Posted 6:13 AM by Dil
Blair's US speech 'confirms MPs were misled'


TONY BLAIR’S claim that history would "forgive" him and US President George Bush for the Gulf War even if no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq was today dismissed by one of his leading critics.

Tam Dalyell said the Prime Minister’s historic speech to both houses of the US Congress confirmed that the House of Commons was misled over the reasons for war. And the left winger said Mr Blair’s address justified all the doubts of those MPs who voted against the conflict.

Mr Blair became the fourth Prime Minister - after Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Clement Atlee - to address the Senate and House of Representatives in joint session on Capitol Hill in Washington. For the first time he admitted that biological, chemical and nuclear weapons might not be found.

But he said the risk of Saddam Hussein and terrorists using such weapons of mass destruction was too great to ignore.

Mr Blair said: "Can we be sure that terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will join together?

"Let us say one thing. If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive.

"But if our critics are wrong, if we are right as I believe with every fibre of instinct and conviction that I have that we are, and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in the face of this menace, when we should have given leadership. That is something history will not forgive."

After Mr Blair’s speech - which got a series of standing ovations - US President Bush said he did believe that weapons of mass destruction would be found and that the intelligence that Saddam Hussein was developing a WMD programme was good.

But Mr Dalyell said today: "Mr Blair confirmed that we went to war for totally different reasons and on a totally different basis from that which he persuaded the majority of the House of Commons.

"He made clear that it was regime change not weapons of mass destruction that was the cause. The Prime Minister confirmed all the doubts of the 122 and then 130 MPs who voted against the war at the time."

Posted 4:51 PM by Dil
July 18, 2003

Handling America the Thatcher way
From Sir Nicholas Henderson



Sir, The close relationship between President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher did not, Simon Jenkins writes (Comment, July 16), prevent the President from confining himself in the Falklands war to covert assistance. True, Reagan, like many other prominent Americans, was worried about coming down on our side. The result was a classic instance of the divided nature of the US decision-making process. But on April 30, 1982, Secretary of State Alexander Haig announced that the US would support Britain and that the President had directed that the US would respond positively to requests for military matériel from Britain.
As Simon Jenkins has himself written (The Economist, March 3, 1984), thanks to the decisive intervention of Caspar Weinberger, an avalanche of weapons and ammunition of all kinds was provided to us in the South Atlantic at the utmost speed. In what must rank as one of the strangest episodes in the bilateral relationship, Weinberger took me aside at a party at the British Embassy to offer to make a US carrier available to us should the military situation require it.

In underlining this matériel support, I have to say that the dependence it signified in no way inhibited Mrs Thatcher from remonstrating with the President throughout the conflict; nor, indeed, a few weeks later when she visited Washington, did it soften the lambasting she gave him on the US ban imposed on pipeline equipment for the USSR. These examples are pertinent to Simon Jenkins’s plea that the US/UK relationship should be treated as a partnership of sovereign equals.

Yours sincerely,
NICHOLAS HENDERSON
(Ambassador to the United States, 1979-82),
6 Fairholt Street, SW7 1EG.
July 16.

Posted 5:14 AM by Dil
July 16, 2003

Blair has broken our marriage vow to the US
simon jenkins

Tony Blair travels to Washington tomorrow with relations between Britain and America never closer — and seldom worse. Congress has been asked not to give him its Medal of Honour now, for fear of embarrassing him at home. This must astonish Americans as much as it should sober Britons.
Britain and America are part of one political and social culture. They share values as they share history. It is a virtue, not a vice, that they stand shoulder to shoulder in time of trouble. I say this over and again these days, because it can sound so hollow. Yet turn on the radio and you hear American voices. Go to a film, see a play, read a book or hear music and it will be Anglo-American in character. Argue reform of education, business or the law and the parallels drawn are with America, not with continental Europe. Britain is truly a pan-Atlantic nation.

The question for Mr Blair is thus not whether Britain and America should be closer or farther apart. Their relationship is not elastic but a fact. The two countries are a marriage made in history, till death them do part.

What has gone wrong is that Mr Blair has, since taking office, broken a key assumption of the marriage. This holds that in form and substance it must be treated as a partnership of sovereign equals. Throughout recent history, leaders in each country have carefully modulated their relations. None could have been closer than Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan during the Falklands war. Yet America played a subtle game. It had supported the Argentine regime. It deplored the seizure of the islands but felt Britain was overreacting in going to war. Mr Reagan refused publicly to side with his friend in London, let alone fight alongside her, confining himself to covert assistance. Britain respected this. It had, after all, taken the same line during Vietnam.

On taking office, Mr Blair converted a marriage of platonic dignity into one of puppy love. His obsession with the Clinton White House was the talk of London and bane of the Foreign Office: he yearned for a proper palace in Whitehall and still yearns for a presidential jet. Not only did he support every American adventure, but did so without qualification. Mrs Thatcher had publicly attacked Mr Reagan for his Grenada invasion of 1983, questioning his motives and intelligence assessments. Mr Blair would have done no such thing. In Iraq he supported containment when America supported it, and abandoned it when America so chose.

