Honesty or judgment: Blair fails on one or other

The Times
June 05, 2003
By Bronwen Maddox

Tony Blair may continue, as he did yesterday, to resist calls for a judicial probe into whether the case for war was exaggerated.

But the claims he made in the two "dossiers" he published leave him — and the intelligence services — extremely vulnerable.

Downing Street now sidesteps its January dossier on human rights abuses and Iraqi security, after the revelation that it was partly based on an academic thesis pulled off the internet.

Most weight, inevitably, falls on the first and longest document, the 50-page account published in September. There are four sorts of claims in it, in particular, which are the main source of the Prime Minister’s current problems.

Praise for the intelligence services
The problems begin with the Prime Minister’s effusive praise for the intelligence services. The first two sentences of the entire report are "The document published today is based, in large part, on the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The JIC is at the heart of the British Intelligence machinery".

In the two-page foreword to the report, which is couched in a highly personal tone, Blair adds: "I and other Ministers have been briefed in detail on the Intelligence and are satisfied as to its authority. I also want to pay tribute to our Intelligence and Security Services for the often extraordinary work that they do."

Blair also takes pains to say: "I believe people will understand why the agencies cannot be specific about the sources . . . and why we cannot publish everything we know."

This tone is extremely unhelpful to Blair now. It invokes the popular mystique surrounding the Intelligence world, asking the public to take it on trust that the allegations which follow are true. But the more that emerges about the patchy and imperfect nature of intelligence, on Iraq and elsewhere, the more questions it raises about the dossier.

Either it calls into question Blair’s judgement in putting so much weight on "intelligence" — or it compromises his honesty in using it as justification for his case while being aware of its weaknesses.

Nuclear emphasis
The prominence which the dossier gave to Iraq’s nuclear ambitions seemed at the time to be unwarranted, given that no analysis seriously suggested that Iraq had nuclear capability. But Blair’s allegations now appear based on exceptionally shaky ground.

Blair’s assertion that Saddam "continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons" remains uncontroversial. But it was melodramatic to assert that "if Iraq obtained fissile material and other essential components from foreign sources . . . Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon in between one and two years."

It is a true but trite observation, and a misleading bid for the headlines, given that obtaining fissile material is the most difficult step in building a weapon, and that there were few signs that Iraq had managed to circumvent the sanctions regime to do this.

Blair asserts as fact a point which was controversial at the time and has become more so: that Iraq was attempting to import a certain type of aluminium tubes for use in its nuclear programme. Many have since contested that the tubes in question were the appropriate type.

The nuclear claims also contain the passage which is now one of the report’s greatest embarrassments: the claim that Iraq was trying to get uranium from Africa. Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary, challenged Blair yesterday in the Commons about the widely reported revelation that at least one of the pieces of evidence on which Downing Street based this claim has been revealed as a forgery.

Blair answered that "there was intelligence to that effect . . . it was judged by the Joint Intelligence Committee at the time to be correct". It would take time and more work to establish whether that was right, he said.

In effect, that concedes the point: the Government cannot at the moment defend that claim. Blair’s answer is markedly weaker than Downing Street’s dogged stance as recently as last week that the claim of the Africa connection was correct and it had more than one source to support it.

"45 minutes to launch"
This remark is now infamous — that Saddam could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. It was simply stupid of Blair to have made it, in both the foreword and the main body of the report.

Blair said yesterday that this claim was the conclusion of the JIC, and his report had taken the line straight from that body. Perhaps; in one sense, the allegation is simply a banal military estimate of the length of time for a launch command to pass down the chain. It is plausible that Intelligence services made such a claim.

But it is hard to imagine that any Intelligence agent would have intended that calculation to be presented as flamboyantly as it was in the dossier, dominating the short foreword with its drama to justify the claim of imminent threat.

Claims about chemical and biological weapons
This is the point where the document appeared on firmest ground and where the failure to find such weapons has been most surprising. Blair asserts on the first page that, "What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons". Of course, such weapons may still be found. But it becomes less likely the more sites are investigated. Chemical weapons, in particular, are not easy to hide or destroy without trace.

However, on this point, Blair is not particularly vulnerable to the charge of "spinning" Intelligence into a more eye-catching form. Before the war, it was considered utterly uncontroversial by both British and American intelligence services to say that Iraq had these weapons.

Gary Samore, author of the 75-page dossier produced shortly before by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said "the primary conclusion — that Iraq had reconstituted chemical and biological weapons capability, was not in dispute. It now appears to be wrong, but it was not in dispute." If they are never found, it points to a serious failure of the Intelligence services themselves, one that cannot be excused by political exaggeration.

