July 15, 2004

They believed what they said, but they said more than they really knew


GRANDMOTHERS through the ages have advised that honesty is the best policy. Politicians are not known for taking grandmothers' advice, but George Bush and Tony Blair must now wish that they had. In making the case for last year's invasion of Iraq, they were honest about what they believed, namely that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous man, was likely to possess the world's most dangerous weapons, and had been too deceitful in the past decade to be trusted in the new atmosphere following September 11th. But, as critical reports last week from the Senate Intelligence Committee and this week from Britain's Butler committee showed, the American and British governments were not honest about how solid their knowledge really was. When making the case for war, in effect they gambled that the facts found in Iraq would bear out their claims. They haven't. The result is not only damage to the personal credibility of America's president and Britain's prime minister. It is real damage to the ability of those countries, and probably others, to deal with future military and terrorist threats.

Both Mr Bush and Mr Blair do often say honest, sensible things about Iraq. This week, responding to the Senate committee's report, Mr Bush made an admirable speech explaining why he went to war. Despite the uncertainties about what his spies knew, a responsible American president could not, he said, take the risk, after September 11th, of leaving Mr Hussein with weapons of mass destruction to use himself or to offer to terrorists, who might now be seeking an even bigger attack on a newly vulnerable America. Nor was continuation of the containment regime, using sanctions and bombing raids from Saudi bases, a sustainable alternative. Mr Blair made a similar, strong case in his speech to Parliament on July 14th, in response to the Butler report. As he said, there is now criticism that the Bush administration did not seize upon the frail intelligence it had to stop the September 11th attacks, yet also criticism that stronger-but still frail-intelligence led to the decision to invade Iraq. How would he have been judged, he asked, if an Iraqi or Iraqi-assisted attack had taken place after he had shrunk back from the issue?


     

What a pity that before the war neither the British nor the American governments stuck to such careful justifications. Instead, they went much further, turning legitimate suspicions into hard facts. Mr Bush's vice-president, Dick Cheney, was especially reckless when declaring as incontrovertible truth that Mr Hussein had resumed his nuclear-weapons programme. His secretary of state, Colin Powell, made a speech to the UN Security Council in February 2003 that seemed thin at the time but has now been shown by the Senate Intelligence Committee to have included many claims made with an authoritativeness not justified even by what was known then. And Mr Blair's public "dossiers" on Iraq's WMD made statements that stripped all the caveats from intelligence assessments, turning dangerous possibilities into seemingly clear realities.

Given the long-some would say interminable-debate over Iraq in 2002-03, and given widespread public and international scepticism about whether war was the right solution, such salesmanship was understandable. As Mr Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, has said, the spies' briefings about Iraq were consistent for many years, and September 11th did change the way in which a president had to view them. To understand, however, is not to forgive. For hyped-up salesmanship brings clear consequences: customers become even more sceptical, once they find they have been gulled. The basic claim made by Mr Bush and Mr Blair is true: we do live in dangerous times, in which the threat of catastrophic attack by WMD-armed terrorists is real. But the next time politicians call for military action to deal with such threats, on the basis of intelligence warnings, even more people will refuse to believe them. Well-intentioned or not, such salesmanship has made us all less safe, and more vulnerable to terrorists.

Holding them to account 

Has it made their own jobs less safe? In Tony Blair's case the answer is: probably not, for now. The great risk to him in the Butler report was that the committee might find that he had included things in his WMD dossiers that he knew at the time to be untrue. It didn't. Had it done so, an already wobbly Labour Party might have decided that their great election-winner had become an electoral liability. Voters in two by-elections had the chance to offer an immediate verdict on the Butler report. 

Whatever fuss that verdict stirs up, however, Labour minds are likely to focus on two other points: that, despite all that has happened in Iraq, Mr Blair's party remains ahead in national opinion polls; and that to switch now to Gordon Brown, probably less than a year before a general election, would be to take an unnecessary risk. Britain's chancellor of the exchequer can boast of the country's stable economic growth and of all the extra money he has been pouring into public services without threatening that stability. Yet Mr Brown is an uncompelling election-campaigner and has a leadership style that is divisive and confrontational, to say the least. Moreover, there is time before the election for the situation in Iraq to improve sufficiently to make it a less important and emotive issue when Britons eventually vote.

There is much less time for such improvement before Mr Bush must meet his electoral makers. Another deadly car bomb in Baghdad this week offered a reminder, if one was needed, that it will be perilously hard for him to make confident claims that things are on the mend there, even if they are. 60% of Americans polled think they were given false information about Iraq's WMD and 52% disapprove of Mr Bush's handling of his presidency. By the time they vote on November 2nd, Mr Bush will have to convince millions of Americans that he is more trustworthy than his record makes him look, or else that to elect his opponent would be too risky to contemplate.

Mr Bush has said that he is running as a war president, which is not surprising given that he has fought two of them in the past four years. This newspaper supported both wars, the second of them pretty much on the basis that he outlined in his speech this week. We still think it would have been riskier to carry on containing Saddam, a policy by then both counter-productive and weakening, than to remove him from power. Yet though that invasion made possible a stabler, more prosperous Iraq, despite all the ensuing turbulence, Mr Bush still needs to bear the responsibility for having made things harder and more dangerous in several ways. One is the dishonesty already outlined, and its consequence for public trust. Another is his failure to deal with the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison by demanding accountability at a senior level, preferably by requiring the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, his defence secretary. A third is the negligent lack of preparation and initial resource-provision for rebuilding Iraq.

Not everything goes right during war, or military occupation, to put it mildly. Intelligence is always uncertain, and often looks comically or outrageously wrong in retrospect. Decisions have to be made in a fog, on a balance of risks, in an atmosphere of doubt. Yet when things go plainly wrong, errors need to be admitted to and senior people held to account. Having failed to hold others to account over Iraq, Mr Bush now has a lot to do to convince the electorate-that the buck should not in fact stop with him