Weapons of mass deception (21 June 2003)

Tony Blair’s rationale for war has collapsed in a heap of pretence and contradictions, argues Glen Rangwala.

What must Tony Blair have been thinking of? He proclaimed almost daily over the space of a year that Iraq had weapons that threatened the world, when it seems increasingly likely that the actual assessment of British officials was that Iraq had in fact no vast stockpiles of prohibited weapons. Did he think that people would somehow just forget those claims once the invasion was over, and glory in victory - without thinking about why the war was fought in the first place? Or did he enter some peculiar state of mind in which he was able to believe that something was true just because he earnestly pronounced it as such, rather than because there was any evidence for that belief?

So far we know - from Robin Cook - that the assessment of the Government in the late 1990s was that Iraq had no nuclear programme, no anthrax weapons and no long range missiles. We know - from Clare Short - that the intelligence services were themselves saying on the eve of the war that, while Iraqi scientists may have continued to research chemical and biological weapons, the chances of Iraq actually using any weapons was not high. We also know from a senior US ambassador that documents which the British government supplied to Washington, which purported to show that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa, were widely believed to be forgeries. This was before they were mentioned so prominently in Tony Blair's dossier last September.

If any of this were to have filtered into Blair's mind before he ordered troops into action, he would have realised that the invading armies would not be met with chemical or biological weapons, that they would not find prohibited facilities on any sizeable scale, and that he would end up looking foolish, deceitful and discredited.

He might then have hesitated before he proclaimed his certainty in a press conference on 25th March, at the start of the war, that "once the regime is out then there will be all sorts of people that will be willing to give us the information" about where the weapons were stored. However, almost all the key scientists and officials named by the US Administration as being involved in Iraq's weapons programmes have now been captured. They have undoubtedly been offered large amounts of real estate in return for politically convenient information. Maybe they are able to resist temptation to an extent not heard of for two millennia. Because otherwise Tony Blair was wrong.

If Blair had taken a keener interest in the evidence, he might not have said when standing alongside President Bush on 8th April that, "On weapons of mass destruction, we know that the regime has them, we know that as the regime collapses we will be led to them. We pledged to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and we will keep that commitment." Six weeks later in Poland, Blair told us that this "pledge", this "commitment", was neither here nor there - "not the most urgent priority now for us," he said.

The true extent of the collapse of the US and UK case on Iraq's weapons is clearest in how the search for weapons has so far been fruitless. Few biological weapons experts accept that the trucks, presented by the Pentagon and Bush, as being mobile biological production facilities were anything of the sort. The Iraqi scientists who used the trucks claimed that they were used for the production of hydrogen to fill balloons to guide artillery fire, an explanation that would fit with what is known about them. The Observer has even found that Britain sold such a system to Iraq in 1987. But it remains the only find that the British government can claim for Anglo-American forces inside Iraq, and so they still keep referring to it.

Just as remarkably, Blair continues to defend the claims put out before the war itself, even saying at Evian that he stands "absolutely 100%" behind his dossier of September last year. If that is the case, then he must still believe that there are in Iraq twenty missiles that can be filled with chemical or biological agents and which can reach as far as Cyprus or Israel. He must still believe that there are stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons inside the country, and that some of these can be deployed within 45 minutes. And he must still believe that Qusai Hussein, Saddam younger son who is still at large, has control over these weapons. Then again he says finding the weapons is not a priority. So either the present policy is deeply reckless, or else the claims put out by Blair before the invasion were utterly false. Which is it?

Author: Glen Rangwala

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