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Wealth of Nations 
Misleading Voters About WMD Is No Way to Spin a WarIn prosecuting this long war against terrorism, the electorate's trust is a vital strategic asset by Clive Crook .... The failure so far to find Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is nowhere near the scandal that many of the war's critics want to make it. Even so, it is a bigger embarrassment than most of the war's supporters are willing to accept—and a potentially significant setback, as well, in the ongoing war against Islamic fundamentalist terror. Weapons of mass destruction—or compelling evidence of active programs to develop them—are probably going to turn up in Iraq in due course. But as the search drags on without success, people who insisted that the war needed to be fought are squirming none too convincingly to avoid some awkward questions. Up to now their standard response to the absent weapons has been to scorn the anti-war critics as sore losers, and to stress what has come to light about just how disgusting the rule of Saddam Hussein was. This is weak. Yes, Saddam's regime was vile, even worse than we knew, and good riddance to it. But the fact remains that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were central to the case for resorting to arms. It is not good enough for the war's supporters—and that includes me—to say "So what?" if it turns out that by the time the war began, Iraq had no WMD after all. One thing needs to be understood at the start. It is an obvious point, though you might not think so from listening to critics of the American and British governments. Fact: Iraq did possess WMD in the 1990s. You can even ask Hans Blix. Saddam's regime itself admitted it to the United Nations, disclosing (among other things) that it had produced large quantities of anthrax and VX nerve gas. This and other material were unaccounted for by the time the U.N. weapons inspectors left the country in 1998, and they remain unaccounted for today. The idea that "there never were any WMD," as many anti-war critics now appear to believe, is just nonsense. The question, then, is what happened to this WMD material. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has suggested that the regime might have destroyed its stocks during the days and weeks leading up to the war. "Yeah, right," chorus the administration's critics. "How likely is that?" And, of course, they are right to be skeptical: This is a pretty far-fetched idea. If the regime was destroying its WMD in the months before the fighting started, why on earth did it not do so openly, with Blix standing by and taking notes? What surer way to deflect the United States from its war plans? A most unlikely theory, as the critics say. But this leaves them with a problem, doesn't it? If the idea that Saddam destroyed his WMD just before the war and without saying so is hard to believe, then just three possibilities remain. One is that there were no weapons in the first place, which we know to be false. The second is that they were destroyed earlier, before America began to threaten war and after the U.N. inspectors had packed their bags—at a time, in other words, when the external pressure on Iraq to get rid of its WMD was weak. (One also needs to suppose that the destruction was carried out in secret and without documentation, even though a declaration of this comprehensive disarmament would likely have led to the U.N. lifting the sanctions.) The third remaining possibility is that the WMD material, though missing, still exists. Even knowing what we know now, this last possibility still seems likelier than the others, despite the surprising failure to turn up weapons or material so far. On the eve of the conflict, before the failure to find weapons forced a reconsideration of all possibilities, the existence of Iraq's WMD seemed the only remotely plausible assumption. The theory that the American and British governments emphasized the WMD rationale for attacking Iraq, knowing or suspecting all along that it was false, therefore demands of anybody believing it an instant loss of memory and common sense. Logic and Iraqi history said that the WMD were there. The conclusion that America and its allies (and many other governments as well) drew about Iraq's WMD was at the time the only plausible conclusion, and even now remains the most probable one. In short, on the broad question of whether Iraq had WMD at the outbreak of war, there's no reason to suppose that the two governments said one thing while believing another. But that is not the end of the matter, because there is more to this than whether the American and British governments sincerely believed Iraq had WMD. If it proves nothing else, the failure to find weapons quickly, or maybe at all, underscores the limits of American and British intelligence. Given that Iraq had been recognized for years as a dangerous enemy, how could the allies know so little about exactly what was going on inside the country? Will we be as ignorant about the next enemy we confront? Even if the American and British governments acted in good faith throughout, the missing WMD bear witness to an alarming failure of intelligence. At the start of what promises to be a long war against terror, this failure needs to be recognized and urgently addressed—not ignored or denied. But what of the issue of good faith? The salient question is not whether the two governments genuinely believed that Iraq possessed WMD, but whether, so believing, they then embroidered or even invented "intelligence" in order to bring public opinion more firmly around to the same conclusion. In Britain, it is already clear that this did in fact happen. The current furor over Iraq policy has brought Prime Minister Tony Blair to his lowest standing yet in the opinion polls, with a clear majority of Britons saying they no longer trust him. The controversy is so fierce that it has brought Britain's pitifully unimpressive Conservative opposition even with the Labor government in the polls. What has shifted opinion so markedly is a succession of disclosures and security-service leaks about the presentation of intelligence on Iraq. Many Britons now believe that if they were not outright lied to about what was known concerning Iraq's WMD, they were systematically misled. For example, at a crucial moment in the public debate in Britain before the war, Blair told Parliament and the country that Iraq had missiles armed with WMD that could be launched at 45 minutes' notice. Apparently, the intelligence services warned the prime minister that this claim was uncorroborated and unreliable. Blair presented it nonetheless as solid established fact. In this and other ways, according to a disgruntled MI6 officer, Downing Street deliberately "sexed up" the agency's intelligence for public consumption. Separately, in a display not just of dishonesty but also of farcical incompetence, the government released a dossier on Iraq's internal-security apparatus—a file that the public was allowed to believe had been prepared by the security services, but which turned out to have been written by apparatchiks in a propaganda unit supervised by Alastair Campbell, Blair's head of spin. This "dodgy dossier," as it is now known, contained plagiarized and out-of-date material downloaded from the Internet, alongside bits and pieces of genuine intelligence. This week, it was reported that Campbell has written to the head of MI6 apologizing for the episode. The British public is owed an apology, too, but is still waiting. Without these efforts to distort and mislead—what else were they?—Blair might have been unable to deliver British support for American military action. Exactly what liberties, if any, the Bush administration took with the findings of its own intelligence services is still unclear. But then the president was far more confident of American support for his Iraq policy than Blair was of British support for his. Blair's misdirections may actually have swayed the country to support a war Britain would otherwise have refused to fight. Many in his own party level this very charge. It is why feelings of anger and betrayal are running so high. Deliberately misleading voters, even in a cause as good as the destruction of Saddam Hussein, is bad in itself. It may very well prove counterproductive as well—especially if America and its allies are right to suppose that the war against the West's enemies is only just beginning. In prosecuting this long war, the electorate's trust is a vital strategic asset. George W. Bush's stock of credibility with voters seems ample, for now. But what happens next time when Tony Blair, clutching bulging dossiers of intelligence, asks Britain to trust his assessment of national security and to go to war? Unless danger by then is staring them in the face, his audience is going to take an awful lot of convincing.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Clive Crook is a columnist for National Journal and the deputy editor of The Economist. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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