Tony Blair on Iraq: A Case of 20-20 Hindsight?

By Adrienne Snow

So Prime Minister Tony Blair, more than a month after the U.S. 9/11 Commission released its report reaching similar conclusions, has finally admitted, in a recent speech to a British Labour Party conference: “The evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons, as opposed to the capability to develop them, has turned out to be wrong.”

What took him - or, for that matter, the 9/11 Commission - so long to reach such a conclusion, one wonders?

In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, in the spring of 2003, the Canadian government asked two key things of its counterpart in Washington. First, to provide Canada’s government with evidence of direct connections between the al-Qaeda terrorist movement and the government of Saddam Hussein, as well as of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - both being, at the time, the United States’ ostensible reasons for launching an invasion. Second, Canada lobbied long and energetically for the United States to secure UN support for the invasion, thereby keeping America and its allies well within the bounds of accepted principles of international law and avoiding potential embarrassment, or disrepute, for the invading forces, as well as for their governments.

As the administration of U. S. President George W. Bush was unable to provide Canada with credible support for its “weapons of mass destruction” hypothesis, or with a UN resolution, explicitly authorizing an invasion to change the Hussein “regime” in Iraq, Canada chose to sit out the invasion, while continuing to provide military assistance to U.S.-led military action in Afghanistan.

That decision was taken by the government of Canada in April 2003.

Seventeen months later, Mr. Blair appears, at last, to have acknowledged the same lack of evidence of significant caches of weapons in Iraq that, at least in part, informed the decision of the Canadian government and a number of other NATO governments early in 2003 not to join the invasion of Iraq.

Now that Saddam Hussein has been removed - an excellent thing, to be sure, in spite of the methods used - two questions remain. First, why were Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush unable to interpret the intelligence on Iraq as accurately as their counterparts in Canada, and elsewhere, did?

After all, that there was little or no hard evidence of significant supplies of WMD in Iraq in 2002 or 2003 has long been an open secret in Western defence and security circles. As an article in the Canadian Military Journal, published earlier this year by the Canadian Department of National Defence, states: “Iraq [in the spring of 2003] posed no imminent threat to the United States, the West or the Middle East.”

If the Canadian government, which spends many fewer dollars per capita on defence, security and intelligence matters each year than do the U.S. and U.K. governments, was confident there were few, if any, “weapons of mass destruction” at Saddam Hussein’s disposal, why did intelligence experts, and other government officials, in the United States and the United Kingdom not reach a similar conclusion?

All of this leads to a second, perhaps equally important question, that too few in the media and elsewhere in the United States, seem to have been willing to ask, as yet. That is: How long before a motion is made to impeach Mr. Bush, for apparently having told materials untruths to Congress and to the American people, about the true nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein? (Assuming there continues to be some chance Mr. Bush may be re-elected in November.)

Recall another Republican president who was reckless to the point of behaving lawlessly: Articles of impeachment were brought against Richard Nixon for, among other things, “making … false or misleading public statements.” Surely, based not only on Mr. Blair’s statements at the Labour Party conference, but an abundance of additional evidence, Mr. Bush will soon face a similar day of reckoning?

Mr. Blair, by admitting to the extreme sloppiness of his government in making a solid case for war against Iraq, has, in spite of his own significant errors on the Iraq file, now at least served the useful purpose of bringing to the fore gross incompetence and dishonesty at the highest levels of government, both in the United Kingdom and in the United States. That is a development long overdue.

Thank you, Mr. Blair, for finally joining the government of Canada, and others, in “coming clean” with the public on the true state of military preparedness in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

And, Godspeed, Mr. Bush.

An edited version of the above article was published in the electronic edition of the Globe and Mail on October 11, 2004.