his responsibility to assess the strength of British military intelligence about Iraq's WMD, but only to look at the death of Mr. Kelly. Former Blair cabinet minister Robin Cook, who resigned over the decision to go to war in Iraq, wrote: "If I am ever up in court on a serious charge, I want to book Lord Hutton now as the trial judge." The Scotsman reports that Mr. Cook, along with Doug Henderson, another former Blair cabinet minister, says the results of the Hutton Inquiry make this the perfect time for Blair to "come clean" about his government's statements about WMD.

"Even David Kay, recent head of the Iraq Survey Group, has told us that the hunt has been sufficiently intense to conclude that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Now that Lord Hutton has cleared Tony Blair of lying, he is in a strong position. He will never have a better opportunity to say that he believed in all good faith the intelligence he was given and he gave to Parliament, but that it has turned out to be wildly wrong. If Government refuses to learn the lessons from what went wrong, there will always be the risk that they will make the same mistake again."

The Daily Telegraph reports that Blair is using the findings of the Hutton Inquiry to dismiss all calls for an investigation of the evidence used to go to war in Iraq. But the Independent reports that several British ministers and their advisers wish Lord Hutton had added a few criticisms of the government to his report last week to give it a more balanced appearance.

One senior source said: "Was what he said about the BBC fair? Yes, reasonably. Could he have been harder about the Government? Yes, he could have been. It wouldn't have affected what has happened at the BBC, but judging from the press and opinion poll reaction, it might have affected the way his report was received."

Writing in The Gulf News, a daily English-language paper in the United Arab Emirates, Prof. Adel Sarty, Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at UAE University, says whether or not Blair or Mr. Bush hold investigations into intelligence failures on WMD, "under the law, a freely made admission of the facts is the highest level of evidence. The Bush administration, the chief proponent of the war against Iraq, has admitted that its principal argument for the war might not be substantiated. Bush suggested that this did not matter. But, in fact, it does."

The difference is that a legally weak argument for the war has now become indefensible. Bush's principal argument for the war was that Saddam Hussein possessed large quantities of WMDs and this posed a threat to international peace and security. The US and the UK claimed the right to defend themselves, with or without the UN, against this threat to international peace. The UN Charter recognizes in Article 51 the inherent right of self-defense, but only "if an armed attack occurs" against a UN member state, and only until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Clearly, the war against Iraq could not be justified by reference to Article 51.

But Anne McElvoy, writing in the London Evening Standard, says that the problem was not getting rid of Mr. Hussein (she quotes UN weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus, who says Hussein never would have given up his "aggressive and destructive ambitions"), but that the way it was justified.

An inquiry would help stop the droning chorus of "we went to war on a lie". We did not. But there is some truth in the accusation that the war was sold to the public in terms which suggested a far more solid picture of the Iraq weapons than we possessed - and democratic governments should admit their mistakes as well as trumpet their victories. As for us WMD toughies, we too should welcome the most thorough investigation into the run-up to the war. It will show up errors, I do not doubt that. But it will also be an overdue reminder of the fundamental things about Saddam's Iraq that are being swept away in the present spasm.

Meanwhile Blair and Bush have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a right-wing member of the Norwegian parliament. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Australian Prime Minister John Howard praised the move, saying that the two men had helped make the world a safer place.