The life of the September dossier (23 August 2003)

Published as part of "How weak '45 minutes' claim became rock-solid case for war", The Independent on Sunday (24 August 2003)

The September dossier served to cement the idea within that the existence of Iraq's prohibited weapons programmes was undisputed. Now any statement by the Iraqi regime that it did not have any chemical or biological weapons was automatically cast as a lie, a sign that the regime had still not faced up to its international obligations.

Just as importantly, the firmness of the dossier's conclusions meant that no other country could publicly question the existence of Iraq's weapons programmes without being seen as implicitly questioning Tony Blair's own credibility. Few countries were willing to risk a diplomatic incident with the UK in order to defend such an unpopular regime as the one in Baghdad in its claim to have no weapons programmes left.

Instead, those countries that were reluctant to endorse military action would only dispute the process by which Iraq could be successfully disarmed, rather than whether further disarmament was indeed necessary. This allowed Mr Blair and Mr Straw to invoke repeatedly the fact that nobody was claiming that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction: if weapons were not being visibly destroyed, that must mean that they still retained those weapons.

This gave the British government the upper hand in the deliberations in the Security Council. The claim in the September dossier that Iraq was continuing to produce prohibited weapons allowed them to justify delaying the entry of UN weapons inspectors until a new, tougher Security Council resolution was passed on November 8th, that threatened "serious consequences" if its stringent demands were not met.

One of those demands was that Iraq give "a currently accurate, full, and complete declaration of all aspects of its programmes to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and other delivery systems" within 30 days. Iraq declared that it had some missiles that exceeded the UN-imposed 150km limit, but that it had no chemical, biological or chemical weapons. On the basis of the understanding that had been built up through the dossier, Mr Straw was able to tell the Security Council on 5 February of this declaration that "its central premise - that Iraq possesses no weapons of mass destruction - is a lie", and that this constituted a "material breach" of the Security Council's resolutions.

Meanwhile, the claims in the dossier were themselves being called into question among the UN weapons inspectors. Within weeks, all eight of the sites mentioned in the dossier had been visited by inspectors, who found no traces of prohibited materials or equipment at them. Many of those facilities seemed to have been disused for a number of years.

The central claims of the dossier concerning Iraq's nuclear programme suffered the most clearly from the inspectors' assessments. The only documents passed to it to substantiate the claim in the dossier that Iraq sought uranium from Africa were discovered as forgeries. On 7 March, Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief nuclear inspector, reported that "After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq."

The dossier's claims about ongoing chemical and biological weapons programmes fared little better. The UN inspectors were making progress in verifying Iraq's claims to have destroyed its stocks of anthrax, VX and bombs filled with biological weapons in 1991. After 731 inspections at 411 different sites, Hans Blix reported to the Security Council that the inspectorate "has not at any time during the inspections in Iraq found evidence of the continuation or resumption of programmes of weapons of mass destruction or significant quantities of proscribed items – whether from pre 1991 or later".

Some in the US and UK dismissed this record as demonstrating only the effectiveness of the Iraqi regime in concealing its weapons programmes. This conclusion fitted badly with the Prime Minister's statement in the foreword to the dossier that Iraq was "a current and serious threat to the UK national interest". The move to war fitted in even more poorly with the statement of Jack Straw just prior to the release of the dossier that if Iraq readmitted weapons inspectors then the case for military action "recedes almost to the point of invisibility".

Author: Glen Rangwala

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