45 minutes
from doom
“The weakness, obviously, is our inability to say he
[Saddam Hussein] could pull the nuclear trigger any time soon.” (Tom Kelly to Alistair Campbell, 18 Sept
2002)
At the time of writing,
the Hutton inquiry is into its third week. Countless, mostly irrelevant, documents have been submitted to the
inquiry, and are available on the inquiry website. Witnesses have been examined in great detail about the merest
trivia. And there is much more to come.
Who said/wrote what to whom in Downing
Street during the drawing up the September dossier has
been examined at great length and in minute detail. All this forensic effort has been expended on the minutiae of how
the document was drawn up, and none at all on how the document turned out to be
comprehensively wrong.
Not marginally wrong about the
inclusion of the 45-minute warning, which is the subject of the wrangle between
the BBC and Downing Street, but comprehensively wrong about the existence, not
just of proscribed weapons and weapons-related material left over from before
the first Gulf War, but in its assertions that Iraq had reconstituted its
chemical and biological weapons programmes since 1998 and was now manufacturing
more chemical and biological agents, and, furthermore, was actively engaged in
reconstituting its nuclear programme.
The contents of this document
played a major part in the Government’s justification for invading Iraq and
killing thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Iraqis. Unlike Dr David Kelly, they didn’t die by
their own hand, and neither did the British military personnel who were killed
during the invasion, and are still being killed.
In the midst of this detail about
what was in the various drafts of the September dossier, and who suggested what
amendments when, and which amendments were included and which weren’t and why,
it is worth recalling the dossier’s title.
It is: Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the
British Government.
It is not Alistair Campbell’s
assessment, nor the Joint Intelligence Committee’s assessment, nor even Tony
Blair’s assessment, though, since he is the head of the Government and put his
name to the dossier’s foreword, the responsibility for it falls more heavily on
him than anybody else.
So, it doesn’t matter who was
responsible for what phrase here, and what nuance there. It was the Government’s assessment, and the
Government is responsible. Otherwise,
the Prime Minister’s speechwriters, rather than the Prime Minister himself,
will have to be held responsible for the words that come out of his mouth from
now on.
The Government has forced the
Chairman of JIC, John Scarlett, out of the closet to claim responsibility for
the dossier, and to assert that it was all based on properly assessed
intelligence information. That is an
attempt to shift responsibility for it away from Downing Street and on to the
intelligence services, but it doesn’t alter the fact that it was The
Assessment of the British Government on 24 September 2002.
There may be a few people in
Britain, who still believe that the dossier was an honest attempt on the
Government’s part to put before the British people an objective assessment of
Iraq’s proscribed weapons. If so, they
should read the e-mails that were flying around the Downing Street machine in
the weeks leading up to the dossier’s publication, and which have now been
submitted to the Hutton inquiry, and are available on its website.
For example, a memo from Campbell
to Scarlett on 17 September 2002 reported on the Prime Minister’s opinion of
the latest draft. It said:
“He [the Prime Minister] said he thought you’d done a very good job and
it was convincing (though I pointed out that he is not exactly a ‘don’t know’
on the issue) …
“He, like
me, was worried about the way you have expressed the nuclear issue particularly
in paragraph 18. Can we not go back, on
timings to ‘radiological device’ in months; nuclear bomb in 1-2 years with
help; 5 years with no sanctions.
“He
wondered if there were any more pictures that we could use” (CAB/11/0066-0068)
Could it possibly be that the
Prime Minister wanted a document that would “convince” the world that Saddam
Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, and would soon have nuclear
weapons, so he had to be dealt with, a conclusion that the Prime Minister
himself had already reached? And could
it possibly be that his good and faithful servants provided him with such a
document?
Another example of Downing
Street’s desire to make the case as “convincing” as possible is the
following. On 18 September 2002, one of
the Prime Minister’s official spokesmen, Tom Kelly, e-mailed Campbell, expressing regret that there was
insufficient intelligence to justify including in the dossier that Saddam
Hussein posed an imminent nuclear threat.
He wrote:
“The weakness, obviously, is our inability to say he
could pull the nuclear trigger any time soon.” (CAB/11/0092)
That would have made the dossier really “convincing”
(but, had that been the case, Saddam Hussein would have been left strictly
alone).
