Blair’s Case for Iraq War Assailed

Savaging the premise of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s case for invading Iraq, two former Cabinet ministers told a parliamentary inquiry Tuesday that Britain’s road to war was paved by exaggerated intelligence information that overstated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons.

Robin Cook, who resigned as leader of the House of Commons on the eve of war, and Clare Short, who stepped down as international development minister last month, testified that prewar briefings by British intelligence indicated that Iraq’s programs to secretly develop banned weapons posed no imminent danger to other countries.

But they said Blair ignored that assessment, instead cherry-picking intelligence information that buttressed his efforts to seek the overthrow of Hussein’s government. Intelligence reports were used “to justify a policy [of going to war] on which we had already settled,” Cook said.

The accusations of deception came on the opening day of hearings by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee into whether the government presented “accurate and complete information to Parliament” in the run-up to the war. The inquiry was triggered by the failure so far of British and American troops in Iraq to uncover any significant sign of chemical or biological weapons.

The prime minister, who has urged patience for the illegal arsenal to turn up, has dismissed as “a lie” previous assertions by Short that Blair and President Bush intended to invade Iraq long before U.N. weapons inspectors were pulled out in March. Blair has said that he and his staff will not participate in the inquiry.

In particular, the committee wants to know why Downing Street published the assertion that Iraq had an arsenal of banned weapons primed to fire in as little as 45 minutes. The claim was the most startling made by the British government in a “dossier” of evidence that had been billed as containing information from high-level, classified sources inside Iraq. It was later exposed to contain chunks of dated public documents -- including plagiarized passages from a 12-year-old PhD thesis.

Cook, a former foreign secretary, told the lawmakers that he was “taken aback by how thin the dossier was” and noted that neither the British nor the American governments “had much intelligence inside Iraq.” The U.S., he said, “was drawing heavily on [Iraqi] exiles.”

In Washington, two congressional committees are conducting similar reviews of prewar intelligence claims.

Cook and Short, in their appearances before the committee Tuesday, were careful to make clear that they believed Blair acted in good faith while leading the country into conflict. Yet their testimony came close to suggesting otherwise.

Short described a prime minister who, while honest in his intentions, resorted to “a series of half-truths, exaggerations and reassurances that weren’t the case” to win over skeptics.

“I believe that the prime minister must have concluded that it was honorable and desirable to back the U.S. in going for military action in Iraq, and therefore it was honorable for him to persuade us through various ruses and ways to get us there,” she testified. “So for him I think it was an honorable deception.”

Cook suggested that the government’s march to war stemmed from a “burning sincerity and conviction of those involved in the exercise.”

But it is becoming clear that the postwar mood in Britain is not all-forgiving to Blair.

The inability to find a fingerprint of the banned weapons is hurting him, with polls showing trust in the prime minister declining.