Wrong, terribly wrong (20 February 2004)

Published in Labour Left Briefing (March 2004)

Just when they think they've escaped from scrutiny over invading Iraq, the fibs they told come back to haunt them. On the afternoon of 28 January, Alastair Campbell announced before a government-organised press conference, "The prime minister told the truth, the government told the truth, I told the truth. .... Today a stain on the integrity of the prime minister and the government has been removed." He was talking about the findings of the Hutton inquiry. Barely a few minutes later, that stain was back again. David Kay, appointed by the CIA to search for Iraq's weapons, spoke at a hearing of the US Senate Armed Services Committee. "We were all wrong", he said about previous US claims about Iraq's weapons, "and that is most disturbing."

Kay, once the darling of the pro-war camp and who had resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group only five days earlier, seems to have gone out of his way to pull down the remaining excuses about Iraq's weapons. The Bush administration, with Jack Straw acting as an echo, had continued to claim that the weapons might have been moved to Syria. "My belief that they did not move large stockpiles of WMD to Syria," explained Kay, "is based on my conclusion that there were not large stockpiles to move." He singled out the British claim that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger in a separate interview with the New York Times: "We found nothing on Niger", he stated pithily.

It became worse over the following days. In the type of self-criticism unknown to his British counterparts, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in an interview with the Washington Post on 2 February that he was unsure if he would have been in favour of going to war if he had known that Iraq didn't have stockpiles of banned weapons. If only he'd been reading Labour Left Briefing. Whilst British ministers scrabbled around Kay's testimony to find anything they could use to muddy the message, Powell acknowledged openly that Dr Kay "did say, with respect to stockpiles, we were wrong, terribly wrong".

A day later, Brian Jones, who had been the most senior WMD scientist in the ministry of defence until last year, broke ranks. He described to the Independent how there had been "a unified view" among defence intelligence experts before September 2002 that any claims about Iraq's current possession of prohibited weapons should be "carefully caveated". In other words, nothing they knew justified the claims to certainty that Blair had been trumpeting. Nevertheless, this view was overruled on the basis that there was new information that only a small number of people within MI6 were allowed to see. This information purported to show that "chemical or biological" agents could be launched on the backs of short-range artillery weapons within 45 minutes. If the weapons could be launched so quickly, then that means – hey presto, that they must exist after all. So the infamous 45 minutes claim made by Tony Blair in September 2002 was not just the cherry on the cake in the British government's case that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons: it was the cake itself.

Of course, the problems with that claim are well known by now. They seem to be have been received third-hand by the British government, arriving through a chap whom they saw as reliable, and who – rumour has it is – is based in Sweden. That individual received the information from a source within Iraq itself, but whom the British government didn't know anything about. They also weren't told about the type of agent that Iraq could allegedly fire (chemical? biological? vegetable? mineral?), in which sites it was contained, or the locations it had to be moved to in order for it to be used. Blair told the Commons on 4 February that he didn't know until after the invasion that these putative weapons upon which it seems he'd based his entire case were short-range weapons that couldn't inflict damage outside Iraqi territory. We all know that Mr Blair has never been knowledgeable about foreign affairs: this is why he deploys his moralistic stance instead of making arguments based on the facts. But for him to admit that he launched a war without knowing what his own claim was – whether Iraq had the ability to lob a few illicit mortars or to kill millions in instant – betrays a staggering degree of irresponsibility.

As even his most devout supporters covered their faces in embarrassment at Blair's confession, a new inquiry was set up. And who better to put in charge than Lord Butler? This was, after all, the man who told the Scott arms-to-Iraq inquiry in 1996 that "half the picture can be true". Blair must be hoping that a tiny corner of the picture can be true as well. In the time since his days of loyally serving Blair as cabinet secretary in 1997, he has been acting as a paid advisor to Marsh & McLennan, the insurance brokers. Their other famous employee is Paul Bremer, chief executive of a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan from October 2001 until he took up his appointment in Baghdad in April 2003. So the man supposedly investigating why Britain went to war on Iraq works for the outfit that provided the person who rules by consequence of that war.

Some sections of the British media have been placing their faith in Lord Inge, a member of Butler's small team, to ask independent questions. Inge is a paid advisor to BAE systems (formerly British Aerospace, the weapons manufacturer), an organisation that is more eager than ever now to return to the government's good books. He is also the director of the Hakluyt Foundation, which was established by MI6 officers as a private spying outfit, and is rumoured to "investigate" those critical of BAE.

Arguments rage about whether the members of the British inquiry are any better than those appointed to the US inquiry, established on 6 February. That one is to be co-chaired by Laurence Silberman, a self-confessed friend of vice-president Dick Cheney and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Silberman took a leading role in the infamous negotiations between representatives of Ronald Reagan's campaign team and the Iranian authorities in advance of the 1980 presidential elections. Those negotiations resulted in the Iranians keeping US diplomatic staff as hostages until after the elections, allegedly to discredit Reagan's incumbent rival Jimmy Carter, in return for military aid to Iran from the new Reagan administration. Silberman also served as the judge on the panel that overturned the conviction of Colonel Oliver North, the central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Nevertheless, amidst the obfuscations and lame excuses that will be issued by these supposed inquiries, it is reassuring to know that some voices can be relied upon. Ahmad Chalabi, the neo-cons' favourite who was installed as a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, told the Telegraph about the faulty information on WMDs that his organisation – the Iraqi National Congress – had filtered to the governments and media to justify a war on Iraq. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important." You can hear Blair cheering from the sidelines in support.

Author: Glen Rangwala

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