Kelly also worried that the
dossier did not make the case that Saddam Hussein would use his deadly
weapons. He wrote to Campbell on 11
September 2002 (CAB/11/0027):
“This does
have some new elements to play with, but there is one central weakness – we do
not differentiate enough between capacity and intent. We know
that he [Saddam] is a bad man and has done bad things in the past. We know he
is trying to get WMD – and this shows those attempts are intensifying. But can
we show why we think he intends to use them aggressively, rather than in
self-defence? We need that to counter
the argument that Saddam is bad, but not mad.”
And there is much, much more, all
concerned about finding ways to make a case that Iraq must be dealt with, not
about arriving at an objective assessment of Iraq’s weapons.
There was also a realisation at
the highest level in the Downing Street machine that, although the dossier
might be said to prove that Saddam Hussein had proscribed weapons, and even
that he was continuing to develop them, it did not prove that Iraq was an
imminent threat to Britain.
Jonathan Powell, Blair’s Chief of
Staff (and brother of Thatcher’s foreign affairs advisor, Charles Powell),
e-mailed John Scarlett on 17 September 2002 (CAB/11/0077-0078):
“ … the
document does nothing
to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein. In other words, it shows he has the means
but it does not demonstrate he has the motive to attack his neighbours, let
alone the west. We will need to be clear in launching the document that we do
not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat. The case we are
making is that he has continued to develop WMD since 1998, and is in breach of
UN resolutions. The international community has to enforce those resolutions if
the UN is to be taken seriously.”
Asked
at the Hutton inquiry how he responded to Powell’s e-mail, Scarlett said he
didn’t regard it as a request for the dossier to be changed and in any event,
he didn’t think that Powell’s point that Saddam Hussein was not a threat,
“would have fitted easily into the way that the dossier was
construct[ed]”. Indeed it wouldn’t: it
would have made it much less “convincing”.
In an e-mail to Campbell on 17 September 2002, Powell
wrote:
"In
the penultimate para [of the foreword] you need to make it clear that Saddam
could not attack us at the moment.
The thesis is he would be a threat to the UK in the future if we do not
check him." (CAB/11/0053)
A week later the dossier was
published a foreword by Blair saying:
“I believe this issue to be a current and serious
threat to the UK national interest.”
(After the event, Jack Straw
has said on several occasions that neither he nor Blair described Iraq as an
“imminent” threat, while admitting that they used the words “current and
serious” threat. He made a big point of
this in giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on 24 June
2003. He seems to have a cockeyed
notion that a “current” threat doesn’t require as urgent attention as an
“imminent” one. But doesn’t a “current”
threat, which already exists, require a more urgent response than an
“imminent” one, which is merely expected to exist?)
The
September dossier claimed that Iraq had:
“military
plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, including against its own
Shia population. Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an
order to use them” (Executive Summary, p5)
This claim was allegedly based
on intelligence received a few weeks before the dossier’s publication, and
included in it at the last moment. In
evidence to the Hutton inquiry, Scarlett denied that the Downing Street machine
were responsible for including this claim in the dossier, or for embellishing
this or any other claim included in the dossier. So, on this charge reported by the BBC and others, based mostly
on conversations with Dr Kelly, the government is off the hook.
Since Andrew Gilligan’s Today
broadcast on 29 May, the 45-minute claim, and the allegation that Downing
Street forced its inclusion in the dossier, has dominated discussion about the
Government’s case for military action.
Yet, objectively, it is a matter of little or no significance.
If the dossier was to have been
believed, Iraq had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons,
and a variety of means of delivering them: the dossier claims:
“Iraq
remains able … to use bombs, shells, artillery rockets and ballistic missiles
to deliver them.” (Executive Summary, p5)
If all that were true, it would be
amazing if Iraq had no plans for their use by the variety of means supposedly
available to them. As Dr Gary Samore
of the International institute for Strategic Studies told
the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on 17 June 2003:
“ … the idea that
Iraq would have in place military plans to use their weapons seems to me to be
the kind of obvious thing that you would expect and certainly was the case in
1991 when they actually deployed chemical and biological weapons in the field.”
So, the dossier’s “revelation” that, allegedly, Iraq had
plans to use these weapons is hardly earth shattering. Nor is the apparently short time period
between an order being given to use them and their being ready for use. If the period was 45 hours rather than 45
minutes, and if Saddam Hussein had been mad enough to use them, then all he had
to do was give the order 44 hours 15 minutes earlier – or keep them ready for
use on a permanent basis.
