Deadly fallout from Blair's blunder

THE Prime Minister has run out of luck on Iraq. He desperately wants his party conference and the electorate to forget the quarrel about his decision to take Britain to war last year.

Yet the more he tries to shift our focus, the more events conspire to keep the spotlight on Iraq.

From bombs to hostage taking, from Greg Dyke's book to leaked documents, the eye of the public is constantly drawn back to the reason he gave for the fateful decision.

But the real damage caused by his mishandling of the decision to go to war is potentially much greater than either Mr Blair's political travails or even the chaos in Iraq. It is the long-term breakdown of arms control.

This is about to be brought home by the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which is due to report imminently. It must have been hoped that the recent leak of its findings in Washington would limit the damage of another potentially debilitating wound.

However, after the knowing way in which Mr Blair so often counselled us to wait and see what it said, he can hardly expect his reputation to escape unscathed when it is confirmed that there was no stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

In turn, we are reminded that the justification for the invasion was recklessly built on an interpretation of intelligence that was heavily biased to serve pre-existing political imperatives.

The political imperative of the neo-conservatives in Washington was multi-stranded. It was unfinished Bush business.

It would also demonstrate America's will to tackle the broader threats of WMD proliferation and terrorism which, together, had the potential to undermine the neo-cons' belief in America's right to global freedom of action.

Regime change in Iraq would also be a precursor to the reordering of the political infrastructure of the Middle East, guaranteeing oil supplies to the US and the global economy it dominates.

The neo-cons' dream is foundering fast on the rock of their naive grasp of the culture and politics of the Middle East. What is more, the current myopic focus on the likely influence of Iraq on imminent elections is obscuring some worrying truths about WMD intelligence, proliferation and arms control that promise to haunt us well beyond the political lives of Mr Bush and Mr Blair, even if they are both re- elected.

IF the Prime Minister's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's WMD is set aside, we now know from Hutton and Butler that the previously classified intelligence assessments of the Joint Intelligence Committee provided an impression that is not so very different from the picture that comes from the ISG report. As the Director of Central Intelligence in Washington said, assessments are rarely completely right or completely wrong. What needs to be understood now is exactly how wrong the assessments were.

The intelligence evidence for the existence of even small stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq was circumstantial. That is why, on behalf of the experts I worked with, I decided to put it on record before the dossier was published. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said: "We do not know what we do not know."

Our problem was that we were not allowed to properly explain what we knew we did not know. The use in the dossier of the qualifiers " possibly" or "probably" would have been better than nothing, but even they were denied us.

Even so, I am surprised at the limited extent of the programmes found by the ISG. It remains difficult to understandwhy, given the absence of any telltale signs, Saddam did not co-operate more positively with the weapons inspectors to demonstrate his compliance with UN resolutions.

He may have been oblivious to the suffering of his own people, but if he had cooperated and sanctions had been lifted, the increased revenues would have allowed him to improve his conventional military capabilities in the short term. There would also have been increasing scope for him to pursue covertly his WMD ambitions.

So the need for a better general understanding of the nature of the enemy, as well as the science and technology of WMD, are important lessons of the Iraq experience. But the biggest question is whether international WMD arms control and counter-proliferation can now be made to work at all.

After the first Gulf War, Iraq was required to make a detailed disclosure of its WMD programmes and related activities. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) were given unprecedented rights of access to people and places.

This exceeded by a long way the most stringent arrangements for compliance monitoring associated with the existing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons arms control treaties. But even with that access, neither the inspection regime or national intelligence agencies could yield a useful picture of the status of Saddam's WMD programmes and capabilities.

WHAT the Iraq e x p e r ienc e has thus done is to expose the fallibility of both intelligence and the process of inspection for WMD. It is the difficulty of proving a negative. And despite all the brave words, the limits of the military capacity of the world's only remaining superpower, let alone our ability to contribute, are being cruelly exposed as well.

A potentially useful myth is being exploded. Iran, North Korea and perhaps even Syria appear emboldened by what they see - and their WMD ambitions are undiminished.

Later this week the Labour conference will consider how long British troops should stay in Iraq. This is an issue about which there can be a sensible debate. The answer must be for as long as we can make a meaningful contribution.

But I fear there is little point in discussing the issue which is more important in the long term - the future of WMD arms control. For the very military action that the Prime Minister said was essential to support it is now heralding its demise.

* Brian Jones is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Mountbatten Centre for International Studies, University of Southampton.

Brain Jones, Former WMD specialist on the Defence Intelligence Staff

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