Scapegoating Blair?

As it riled up the public for war against Iraq, the Bush administration frequently cited supposed findings by British intelligence to illustrate the purported danger represented by Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. References to reports from British intelligence were included in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council shortly thereafter, and numerous other public speeches by the president and his subordinates.

Extensive on-site searches in Iraq have found no WMDs to date. But even if WMDs are eventually found, it is clear at this point that the administration exaggerated both the size and imminence of the Iraqi threat to justify going to war. Prior to the invasion, President Bush hyped Saddam's regime as an existential menace to our nation; in a recent television interview, however, President Bush tacitly suggested that Iraq may not actually have possessed WMDs when he asked "What's the difference?" between possessing WMDs and trying to acquire them. (See "WMDs vs. WMD Programs: Does It Matter?" in our January 12 issue.) Just as significantly, the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair is in serious political danger amid accumulating revelations that it knowingly misrepresented the Iraqi threat.

"The Secret intelligence Service has run an operation to gain public support for sanctions and the use of military force in Iraq," reported London's Sunday Times on December 28, 2003. "The government yesterday confirmed that MI6 had organized Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."

According to Scott Ritter, a U.S. Marine officer who led 14 UN inspection missions in Iraq, the aim of the MI6 operation "was to convince the public that Iraq was a far greater threat than it actually was ..." Ritter, who was recruited by MI6 in 1997 before emerging as a vocal critic of the U.S.-British drive for war, "said there was evidence that MI6 continued to use similar propaganda tactics up to the invasion of Iraq...."

During the Cold War, the Soviet KGB excelled at planting disinformation in the foreign press--often in government-controlled newspapers of Soviet satellite nations. Those planted stories would then be picked up and reprinted in Pravda or Izvestiya to convince the Soviet population that world opinion supported the official Communist Party line. The Anglo-American disinformation campaign about Iraq followed the Soviet model: Stories of "underground facilities" to build nuclear and other WMDs were planted in the Polish, Indian, and South African press, as well as in other countries.

In mid-December, Blair reiterated a key disinformation claim, telling a group of British troops that there was "massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories" in Iraq. This claim was rebutted by--of all people--Paul Bremer, the Bush administration's colonial administrator in Iraq. When a British television reporter asked Bremer about Blair's claim, without noting that the comment was made by Blair, Bremer replied: "I don't know where those words come from.... It sounds like a bit of a red herring to me. It sounds like someone who doesn't agree with the policy sets up a red herring then knocks it down." Told that Blair was the source of the claim, Bremer made a hasty effort to backtrack: "There is actually a lot of evidence that has been made public."