Nevertheless, this rather unimportant claim has dominated
debate for the past three months.
Andrew Gilligan has done the Government a big favour by raising it, and
even bigger favour by accusing Downing Street of forcing its inclusion in the
dossier. It has been a wonderful
distraction from focussing on Blair’s bogus case for war. And now it looks as if Hutton will find that
Gilligan’s source, Dr Kelly, got the story wrong – which means that on this
Blair will come up smelling of roses.
In military terms, the 45-minute claim wasn’t of any great
significance. But it was very valuable
to Downing Street when the dossier was launched. First and foremost, because it was new. Blair’s original plan to produce a dossier in
the spring of last year was abandoned in part because there was nothing new to
put in it to grab the headlines.
Journalists with contacts in the intelligence services have
said that, throughout the summer, there was pressure from Downing Street to
come up with something new to put in a dossier. This duly appeared in the form of the 45-minute claim. So perhaps there is an underlying truth in
what Kelly told Gilligan and other journalists – because the 45-minute claim
was a product of Downing Street’s known desire to have something new to make
headlines with.
Also, the 45-minute claim was ideal for generating headlines
proclaiming Iraq to be an imminent threat, and the Downing Street machine made
sure it appeared in them. Looking at
the Evening Standard on the day the dossier was published, and the morning
papers the next day (see documents BBC/4/90-116 on the inquiry website), it is
easy work out what Downing Street fed them about the dossier:
1.
The 45-minute claim
2.
That Iraq had managed to retain SCUD missiles with a range
of 650km and therefore capable of hitting Cyprus
3.
That Iraq could have a nuclear weapon in a year or two.
To find any reference to the last point in the dossier, you
have to reach page 27 (a sure sign that the media were told about it by Downing
Street), where it says:
“We therefore judge that if
Iraq obtained fissile material and other essential components from foreign
sources the timeline for production of a nuclear weapon would be shortened and
Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon in between one and two years.”
The
rather important qualification that Iraq would have to obtain fissile material,
and other essential components, in order to produce a nuclear weapon, did not
appear in the reports – presumably because it wasn’t part of the Downing Street
briefing.
Convincing headlines
The
Evening Standard of 24 September had the front page headline 45 MINUTES FROM
ATTACK and on pages 4 and 5 Iraqis could have N-bomb in a year. The next day, the Sun screamed BRITS 45
mins FROM DOOM and the Daily Star’s headline was 45 MINUTES FROM A
CHEMICAL WAR. All of them carried
points (1) to (3) in the opening paragraphs of their stories. The Sun’s began:
“British servicemen and tourists in Cyprus could be
annihilated by germ warfare missiles launched by Iraq, it was revealed
yesterday.
“They could thud into the Mediterranean island within
45 MINUTES of tyrant Saddam Hussein ordering an attack. And they could spread death and destruction
through warheads carrying anthrax, mustard gas, sarin or ricin.
“This terrifying prospect was raised in Downing
Street’s dossier on Saddam’s arsenal, which also raised the prospect that he
could be just 12 months away from nuclear weapons.”
The broadsheets carried the same points, albeit in more
moderate tones.
The 45-minute claim
produced a plethora of “convincing” headlines and stories. Never mind that they were gross
exaggerations prompted by Downing Street, in which judgements based on
(apparently faulty) intelligence were expressed as hard facts. Never mind that the intelligence (so-called)
on which 45-minute claim was based referred to the deployment of battlefield
weapons, not to missiles. The dossier
was (deliberately?) vague on this, but in evidence to the Hutton inquiry on 26
August 2003, John Scarlett said:
“It related to
munitions, which we had interpreted to mean battlefield mortar shells or small
calibre weaponry, quite different from missiles.”
Downing Street didn’t rush to correct the Sun’s assertion on
25 September 2002 that Brits in Cyprus could be annihilated by Saddam within 45
minutes of him deciding to do so, nor did John Scarlett resign because Downing
Street manipulated his intelligence judgements to get “convincing” stories in
the papers.
* * * *
The 45-minute claim was an exceedingly “convincing” weapon
for Downing Street in September 2002.
It served its purpose then, and was barely mentioned in the succeeding 6
months before military action began.
Thanks to Andrew Gilligan, it has enjoyed a second coming
and done another useful job for Downing Street, this time as a distraction from
their bogus case for war.
September 2003