Lord Robin Butler, delivering his review of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction on Wednesday, looked like the amiable Oxford head of college he has become. But the former Cabinet secretary’s findings throw a harsh light on British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s conduct of government, as well as on the performance of the intelligence agencies.
Butler found the intelligence was generally weak, in some cases seriously flawed and, on the infamous 45-minute warning, plain wrong; while the government used this dubious information, ignoring the caveats and health warnings in which it was cloaked by the joint intelligence committee, to support its case against Iraq in a way that ”went to the outer limits … of the intelligence available”.
In spite of Butler’s reluctance to condemn individuals, this was no exoneration of Blair. Rather, it was confirmation of a presidential style that extends well beyond foreign affairs and that allows no effective challenge to a personal mission or even obsession.
Butler has written a meaty analysis of the background and development of the intelligence-based case for war. He scrupulously lays out the slowly accumulating intelligence that Osama bin Laden wanted to acquire and was prepared to use chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons.
He relates the parallel intelligence — although increasingly sparse and unreliable after Saddam Hussein evicted the weapons inspectors in 1998 — that the Iraqi president was suspected of building such weapons, and could be regarded as a potential source. He details the impact of September 11 on the way intelligence was interpreted, even though the intelligence itself did not indicate any change in Iraqi capacity or objectives. But he is damning about the weakness of intelligence from Iraq, the shortage of human sources, their unreliability, and, crucially, the pressure put on them and the analysts by what he calls ”the urgent requirement for intelligence”.
Attention inevitably focuses on Blair’s determination to make political use of intelligence — and the way in which he did it — the novel and most controversial element of the run-up to the pre-emptive strike on Iraq. The government wanted unclassified but authoritative intelligence material to advance its position.
In September 2002 the joint intelligence committee was charged with preparing a dossier, to lend the imprimatur of its expertise and impartiality to what was in effect a piece of advocacy for Blair’s position. Although the resulting dossier, Butler found, lay just within the bounds of acceptability, and he clears the government of acting in bad faith, he cautions that it was possible to read the warning about the constraints of security as strengthening rather than weakening the material, while Blair’s description of it as ”extensive, detailed and authoritative” may have — Butler says — ”reinforced this impression”.
He warns, damning by implication, that in future the uses and limitations of intelligence must be carefully explained while ”clearer and more effective dividing lines between assessment and advocacy” must be established. He concludes the failings were collective. The danger of that approach is that no one will have responsibility for putting things right. The contrast with the government’s expectation that heads would roll at the BBC was marked.
For his part, Blair hailed Butler as an exoneration: ”No one lied. No one made up the intelligence. No one inserted things into the dossier against the advice of the intelligence services,” he told the British House of Commons immediately after the report was made public.
That is not the point. He did not lie, but nor did Blair tell the whole truth. He misled by omission: the great persuader, dizzied by years of deploying weapons-grade spin on the Westminster battlefield, had set an objective.
Blair was less discriminating in the means that he used to pursue it than standards of good governance demand — the question of trust, which has dogged him almost from the moment of his election in 1997, is back with pressing urgency. For when Blair made the case for war, we were not given the whole picture.
Britons were left with the impression, reinforced in press conferences (”the threat is serious and current”) and in the Commons (”I believe it is beyond doubt”) that his passionate conviction that he was doing what was right was based on overwhelming evidence, when it is now clear that he was using flaky intelligence to make a risky judgement.
There was a sting left for the final paragraph of the Butler findings. ”We are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the government’s procedures which we saw in the context of policy-making towards Iraq risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgement.”
The sofa culture revealed in evidence to the Hutton inquiry, the informal, unminuted ad hoc meetings where key decisions were taken serves to exaggerate the presidential style of this government.
Butler has laid bare a style of government both unaccountable and dangerous. — Â