Iraq has now proved a tryst too far. To Washington it was the final drawing of the poison of September 11, an act of retaliatory rage. Britain had no such excuse. However evil Saddam Hussein might be, this was in reality a war without motive. The lawyer (and the politician) in him craved reasons. He duly perverted the conduits of intelligence assessment by editing and publishing them. He and George Bush were soon like schoolboys cobbling together alibis in the playground before seeing the headmaster.

It seems bitterly ironic that the falling out should be over Niger uranium “intelligence”. The source, I understand, was France, with close links to Niger’s mining industry. Britain should have been deeply sceptical of anything French at this juncture before the war, hence perhaps the reluctance to reveal the source to Washington. The effect was to give President Bush dodgy material in his State of the Union address. But worse, a nation that was refusing to eat French fries was unknowingly spoonfed French intelligence.

Britain and America are right constantly to assert their shared values. But one value needs daily refreshment, open and honest public accountability. Many Europeans feel that September 11 traumatised not just an American generation but an entire portfolio of democratic liberties. The challenge of terrorism was never primarily military, despite the scaremongering and dissembling from both the White House and Downing Street. Even Israel, subject to suicide attacks almost daily, can survive them at a cost.

The challenge of terrorism is different. It is identical to that which communism posed to America during the McCarthyism of the 1950s. It is to evoke a reactive pollution of democratic institutions, to force a nation down the authoritarian road. In the latest London Review of Books, the historian Anatol Lieven predicts just this, that America’s stance of “militant democracy” will generate a vicious circle of Islamic militancy and ever-more draconian laws to combat it. This will eventually “destroy democracy in America and any state associated with it”.

I share Lieven’s concern if not his conclusion. I disagree with the military stance of the “neo-cons”, who brilliantly converted the failures and fears of September 11 into a doctrine of pre-emptive retaliation at will. Shock-and-awe and insensitivity to overseas opinion are hardly new. They mirror the “ugly Americanism” of the postwar era. But this is the policy of a Pentagon faction within a faction, and will surely pass.

Far more disturbing is the policy’s contempt for the rule of law, at home and overseas. America’s refusal to abide by international agreements on disarmament, trade, environment and war crimes is deeply disturbing to its friends. The use of assassination, the arrest of Arabs without trial, the persecution of academic and media dissent are equally so. Only a government supremely unconcerned with democracy’s global reputation could sustain the obscenity of Guantanamo Bay and its execution chamber. Yet Britain has a prime minister who cannot bring himself to raise a finger in public protest, even when British citizens are the victims. Imagine if Mrs Thatcher were still in office.

Foreign policy may have become stupid but it remains secure within the penumbra of debate. That debate has lost none of its ferocity. There is no question of the sophistication of such apologists for the Pentagon as the strategist Philip Bobbitt. He argues in The Shield of Achilles that pre-emptive intervention is justified by a new, unique threat to the West: nuclear dissemination and terrorism. He is as pessimistic about the vulnerability of the West’s borders as Lieven is of its values.

Which brings me back to the communality of Britain and America. I remain a determined optimist. I do not believe that terrorism “threatens Western democracy”, unless that democracy so loses its self-control as to become its enemy’s best friend. It is still far from doing that. I disagree with Bobbitt that America is so weak that terrorism poses a plausible military threat. I disagree with Lieven that it is so feeble as to risk self-destruction from within.

My optimism goes further. America is still home to as plural a range of peoples and opinions as any state on Earth. America has no need of Britain to “play Athens to its Rome”; it has Athenians and Romans enough. You need not come to Europe to find sceptics of Mr Bush’s policy. Indeed I sense that US democracy is about to teach its British forebear a lesson in accountability.

Rather than give Mr Blair a rostrum, Congress should sit him down before a benefit performance of a congressional hearing on Iraq. It should show him how real democratic assemblies behave, not the patsies and placemen to which he is used at home. Congress is about to tear the presidency apart for misleading it over Iraq. Pollsters may claim that most Americans do not care why they went to war. Their representatives may care very much.

Foreign policy is in thrall to dumbness, but for considered and sustained questioning of the Iraq affair we will soon be turning to the US Congress, the US media and, at some remove, US public opinion. It will not be a democratic Iraq that gets Americans and British soldiers out of Baghdad. It will be a democratic America, stung by false promises, dead soldiers and $4 billion a month vanishing down a Baghdad drain. A new cavalry is riding over the hill, before whom even the mighty Pentagon must quail, the American electorate.

