Blair's WMD Claims Look Increasingly Shaky

News Analysis

By Richard Evans, The Inquisitor's Editor, in London

With little evidence that Saddam posed a threat to the outside world, the British Prime Minister is struggling to justify the recent war in Iraq

It's been a tough couple of weeks for Tony Blair. Blindsided by a series of recent revelations and slips, British government officials have stumbled and contradicted themselves in efforts to defend the contention that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed a deadly array of weapons of mass destruction.

First Blair had to react to comments by US Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that weapons of mass destruction were no more than a bureaucratic pretext used to justify the toppling of Saddam. Then British officials agreed with Wolfowitz's boss, Donald Rumsfeld, that Saddam had suddenly destroyed his chemical and biological weapons days before the Anglo-US invasion, only to withdraw that claim two days later.

After that, things went from bad to worse. A pre-war report by the US Defense Intelligence Agency - the Pentagon's intelligence arm - suddenly appeared which concluded there was "no reliable evidence" to prove Saddam had any chemical weapons. Then John Reid, leader of the House of Commons and a frequent Blair spokesman, stated that damaging press leaks suggesting a British government effort to trump up the Saddam weapons claims were actually the work of rogue British spies trying to humiliate Blair's administration. Finally, former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told the BBC that he had been shaken by the poor quality of British and US intelligence justifying military action against Iraq.

Tony Blair continues to state that weapons of mass destruction will be uncovered in Iraq, while Bush administration officials are now distancing themselves from that view. This likely means that either Blair has intelligence that Washington lacks - a scenario most analysts believe to be unlikely - or he is concerned over the political consequences if no 'smoking gun' can be found.

Prime Minister Blair would appear to have far more reason to be worried than President Bush. The war in Iraq was initially deeply unpopular among the British, with over a million people marching in protest in London on February 16 before the war began. His ruling Labour party was also deeply divided over the legitimacy of and the need for war. Only a series of passionate public statements by Blair - including the contention that Iraq had deadly chemical weapons and could mobilize them within 45 minutes - finally brought his party and the public around.

In the run-up to the war in Iraq, the Blair administration repeatedly referred to UN reports that noted major discrepancies between the number of Iraqi weapons reported destroyed and those which Saddam's regime supposedly possessed. Yet no UN report after 1994 ever claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Just two days before the war began, Blair stated before Parliament that Iraq "had far-reaching plans to weaponize" the deadly VX nerve agent that Saddam had supposedly been stockpiling. Today, neither VX nor any other chemical or nerve agent has been found in Iraq, despite extensive searches by British and US weapons experts.

Particularly surprising is Blair's continuing claim that Iraq attempted to buy uranium illegally from the West African nation of Niger in order to fuel a dangerous nuclear weapons program that could threaten both the Middle East and the West. The documents upon which this claim rests, supposed letters between Saddam's government and Niger officials, have already been discredited as crude forgeries by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear monitoring arm.

The documents, reportedly unearthed by British intelligence, were dismissed as fakes by the IAEA even before the war began. Riddled with fundamental and amateurish errors, some of the letters from supposed Niger authorities featured the signature of one official who had resigned more than a decade earlier. Melissa Fleming, an IAEA spokeswoman, recently reiterated the organization's position on the Niger uranium incident. "These were blatant forgeries," she said, referring to the documents in question. "We were able to determine that they were forgeries very quickly."

Unlike President Bush, Prime Minister Blair has suffered the resignation of a number of government cabinet ministers over the Iraq war. Most significant among these was that of former foreign minister Robin Cook, who continues to question British involvement in the Iraq war both in Parliament and on television news programs.

Blair has been obliged to accept an investigation on the affair by the British Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee. While the ruling Labour party dominates the committee, it remains difficult to predict what the investigation will conclude. Depending on the evidence, opposition members of the committee or dissatisfied left-wingers within Blair's own party could either take an embarrassing public stand against him or choose to leak sensitive information to the press.

Unlike in the US, many in Britain believe that Tony Blair's continued leadership may rest on what the current investigation uncovers. Perhaps a third of the parliamentary Labour party were staunchly opposed to the war and only voted to support it following repeated pleas by their prime minister. If he is proven to have misled them, either intentionally or through incompetent intelligence, then he could become discredited, a lame duck with perhaps two years to run before the next general election.