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INCOMPLETE INVESTIGATIONS

A POLITICAL COMPROMISE in one case and bureaucratic reticence in the other saved United States President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair from being held responsible for invading Iraq on false pretences. After separate investigations of the processes antecedent to the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Senate's select committee on intelligence and the United Kingdom's enquiry commission headed by Robin Butler drew strikingly similar conclusions. The investigators found that the myth about Iraq's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was created and sustained by "group thinking" within intelligence services that relied almost exclusively on unverified information from suspect sources. A National Intelligence Estimate presented to the Bush administration on October 2, 2002 and a dossier prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee of the U.K. under guidance from Mr. Blair's office on September 21 in the same year either overstated the case about WMD or were not supported by the underlying information. These were the documents the two governments relied on to argue that Iraq was in breach of the obligation to dismantle its non-conventional weapons. However, for their own reasons, the Senate Committee and the Butler commission declined to look into the role played by the political leaders in creating the fiction that the Ba'athist regime posed an imminent threat to world peace. In this the investigators appear to be out of sync with public sentiment in their countries. The results of parliamentary by-elections in the U.K. and opinion polls in the U.S. reveal that vast sections of the public in both countries believe their political leaders led them to war on fictitious grounds.

A Republican majority in the Senate Committee forced the Democrats to strike a compromise and postpone an enquiry into the more important question: did Mr. Bush and senior officials arm-twist the intelligence community to prepare a threat assessment that suited their purpose? The Democratic members of the Committee subsequently asserted there was ample evidence to show that the President and his aides brought sustained pressure to bear on the intelligence services. Similarly, in the U.K., Lord Butler and his associates refrained from declaring that Mr. Blair leaned on the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) to produce a dossier that would back up a pre-set decision to attack Iraq. However, the Butler report brought out the stark contrast between the September 21 dossier and an intelligence assessment made a fortnight earlier, which was markedly different in its tone and thrust. The caveats and qualifications with which the JIC circumscribed its assessment of Iraq's WMD potential in this earlier document were totally absent from the later dossier. While focussing on the lapses of intelligence agencies, the Senate and Butler reports indicate that the political bosses were only too ready to overlook even obvious deficiencies in the information provided to them.

Not surprisingly, the American and British investigations found that the core rationale for the invasion was without basis since no WMD stockpiles were unearthed despite extensive searches carried out during the months of occupation. Further, while the Senate committee nailed the lie about a connection between the Ba'athist regime and Al Qaeda, the Butler committee exposed the falsity of Mr. Blair's claim that Iraq could launch non-conventional weapons at very short notice. Messrs. Bush and Blair try hard to remain unfazed even though every single justification they advanced for military action has come unstuck. The two leaders might soon have more trouble on their hands since the intelligence services will certainly not relish being made scapegoats for outrageous acts of political deception and manipulation.

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