Bush and Blair are starting to hurt
July 16, 2003 Edition -1
By Allister Sparks
It is not always gratifying to be able to say "I told you so", but the fact is there is a grim inevitability about the
deteriorating situation in post-war Iraq and the political fallout that is beginning to hurt George Bush and Tony Blair.
One might be tempted to gloat, given the arrogance with which those leaders brushed aside world opinion, but the implications for global security and the danger of terrorism becoming more contagious are too serious.
It was predictable that the war would be quickly over. There was no way Saddam Hussein's rabble army could stand up to the military might of the United States and Britain for more than a few weeks. The question was always: what would be the effect of a prolonged military occupation after the war on the deep sense of grievance that pervades the Arab and broader Islamic worlds?
The Bush administration believed its gifts of "liberation" and "democracy", of offering Iraqis "the American way of life", would be enough to ensure a grateful
response and begin a domino process of
democratic transformation in the Middle East. But that was always too simplistic.
Instead there has been a gross failure of post-war reconstruction. There was no administrative backup to take over from the military when the fighting ended. Soldiers are taught to bomb and kill, not run cities, and so the whole administrative system collapsed as Saddam's civil service was ousted.
Life for Iraqis has become a nightmare of electricity and water-supply cuts, of no air- conditioning in the 50¼ desert summer, of garbage piling up and putrefying in streets, of postal, telephone, banking and health services collapsing, and of rampant crime.
Simply put, the allies won the shooting war but are losing the war for hearts and minds.
Resentment of military occupation is on the rise and civil resistance has begun; 37 American and British soldiers have been killed in an incipient guerrilla war since Bush proclaimed victory on May 1, and as the body bags come home, rumblings of discontent are beginning in the US and Britain.
Nor is it only the casualties that are causing concern.
Economic costs are escalating. Last week US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the costs of the occupation had risen from $2-billion (R15,5-billion) a month to $3,9-billion (R30-billion), and the occupation might have to continue for four years.
What is worse for Blair and Bush, though, is their failure, two-and-a-half months after the end of the war, to find any evidence of the weapons of mass destruction they said so emphatically they knew were there and which they would undoubtedly find. This has produced a crisis of credibility.
Blair in particular is in trouble. The BBC has accused him of having "sexed up" intelligence reports, telling Britons they faced an imminent danger of attacks with weapons of mass destruction in order to swing wavering public opinion behind his determination to go to war alongside Bush.
Blair presented a 50-page dossier to the House of Commons last September in which he said British intelligence services had pre-cise evidence of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, that the Iraqi military planned to use them, and that some could be deployed within 45 minutes of receiving orders.
The dossier also said Britain had credible intelligence evidence that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon.
In February Blair's spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, distributed a second dossier to British journalists which purported to explain how Iraq was concealing weapons. The dossier, also shown to the American CIA, claimed Iraq had a stockpile of 100 to 500 tons of chemical weapons agent, it spelled out where the rocket launchers and warheads were, and it repeated the 45-minute claim.
The Americans were so impressed by the British dossier they quoted from it. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN it provided "exquisite detail" of Iraq's deceptions. "Every statement I make today is backed up by solid sources," he said. Bush included the bit about the weapons being deployable in 45 minutes in his State of the Union address.
The veracity of both documents is now being challenged. The second dossier, now dubbed the "dodgy dossier", was quickly revealed to have been largely based on old material in a Californian student's thesis.
Now the first dossier is also being questioned. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction casts huge doubt on the claim that Iraq not only had them but that they were in a state of operational readiness.
It has also emerged that a CIA agent, sent to Niger a year ago to check out rumours that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium there, reported back that the information was based on forged documents. His findings were conveyed to the British government long before Blair's dossier was drafted.
Robin Cook, dumped as foreign secretary for opposing the war, has been scathing in his criticism of the government's handling of the issue. While Blair insists something may turn up, Cook insists nothing will be found.
So it's fallout time. Big time. Blair and Bush are watching their popularity ratings fall. Blair is getting the worst of it. I have just returned from Britain where the outcry in the media and in Blair's own party is reaching cacophonous levels. They think their prime minister lied to parliament and took the country to war on false pretences.
Bush is not being so heavily battered. Americans take the view that even if no weapons are found, the war was still justified because Saddam was a tyrant and the world is better off without him.
Is that justification enough? Of Saddam's venality I have no doubt. But that was never the casus belli the US and Britain presented to the world. Their justification for taking unilateral action, for overriding the Security Council, for violating international law and destroying the world's only global security system in this dangerous age, was that they had incontrovertible evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, intended to use them, and that this represented a real and present danger to their own safety and world peace. As it turns out, this was not true.
Why did they do it? The best answer comes from Gregory Thielman, newly retired director in the US State Department's bureau of intelligence: "I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude - we know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers."
