Tony Blair Bets Everything On Finding Iraqi WMD

by Sanjay Suri

Once again, Blair has placed his confidence in intelligence reports.

"I have absolutely no doubt at all that they will find the clearest possible evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," Blair told the House of Commons about members of the British, U.S. and Australian team that have begun to arrive in Iraq for the search.

Blair has placed not just his credibility but also his political future on the line. Few see him continuing as Prime Minister past this year if he loses this gamble.

Matching the intelligence speculation about the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) comes media speculation just who the intelligence sources could be.

Speculation in the U.S. has turned on Ahmed Chalabi from the Iraqi National Congress as the dubious source of the information.

The Daily Telegraph in London carried a report suggesting that the mole really is Tariq Aziz, former foreign minister in Saddam Hussein's government. The report suggested that Saddam had become suspicious of Tariq Aziz in his last days, and that his family had been placed under watch.

Tariq Aziz has been in U.S. custody in Baghdad for several weeks now, and hardly a word on him has surfaced in the media. The Daily Telegraph did not follow up its report; and few others did.

Members of the 1,500-strong team now spreading out into the desert heat have been given the confidence that the weapons exist, but little information where they might be, going by the strength of the team, and the failure so far to unearth any.

This has given rise to an apprehension that the new intelligence may turn out to be off the mark just as the old one was.

If Tariq Aziz is the mole, and the weapons exist, then clearly he was not taken into confidence on their positioning, or perhaps disposal. Nor has this information been extracted from the many members of Saddam's inner circle now in U.S. custody.

The evidence so far is that British intelligence has got it badly wrong, in its 50- page dossier published in September last year, and again in a follow-up document released in February.

The dossier published in September, with a confident foreword by Blair, included satellite pictures of four installations; two alleged to be sites for chemical weapons, the third a missile test centre, and the fourth in one of Saddam's palaces. These were among the first sites to be checked after the coalition forces went in; nothing was found.

The document included claims that Saddam had been trying to buy nuclear material from Niger; the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, the world's nuclear watchdog established this was not true.

Former foreign secretary and parliamentary affairs minister Robin Cook challenged Blair over the supposed dealings with Niger. This piece of intelligence, Cook said, had now been established beyond doubt to be a forgery.

Blair replied to say only that "there was intelligence to that effect" and that "it was judged by the Joint Intelligence Committee at the time to be correct."

Take the assertion in the dossier that Saddam's regime tortured members of the Iraqi football team because they lost a match. The old and discredited story was repeated in the dossier years after a full FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association) investigation had found those stories to be false.

Now comes further evidence that British and U.S. intelligence given to the UN inspection team was inadequate. Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told the BBC in an interview Friday: "I thought -- my God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?"

Blair was challenged on the claim that Saddam could launch weapons of mass destruction at 45 minutes notice. He said again that that was the conclusion of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Blair has begun to distance himself from the intelligence committee, while still sounding confident on the basis of intelligence reports.

Blair's confidence -- or at least a public show of it -- remains unshaken after further embarrassment over the source of some of the claims in the dossier that the government had to admit later had been plagiarized from an article posted on the Internet years earlier by an Iraqi exile, now an academic in California.

The academic, Ibrahim al-Marashi, wrote in The Daily Telegraph Thursday that the British government had not just plagiarized but "plagiarized and manipulated" his report by inflating figures and exaggerating Iraq's weapons capability.

The academic says that his remark that Iraqi intelligence was "aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes" was changed to "supporting terrorist groups in hostile regimes" in otherwise plagiarized text.

The opposition has been calling this kind of thing the "sexing up" of intelligence material to mislead people over the extent of danger from Saddam.

Ibrahim al-Marashi now says "the dossiers' authors have plagiarized and manipulated open-source materials, by inflating figures, and exaggerating the capabilities of Iraq's weapons programme."

The two British dossiers, he says, "have undermined serious research conducted by think-tanks and policy centers."

Ibrahim al-Marashi says: "The September 2002 dossier stated that 45 minutes is all Iraq needed to arm and deploy a chemical or biological weapon. Publishing such a figure only proves that Downing Street is not a proper research institution.

No professional analyst would publish a figure such as this, based on only one source. This time span does not take into account the complicated Iraqi chain of command and the technical requirements needed to prepare and launch such a weapon."

For Blair now WMD is a make or break issue. His future is in the hands of the sources that fed him his renewed confidence.