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Yes. Now what are you going to do about
it? That's the Texas answer and always has been.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2003 1:12 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Thus far, but
no further
On the BBC news last night, a reporter pointedly ask Blair, while still
in Iraq, about WMDs. Blair turned his back and wouldn't answer.
Question: Were all those people killed and a country put into ruin
because people in positions of power and trust consciously lied?
Ed Weick
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2003 10:32
AM
Subject: [Futurework] Thus far, but no
further
Professional Blair-watchers are saying that Tony
Blair is now showing signs of extreme nervousness as he continues to try and
justify the reason for going to war in Iraq. (Certainly the pitch of his
voice seems to be getting a little out of control from time to time.) At the
time that Blair threw in his/our lot with Bush, 140 of his own MPs voted
against him and we had the biggest-ever demonstration in London with over 1
million people attending from all over the country. Many (including me)
thought then that Blair was close to being forced to resign.
But he
scraped by in Houdini fashion. However, now that it is becoming clearer by
the day that Saddam Hussein was of no danger to other countries around him,
never mind America or the rest of the world, the pressure against Blair is
mounting again. He is being forced to choose his words very carefully
indeed. As in his speech in Poland today, every sentence he utters is true,
but there's no logical connection between them that amounts to a valid case.
As the FT says below, he and Bush have deceived us and it's going to be
increasingly impossible for Blair to convince most of this country (or at
least most of those who care about the matter) otherwise.
Because I
was wrong before about Blair's resignation, I hesitate to make another
forecast. However, on my dogwalk this morning I bumped into a retired senior
businessman (that is, much more senior than I'll ever be!) whom I
occasionally meet (whose son, by coincidence, is an officer in Iraq and
coming home tomorrow) who said quite bluntly, after we'd circled around each
other conversationally: "Blair will have to resign."
And then, in the
remainder of my dogwalk I read one of the editorials in today's FT. I
thought that this was a pretty good summary of what's been going on so far.
The FT is arguably the most respected newspaper in England -- by both left
and right -- and if this is what the FT says then I rather think that Blair
is in a much deeper hole than he's realised so far. What follows may seem
rather sotto voce to most non-English, but to us it's pretty strong
stuff. If Rumsfeld and Bush start taking silly decisions about Iran -- as it
seems they are threatening to -- then I don't see how Blair can support them
this time.
<<<<
WHERE ARE THEY?
It is time for
a reality check: we have been deceived.
The US/UK occupation of Iraq
has done nothing to prove the case for war. On the contrary, it has
undermined, possibly fatally, their casus belli against the Iraqi
regime -- namely that it was stockpiling chemical and biological, if not
nuclear, weapons. The reality is that, 45 days after the war's end, all the
US and UK appear to have found is two empty trailers suspected of having
been mobile bio-weapon laboratories. This newspaper suspected as much all
along.
Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, now says Iraq may have
destroyed its stocks of weapons of mass destruction before the war. In other
words, he does not expect anything more to be found. Tony Blair is still
expressing confidence in the existence of WMD. But he would; far more than
President George W. Bush, the prime minister justified the war on the need
to rid Iraq of its weapons.
So did the US and UK intelligence
services get it wrong, or were their political masters lying? It seems a bit
of both. Most of the evidence that Iraq might have WMD was based on
what Iraq had at the end of the Gulf war of 1991, on what a high-level
defector alleged in 1995 that Iraq was still concealing and on what chemical
and biological material Iraq was believed to have made or imported after
1998. UN and intelligence assessments were, mainly, a series of questions,
based on known or suspected stocks or inputs.
But in the mouths of US
and British politicians, questions turned into assertions embroidered with
assumptions. In its WMD dossier, Downing Street claimed Iraq had WMD ready
for use in 45 minutes, based on a source that even UK intelligence
apparently regarded as questionable; this could be the time required to
launch a WMD-armed Scud - but only if it had a ready warhead. The
same UK dossier also contained a fabricated claim of a recent Iraqi search
for uranium from Niger. For their part, the Pentagon hawks apparently turned
to their own Iraqi exile sources in preference to more doveish estimates of
the Central and Defence Intelligence Agencies.
One of these hawks, Paul
Wolfowitz, has now tellingly admitted that WMD was chosen as the casus
belli "for bureaucratic reasons, because it was the one reason everyone
could agree on". "Everyone" included Mr Blair. He knew that few outside the
Washington Beltway, and even fewer in Britain, would buy the regime change
argument, whereas the WMD case against Iraq was enshrined in 12 years of UN
resolutions.
The intelligence failures in Iraq raise many questions,
not least why Saddam Hussein was so unforthcoming to UN inspectors, if he
had little left to hide. But there is one overwhelming caution for the Bush
administration. If it ever wants to put its doctrine of pre-emptive war into
practice again, it will need to come up with far more convincing proof of
threats than it showed in Iraq.
>>>>
Financial Times;
May 30, 2003
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath,
England
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