Skimpy evidence
Given the weight Blair put on it, the dossier is frankly skimpy. It is padded out with "factboxes" containing interesting, alarming, but irrelevant details of warheads, missiles, spies and such-like, which make it read like a children’s encyclopedia. They also have the effect of making much more alarming a document which would otherwise seem more hypothetical abstract and cautious. They describe, for example, the destructive properties of a nuclear bomb, the toxicity of ricin, and how many people might die from such weapons — even though the document was not even suggesting Saddam possessed them.

There is also an eight-page final section on "Iraq under Saddam Hussein", which contains stories of human rights abuses.

If you strip out all these sections, the parts amounting to an account of Iraq’s current weapons capability amount to just 13 pages of large type, excluding pictures, with widely spaced paragraphs and generous use of white space.

The document is vastly inferior in detail to the 75-page highly-technical report (not counting detailed footnotes and appendices) by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Weakness of satellite observation
If you do not accept Blair’s instruction to take claims about the authority of Intelligence on trust, then in retrospect, the dossier raises questions about the quality of information available.

It contains four blurred, black-and-blue aerial photographs of suspicious sites, of the kind which are now a staple of such pitches. Two are of alleged chemical facilities; the report questions Iraq’s claim that these are for civil use only. A third is said to be of a test site for a missile engine; and a fourth is of a "presidential palace", with Buckingham Palace, a fraction of the size, superimposed for contrast.

These sites were high on the list for inspection after the war; it appears that nothing has been found at any of them. That inevitably raises questions about the value of such pictures to Intelligence services.

What went wrong?
The dossier relies enormously on extrapolation from Saddam’s past activities and supposed motivation. He has used chemical weapons in the past, he probably retains the capability, therefore surely he still has them.

This is an understandable progression, even if it proves wrong. Gary Samore says he was influenced by the same reasoning. "Studying the history, I became convinced that Saddam had a magical belief in the ability of chemical weapons to defend his country. So I assumed that deep motivation together with available capability equalled a chemical and biological weapons programme."

It is fine for a think tank to make such an assumption, and then to turn round and correct its reasoning in hindsight, as the IISS is now doing. But it serves less well as the basis of a decision to go to war.

Differences from the US
Blair exposed himself to criticism in the dossier more than did President Bush. The case presented by the US Administration varied in important respects, although it had its own important weaknesses.

Washington consistently put more emphasis on the threat of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions. It relied much more on the word of Iraqi exiles (and remains close to them).

But it made fewer precise claims about the current extent of Iraq’s weapons programme. This appears to be partly because Secretary of State Colin Powell was alert to risk that the Administration’s hawks would use him to present an aggressive case that he could not later defend; according to reports, he spent days with aides making sure his claims would stand up.

That is partly why the Administration is now so touchy over the possibility that Downing Street supplied it with faulty "intelligence".

Congressional inquiries are focusing much more on whether the intelligence agencies failed than on whether the Administration exaggerated that intelligence in its presentation.

Osama bin Laden dossier
Similar weaknesses are evident in the account Blair published in October 2001, ahead of the Afghan war, which set out to establish that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the September 11 attacks.

It was striking, in that 17-page account, that almost no Intelligence was offered in evidence. There was almost nothing on money or phone intercepts, nor on the long trail of contacts through Europe which the hijackers had apparently used.

It was also striking that there was no mention that 15 of the hijackers had come from Saudi Arabia, an omission which might be attributed to political sensitivities — the desire, at that time, to keep Saudi Arabia on side.

The most detailed section was on the earlier bombings of African embassies and the USS Cole, based on a narrative from a captured suspect; it made for compelling reading, but gave a spurious sense of the amount of Intelligence available.

Did Blair exaggerate intelligence claims?
Without seeing the raw Intelligence presented to Blair, it is hard to answer definitely whether he unjustifiably hyped his case. But the dossier does seem to leave him vulnerable to the charge of assembling a misleading case.

It suggests that the Intelligence agencies were able to get an adequate picture of Iraq’s capabilities.

It inflated the "45-minute" claim beyond anything the Intelligence services can plausibly have meant, and put too much weight on the nuclear threat.

Failure of intelligence
But the claims about chemical and biological weapons, the heart of the case for war, point more to a failure of Intelligence than to distortions of Downing Street presentation.

Committed to a pervasive "War on Terror" of unknown geographical scope and duration, this weakness of Intelligence is more of a cause for concern than Downing Street’s presentation.

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