Iraq War Crisis Shakes Britain’s Foundation

The lives of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and government scientist David Kelly intersected July 17, juxtaposing disparate images that are the stuff of history.

For Blair, the day brought public triumph. He gave a well-received speech in the U.S. Congress defending the war on Iraq and rhapsodizing about Anglo-American friendship and ideals. His eloquence won him repeated ovations, reminding Britons that many Americans admire their prime minister.

But the day also left Britons with an image of loss and despair. A few hours before Blair spoke in Washington, Kelly left his house in an English country village. The gentlemanly microbiologist walked about five miles to a forest where, police say, he took painkillers, slashed his left wrist with a knife and bled to death in the rain.

In the aftermath, a debate about Britain’s decision to join the war on Iraq has grown into a crisis over the credibility and trustworthiness of politicians and the press. The futures of one of Blair’s closest advisors and his minister of defense are in doubt. And Blair will be questioned by a judge investigating the circumstances leading to Kelly’s apparent suicide.

More broadly, the corpse in the countryside has forced Britons to reflect on the thousands of corpses in Iraq. In a process similar to current debate in the United States, critics are scrutinizing the gravest decision a leader can make: sending soldiers to war.

“There’s a lot that might still explode here,” said Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. “This is going to have a big impact on the shape and character of British politics. There comes a point in any government’s life where things don’t change. It’s distinctly wounded in a way that may not be easily recoverable.”

Kelly, a Defense Ministry expert and former U.N. arms inspector in Iraq, was the secret source of reports by a BBC journalist in May that accused the government of exaggerating evidence about Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. Kelly’s family and friends say he became angry and despondent after government officials made his name public this month in a campaign to rebut the BBC report, a disclosure that led to him being questioned in parliamentary hearings.

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq poses a greater risk to the Blair government than it does to the Bush administration. Resistance to military action without U.N. approval was more intense in Britain than in the United States, so before the war Blair needed desperately to convince the public that Hussein’s unconventional weapons were an urgent threat.

Blair has been besieged in past weeks by accusations that his government politicized intelligence and overstated dangers. The Kelly case injected another element into the uproar: the idea that a distinguished expert with doubts about the case for war was treated shabbily as part of a feud with the BBC. If the judicial inquiry goes badly for the government, the repercussions could be destructive.

The government, for its part, insists that it made a careful, responsible case against Iraq based on the best intelligence available at the time.

“We shouldn’t judge in hindsight,” said an official in the Blair government, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue. “Decisions are taken on the day.... On the point of substance, the things of which we are accused didn’t happen.”

The angriest accusations come from antiwar leftists in Blair’s divided Labor Party.

“I think that Blair lied to us,” said legislator Tam Dalyell, a veteran Laborite. “I think every sinew was stretched to justify a war on which he’d decided months before. If it were not for weapons of mass destruction, he would have never persuaded Parliament.”

Blair suffers from a “Gorbachev syndrome,” Dalyell said, comparing him to the former Soviet leader who once basked in applause overseas while his stock sunk at home.

At this point, however, Blair can still take comfort in the domestic political math. The Conservative opposition lacks strong challengers for the prime minister’s job and robustly supported his Iraq policy. The future depends on Blair’s proven resilience, events in Iraq and the outcome -- sometime in September or October -- of the inquiry into Kelly’s death by Lord Hutton, a member of the Law Lords, Britain’s highest court.

Despite the expectations in some quarters, it may not be easy or appropriate for the inquiry to assign blame for something as complex as a suicide.

Member of Parliament Glenda Jackson, a former Cabinet official, declared that Blair bears responsibility for the alleged decision to use Kelly as a pawn in a “phony war” with the BBC that was intended to distract from embarrassing questions about Iraq’s arsenal.

“He should resign,” Jackson said. “It beggars belief to think that such a strategy could have taken place without the prime minister knowing it.”

Blair, however, has denied involvement in the decision to reveal Kelly’s identity. And some say that the press has nothing to be proud of in an episode that shows how a spirited media culture can cross the line into voracious excess. During testimony in a parliamentary hearing, Kelly complained that he had not been able to retrieve documents he needed because his home was staked out by reporters.

“I think the media has a lot of blame for the way this whole thing got out of hand,” said a former U.N. arms inspector.

The BBC defends its aggressive coverage of a government whose emphasis on media strategy and “spin” has been a continuing source of friction with the press. The weakness of the political opposition has pushed the BBC, a powerhouse in its own right, into a front-line role as a watchdog and critic of the Blair government, analysts say. Simmering enmity between journalists and officials such as Alistair Campbell, Blair’s communications director, has worsened the acrimony of the Kelly case.

Finger-pointing aside, the motives for suicide remain unclear. Kelly, who was a 59-year-old father of three, did not leave a note. Before the dispute erupted, he had reportedly looked forward to an upcoming assignment to return to Iraq with a new Anglo-American team of experts assembled to search for banned weapons.

