The Hindu : `Canada was not convinced of evidence on Iraq'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 15, 2004

International

International

`Canada was not convinced of evidence on Iraq'

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

CALGARY (CANADA), MARCH 14. Canada challenged the Bush administration on the `intelligence' pertaining to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but as Washington failed to deliver, Ottawa chose to stay out of the conflict, a report in The Globe and Mail says.

The U.S. refusal to share intelligence with a close ally, the report said, puzzled officials in Ottawa but a year later it was clear why.

"They did not have any evidence," the report quoted an unnamed official as saying. It was no secret that Washington was quite keen on having Canada on board in the war; and apparently on two occasions advisers of the U.S. President, George W Bush, had said that they would come to Ottawa to present "the case for war".

According to an official in the Prime Minister's Office, "We were not interested in the case. We were looking for evidence." Canada concluded that the American offer was nothing more than a "powerpoint slide show".

The so-called offers are said to have come when Mr. Bush was readying his State of the Union address on January 28 last year and when the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made his presentation to the United Nations Security Council on February 5 last year.

Both the presentations did not impress Ottawa. "We said to Washington `we want something we can really study and look at'. They never said they had anything more" that what was already made public, an unnamed diplomat who was in regular touch with the White House at the time had been quoted as saying.

What is being pointed out is that Ottawa and Washington have indeed a healthy record of sharing intelligence including satellite photos and wiretaps. And Canadian officials had concluded that if the Americans had really the `goodies' on Iraq they would have shared it. Further, Ottawa had come to develop a "healthy scepticism" of the quality of American intelligence after 1998 when the then American President, Bill Clinton, launched a cruise missile attack on an alleged Al-Qaeda nerve gas factory in Sudan which turned out to be a pharmaceutical plant.

A U.N.-based Canadian official was quoted as saying that the U.S. tried to make the U.N. weapons inspectors look like "bumbling Inspector Clouseau characters" when it was actually the other way around.

On Mr. Powell's presentation, the official said, "He went to the Security Council and unloaded a tractor trailer full of mythology...All of it turned out not to be true."

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