Mr Blair allowed his love affair with White House glitz to cloud his judgment and to invent a threat to his own people. He believed that he could not just walk on water but perform a far harder task, accurately assess intelligence. It caused him to humiliate his American friends before the UN and induce Mr Bush to mislead his Congress. Now he must urgently re-establish the old Anglo-American equilibrium. Then he can stop his manic globetrotting and return to his own back yard. It is fast filling with weeds.




Join the Debate on any of these articles at comment@thetimes.co.uk

Posted 12:51 AM by Dil
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3063361.stm
Case crumbling - 9 areas going wrong

Posted 11:19 AM by Dil
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3512516&thesection=news&thesubsection=world

Very Good 20 facts about Iraq that were wrong

Posted 10:51 AM by Dil
The west cannot afford to fail in Iraq
By Douglas Hurd
Published: July 13 2003 17:44 | Last Updated: July 13 2003 17:44


We are consumed all over again with doubts about the grounds for war against Iraq. The argument about the missing weapons of mass destruction is crucial to the credibility of British ministers; but it is separate from the question of Iraq's future. We know for certain that there was no realistic plan for the peace. The brilliant military campaign had no civilian counterpart. The Pentagon, misled by exiles, persuaded itself that once Saddam Hussein was overthrown, it would inherit a functioning administrative machine. Instead the machine disintegrated.


If pressed, US officials say they did not have time to think of everything. There were talks with the British but no decisions. Looting, sabotage and resistance against foreign occupation were predictable and predicted - but not provided against. The British government acquiesced in this neglect. It may have been its biggest mistake. The next few weeks are crucial for undoing the damage.

Capable officials now wrestle day by day in Baghdad with the consequences. Some services are restored, others disrupted. It is hard from outside to judge whether we make three steps forward for every two backwards, or the other way round. The Pentagon, still firmly in charge, talks as if time is on our side. But it is not clear that it is.

Are the daily attacks on the occupying armies the tail end of Mr Hussein's evil regime, which will peter out, particularly if he is found dead or taken alive? Or are they the start of an intifada in parts of Iraq against foreign occupation?

For example, is the town of Fallujah particularly hostile because it was a Ba'athist stronghold, or because during two days in May, US troops shot down at least 16 Iraqis in its streets? The two explanations are not contradictory; both are probable.

As the British learnt in Kenya and Cyprus, and the French in Algeria, resistance can start in a small way. Most people at that stage just want a quiet life; but security sweeps, large-scale arrests and pre-emptive shootings can steadily undermine the order that they are designed to ensure. The German and Japanese parallels from 1945 are an illusion. However many troops we pile into Iraq we cannot now realistically look forward to two or three years of peaceful military occupation while we reconstruct the country.

Yet we cannot afford to fail. The Americans pulled out of Somalia; after many years the British abandoned the mandate in Palestine. That outcome is inconceivable in Iraq, given its importance and the commitment of both governments. We are condemned to succeed. It follows that even those who opposed the war must support the effort to win the peace - in particular the two strands of policy that offer the best hope of progress.

The first is to swallow pride and spread the load internationally. We cannot afford to let arguments about the past wreck co-operation for the future. It is good that other governments are being persuaded to send troops, albeit in small numbers. In Congress, which a few weeks ago was enjoying talk of punishing the French, there are now suggestions that French troops be invited into Iraq so that more Americans can come home. So quickly does the wheel turn. Any countries that contribute substantial numbers of troops for the first time are likely to ask for a clearer mandate and a greater say in policy than did the British at the outset.

There may also be a role for Nato. There is certainly a role for the United Nations and its agencies. The secretary-general has sent to Iraq Sergio de Mello, one of his shrewdest advisers, with instructions not to argue about the war but to work with the occupying powers in whatever way would be useful. The humanitarian skills of the UN agencies complement what occupying soldiers and administrators can do. The UN can help to shape the Iraqi administration that eventually emerges. They will certainly be needed to legitimise it.

That is the second, crucial, strand of policy. The exiles were right to advise the Americans that most Iraqis wanted to be rid of Mr Hussein. The evidence of his crimes grows daily. They were wrong to imply that the traditional differences in Iraq would therefore be easy to reconcile. We know better now.

There are bound to be experiments and errors in choosing the right Iraqis to rebuild the country and in gradually transferring that choice to the Iraqis themselves, locally and nationally. A start has been made. A US-backed governing council held its inaugural meeting on Sunday. We should not complain if these choices from time to time go wrong. The fatal error would be to go slow on the task because it is difficult. One obstacle is likely to be a shortage of funds while the occupying armies cope with the sabotage that still holds up the flow of oil.

It would be hard to imagine a successful international donor conference in October with an American sitting at the table in the place marked for Iraq. We need not be perfectionists. We do not have to insist on model democrats devoted to the doctrines of The Wall Street Journal. The sooner Iraqis of substance are found to run the civilian ministries and agencies, the clearer the path forward will be.

Lord Hurd was foreign secretary 1989-95 and is senior adviser to Hawkpoint