After Kelly’s death, the BBC confirmed that he had been the main source of the May 29 report by radio journalist Andrew Gilligan about allegedly hyped intelligence on Iraq. That revelation could help explain the scientist’s anguish: In legislative testimony two days before his death, Kelly said he doubted he was Gilligan’s main source.

There is also speculation that his bosses in the Ministry of Defense threatened him with retaliation; press leaks can be a serious transgression in Britain’s rigid civil service culture. Yet none of that offers a satisfactory explanation for his decision to kill himself, associates say.

“He was an extremely grounded, level-headed, calm and confident man,” said Toby Dodge, a professor and Iraq expert at the University of Warwick who knew Kelly.

Kelly was the veteran of numerous inspection missions in Iraq, where he won a reputation for wearing down Iraqi scientists with quiet, patient questioning despite the presence of the regime’s thuggish intelligence agents, Dodge said.

Responding to what it called “continuing inaccurate media speculation,” the Defense Ministry issued a statement Friday asserting that Kelly had received only a verbal reprimand. The ministry did not “threaten Dr. Kelly’s pension or threaten him with action under the Official Secrets Act.”

Kelly may nonetheless have been devastated by the perception that the episode destroyed his professional reputation, observers say. Being pushed into a cross-fire between swarming journalists and irate politicians must have been traumatic for a man who was more at home in the fields of rural Oxfordshire.

The spark of the tragedy was the radio broadcast by Gilligan about a dossier, based on intelligence sources, that the government released last September outlining the threat of Iraq’s nuclear arsenal. The assertion in the report that made headlines was a claim that Hussein’s forces had chemical and biological weapons ready to deploy within 45 minutes -- a statement that went further than the Bush administration’s public case against the Iraqi regime.

The intelligence, the Blair government official said in an interview last week, had surfaced in a tip in August from an Iraqi general working covertly for British intelligence who “was in a well-established line of reporting.” The general was the only source for the assertion, according to the official.

Gilligan reported that his source (later identified as Kelly) said that claim was inserted into the dossier over the objections of intelligence chiefs who felt it was weak. And in a newspaper column days later, Gilligan specifically accused Campbell, the prime minister’s media advisor, of inserting the 45-minute claim.

The allegation singling out Campbell unleashed a fierce official response. In the advisor’s defense, the British official told The Times that the 45-minute assertion was already in the draft of the dossier prepared by intelligence officials when Campbell first saw it last September.

“Alistair didn’t do it,” the official said. “It was in there already.”

Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee later concluded that Campbell was not responsible for the 45-minute claim, though legislators found that it was wrong for the media advisor to have chaired a meeting about the dossier because it was an intelligence matter.

Kelly’s testimony July 15 did not completely clarify the dispute. On the one hand, he denied accusing Campbell. On the other hand, Kelly said he thought there was only a 30% chance that Iraq had chemical weapons. And, in further comments that seemed to support the BBC story, Kelly sounded dubious about the claim that Iraq had unconventional weapons ready to deploy within 45 minutes of an order from Hussein.

“Basically it would be very difficult to see how Iraq could deploy in 45 minutes,” Kelly testified, according to a transcript. “It makes a number of assumptions, that the weapons were all ready to go in the right place with whatever system was being used with the right tracking to attack, and that is very unlikely.”

Nonetheless, Kelly said he did not doubt the “veracity” of the government’s dossier about Hussein’s arms programs. Colleagues say the dossier largely reflected a generalized sentiment among experts that Iraq had active weapons programs.

“The dossier was quite credible,” a former U.N. arms inspector said. “It was based on knowledge of what the Iraqis had been up to in the past and their strategic motivation not to disarm. The weapons were such a big issue for the regime and a question of domestic credibility.”

Even if Kelly had reservations about the September dossier, it has by no means been established that he was opposed to the war. His reasons for meeting with Gilligan and other reporters -- at least two more from the BBC, according to the network -- may have reflected his growing belief that scientific evidence had been politicized and liberties had been taken.

“I think he felt the scientific evidence had been exaggerated,” Dodge said. “He was a conservative establishment figure who was trying gently to set the record straight.”

If that description is accurate, it makes the chaotic experience that culminated in Kelly’s death all the more incredible, especially because he voluntarily came forward to tell his bosses that he thought he might have been a source for Gilligan’s story.

The BBC has said one of its reporters has a tape recording of Kelly criticizing alleged politicization of information in the September dossier. The tape will be a key piece of evidence for the inquiry that will surely influence the debate about the credibility of the government’s case for war.

Observers predict that the story will not end without the fall of figures such as Campbell or Defense Minister Geoff Hoon.

The Kelly case has become perhaps a worst-case example of how scandals can chew up people who get caught in the way. Two days before Blair’s speech and Kelly’s death, a legislator asked the scientist what lessons he had learned.

“Never to talk to a journalist again, I think,” Kelly said.