Why We Went To War

This blog, with the help of a research assistant, is working on a project about the reasons for the Iraq war. I hope to post something soon. But in the meantime, a British reader sent me this email this morning about the British side of the equation, which seems pertinent. The link is fascinating - and shows how high the level of debate is in the British House of Lords. The reader writes:

At the time Lord Butler completed his report into Iraqi WMD, it was largely reported as a critique of Blair's style of government, but more less vindication of the Blair pronouncements on WMD and his so-called dodgy dossier.

I actually felt Butler's report was pretty strident criticism of the government, especially coming from an experienced mandarin. And now we know that it was. From a recent House of Lords debate - which went wholly unreported in the UK media until it got a passing mention on the BBC last night - Lord Butler had this to say:

I have always believed that our Prime Minister had good reason for wishing to support the Americans in removing Saddam Hussein. But he had a problem. He had the clearest legal advice that military intervention solely for the purpose of regime change could not be justified in international law. The only justification for military intervention was to enforce the Security Council resolutions at the end of the first Gulf War prohibiting Iraq’s possession or acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.

I have also always accepted and continue to accept that the Prime Minister sincerely believed that Saddam possessed such weapons and was bent on acquiring more. Our intelligence community believed that, as did other countries’ intelligence communities, as well as Hans Blix when he first took UN observers back into Iraq. But here was the rub: neither the United Kingdom nor the United States had the intelligence that proved conclusively that Iraq had those weapons. The Prime Minister was disingenuous about that. The United Kingdom intelligence community told him on 23 August 2002 that,

"we ... know little about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons work since late 1988".

The Prime Minister did not tell us that. Indeed, he told Parliament only just over a month later that the picture painted by our intelligence services was “extensive, detailed and authoritative”. Those words could simply not have been justified by the material that the intelligence community provided to him.

There's some further commentary on the lack of post-war planning, but I thought you'd like to see this about Iraqi WMD in particular. That in August 2002 - shortly after the Downing Street Memo and shortly before the pre-invasion PR exercise went into overdrive - MI6 was telling Blair they had next-to nothing. And apparently the CIA was saying the same.

I've kept an open mind about the motives for this war. My own support was based on more than WMDs, but WMDs were a central part of my own argument for the war. The world now divides between those who believe the whole thing was a complete con, and those who think it's preposterous to accuse Bush and Blair of lying to the British and American publics. The more we find out, the more plausible it is that the truth lies in between: that they knowingly misled themselves and thereby us - with good intentions. But they misled us all the same. The bottom line is that we just didn't know anything about Iraq's WMDs for certain - and that was not the impression that Bush and Blair gave. If the president and prime minister had been honest about what they actually knew for sure and still argued for the invasion, they would have more public trust today.