A 50-page intelligence dossier released by the British government Tuesday warned that Iraq possesses large caches of biological and chemical weapons, that it had the will to use these weapons and that they could be deployed within 45 minutes of an order given by President Saddam Hussein or his son Qusai.
The dossier also said that Iraq was actively engaged in trying to acquire “significant quantities” of uranium in Africa for its nuclear weapons program, but that Baghdad had no nuclear weapon yet.
If left to its own devices, the report said, Iraq probably would have a nuclear weapon within five years. But if Iraq could purchase weapons-grade materials from outside sources, it had the expertise and design capacity to build a bomb within one or two years.
Prime Minister Tony Blair is relying on the dossier to justify his government’s robust support of the Bush administration’s calls for military action against Iraq and to blunt a growing chorus of criticism from within his own party about the wisdom of aligning Britain so closely with the United States.
In Baghdad, a senior Iraqi official rejected the findings in the dossier as “baseless” and accused Blair of lying. “His allegations are long, his evidence is short,” said Amir al-Saadi, who was one of the top officials responsible for Iraq’s past weapons programs.
“His evidence is a hodgepodge of half-truths, lies, short-sighted and naive allegations which will not hold after a brief investigation by competent and independent experts in the related fields,” he said.
Al-Saadi also declared that UN weapons inspectors would be allowed “unfettered access” to go where they pleased in Iraq–an offer that was dismissed by London and Washington as yet another delaying tactic.
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“Saddam sees the UN as a kind of bazaar, a place for haggling, where his price keeps changing,” said Michael Ancram, the shadow foreign secretary from Britain’s Conservative Party. The Conservatives have backed Blair on his pro-U.S. stance.
Hours after the release of the intelligence dossier, the British Parliament, on recess, convened an emergency session to debate the government’s policy.
Blair told lawmakers that Britain’s goal was the disarmament of the Iraqi regime, not “regime change,” the buzzwords of the Bush administration. He added, however, that he personally felt regime change would be “wonderful” and that the Iraqi people would warmly welcome it.
Consensus reached
“The one thing I find odd,” Blair said in response to a question about regime change, “is people who find the notion of regime change in Iraq somehow distasteful.”
After nearly 11 hours of debate, there was a consensus that Britain would support the United States but that the U.S. and Britain should not act without the United Nations’ blessing and that military force should be used only if Iraq continued to flout UN resolutions on weapons inspections.
President Bush on Tuesday praised Blair, who remains a key ally in the U.S. administration’s effort to build an international consensus for a pre-emptive strike on Iraq.
“Prime Minister Blair, first of all, is a very strong leader and I admire his willingness to tell the truth and to lead,” Bush said. “He has continued to make the case, like we make the case, that Saddam Hussein is a threat to peace, that for 11 years he has deceived the world, for 11 years he has ignored the United Nations and for 11 years he has stockpiled weapons.”
But many British lawmakers expressed serious doubts about the course the Bush administration had chosen, with the sharpest criticism coming from within Blair’s Labor Party.
Labor MP Alan Simpson, the most outspoken skeptic, said the intelligence dossier was more propaganda than substance and that the Bush administration’s policies “had little to do with the pursuit of human rights and everything to do with the pursuit of oil rights.”
Simpson argued that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the U.S., Britain or Europe and that, in U.S. eyes, Hussein’s “real crime was to renegotiate oil contracts with Russia and France.”
Although this view was not widely shared by others in the Parliament, Tuesday’s debate provided a window on how much of the world sees America’s fight with Hussein.
James Sheridan, another Labor Party lawmaker, questioned the timing of the crisis and suggested that Bush was beating the war drums to distract domestic attention from the U.S. economy’s “freefall” and the corporate scandals that he said threatened to engulf the U.S. administration.
One concern that came up repeatedly was Israel. Why, asked several lawmakers, was the U.S. insisting on strict enforcement of the UN resolutions that applied to Iraq but ignoring the ones that Israel defied? Others suggested that the United States’ neglect of the peace process had greatly weakened its credibility in the Middle East.
Reservations expressed
Menzies Campbell, foreign affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said he was worried that if Hussein were backed into a corner, he would attack Israel and that Israel would respond with nuclear weapons.
Many of the lawmakers expressed their admiration of the U.S. and their gratitude for the role it has played in the defense of democracy in Europe and elsewhere, but at the same time they said they had serious reservations about the Bush administration and its inclination toward unilateralism.
Chris Smith, a Labor MP, said Britain’s special relationship with the U.S. “does not mean Britain has to agree with every decision of this president and his secretary of defense.”
Malcolm Bruce, from the Liberal Democrats, said the “unequivocal and totally supportive nature” of Blair’s relationship with Bush was damaging Britain’s standing in Europe and the rest of the world.
“I do believe we cannot accept a situation that allows the United States to write its own version of international law,” he said.
The dossier released Tuesday drew on British intelligence sources and satellite pictures, but it contained little new evidence and it did not appear to change any minds.
Charles Heyman, editor of the military affairs journal Jane’s World Armies, told news agencies that the dossier made a powerful case for more muscular UN weapons inspections but did not make the case for war.
“There really is nothing new in it. Nothing that I haven’t seen or heard of before,” Heyman said. “We were all expecting the evidence for war and what we got was evidence for UN inspections.”
The dossier said Iraq, in addition to its stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, had developed mobile weapons laboratories to help conceal production from military attack–or from United Nations inspectors if they were allowed back into Iraq after a four-year absence.
Iraq “has learned lessons from previous UN weapons inspections and has already begun to conceal sensitive equipment and documentation in advance of the return of inspectors,” it said.
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Weapons funding detailed
The dossier outlined how Hussein was funding his efforts from the ever-growing revenue from illicit oil sales, which rose from about $1 billion in 1999 to $3 billion last year. It also said that in addition to retaining 20 “al-Hussein” missiles, with a range of 400 miles, Iraq had constructed a new engine test stand for the development of ballistic missiles that could reach targets more than 600 miles away, able to reach Greece, Turkey and Israel.
Iraq’s other delivery systems for its chemical and biological weapons include free-fall bombs, artillery shells and pilotless planes equipped with spraying equipment.
Noting that the Iraqi regime had deployed chemical weapons in its war with Iran and against its own Kurdish population, the dossier concluded that “Iraq’s current military planning specifically envisages the use of chemical and biological weapons.”