The former United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix weighed into the controversy over weapons of mass destruction on Sunday when he accused Tony Blair and George Bush of behaving like insincere salesmen who ”exaggerated” intelligence in an attempt to win support for war.
In a carefully worded attack, Dr Blix said intelligence communities were too ready to believe the ”tales” of defectors, and the British prime minister and US president, while not acting in bad faith, were too preoccupied with spin.
Referring to the government’s controversial dossier — with its suggestion that WMDs could be deployed within 45 minutes — he insisted: ”The intention was to dramatise it, just as the vendors of some merchandise are trying to exaggerate the importance of what they have.
”But from politicians or our leaders in the western word, I think we expect more than that. A bit more sincerity.”
Blix’s intervention, on BBC 1’s Breakfast with Frost, was immediately rejected by the government, with the leader of the Lords, Lady Amos, insisting that Lord Hutton had cleared the government of dramatising the 45-minute claim, and the secretary for constitutional affairs, Lord Falconer, urging the country to wait for the Butler inquiry, which will report in the summer.
”We shouldn’t go on and on and on discussing the precise detail of this. Instead, we should let the inquiry proceed, not monster it in advance,” he said.
Meanwhile, Robin Cook, the former leader of the Commons, ratcheted up his attack on the prime minister’s credibility, and two other former ministers, the ex-defence minister Doug Henderson and former health secretary Frank Dobson, along with the Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, and the shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, called for Blair to make a statement clarifying why he believed the 45-minute claim referred to long-range weapons of mass destruction when he took Britain to war.
Cook repeated his allegation that the prime minister knew the intelligence only pointed to battlefield weapons when the two discussed the issue on March 5, 15 days before military action — a claim denied by Downing Street.
”I made it quite plain … that it was obvious from the briefings that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and had only battlefield weapons … I could not have been more blunt,” he said.
Speaking on ITV’s Jonathan Dimbleby programme, Cook added that ”heads should roll” on the joint intelligence committee because of their apparent failure to adequately brief the prime minister — ”an appalling failure of communication”.
President Bush on Sunday defended the decision to go to war, arguing that although weapons of mass destruction had not been found Saddam Hussein ”had the capacity to have a weapon, make a weapon. We thought he had weapons”.
”I expected to find the weapons,” he acknowledged. ”Sitting behind this desk making a very difficult decision on war and peace, I made the decision on the basis of the best intelligence possible.”
Downing Street had hoped the WMD furore would dissipate after an ICM poll suggesting 72% of people felt MPs spent too much time on the issue and should return to the domestic agenda.
But the comments of Dr Blix, who headed the UN team searching for Saddam’s weapons from November 2002 until the eve of war last March, on Sunday refuelled the controversy. He questioned the wording of the infamous September dossier: ”They say some WMDs can be ready to be used within 45 minutes. Well, which ones?
”It certainly wasn’t nuclear because the report says that they were not developing nuclear, so they didn’t have them. And what is meant by being ready?
”Is it a phial of anthrax that can be tossed at somebody? I mean one can interpret it in different ways.”
Asked about claims in The Observer that Britain had spied on UN allies in the run-up to Iraq, he said: ”I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was the case … I assumed when I was in New York that I might well have been bugged in my office.”
Doubts about the dossier were also raised by Sir Paul Lever, a former chairman of the joint intelligence committee, who told Sky’s Sunday with Adam Boulton it had been ”sloppy” and the claim that weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes had been ”overemphasised”.
The US Republican senator John McCain, a member of Bush’s inquiry into prewar intelligence, told a weekend security conference in Munich that there had been international intelligence failures, and added: ”It’s clear to me that the weapons of mass destruction were not there.”
It also emerged that the widow of David Kelly has rejected an offer to meet the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, or the prime minister. – Guardian Unlimited Â