Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

BBC is at it again with another bogus attack on Blair and Bush

Sunday Times of London:

THE HEAD of MI6 told Tony Blair that the case for war against Iraq was being “fixed” by the Americans to suit the policy, according to a BBC documentary that will reignite its battle with the government.

Blair followed the US lead by failing to reveal publicly doubts about the quality of intelligence that he had requested to support the case for war, the programme claims.

Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, briefed Blair and a select group of ministers on America’s determination to press ahead with the war nine months before hostilities began.

After attending a briefing in Washington, he told the meeting that war was “inevitable”. Dearlove said “the facts and intelligence” were being “fixed round the policy” by George W Bush’s administration.

The allegations against Blair just weeks before a general election are likely to reopen the feud between the government and the BBC that came to a head over the death of Dr David Kelly, the former weapons inspector. It led to the resignations of Gavyn Davies, its chairman, and Greg Dyke, its director-general.

The documentary — to be shown on BBC1’s Panorama tonight — reveals that Britain and America were anxious to present a united front on Iraq despite a paucity of new data on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

It quotes from a leaked memo on the presentation of intelligence sent by Peter Ricketts, political director of the Foreign Office, to Jack Straw, foreign secretary, in March 2002.

The memo says: “There is more work to ensure that the figures are accurate and consistent with the US. But even the best survey of Iraq’s WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years.”

The programme argues that Blair had signed up to follow Bush’s plans for regime change in Iraq as early as April 2002. It quotes Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who resigned as leader of the Commons over Iraq, arguing that the threat of WMD was not Blair’s true reason for going to war.

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Panorama interviewed Adolfo Zinser, former Mexican ambassador to the UN, who recalls a briefing with MI6 as Britain was trying to shore up support in the security council for the second resolution on Iraq.

Zinser says: “I asked them, ‘Do you have full proof of the existence of these weapons, at any one of these particular sites that you are referring to?’ The MI6 officers told me, ‘No, we don’t’.”

The problem with this report is that it does not understand the US case for war with IRaq. Neither the US or the UK had to prove that Saddam had WMD. Saddam was required under the terms of the cease fire in 1991 as well as 17 UN resolutions to account for his WMD so that it could be destroyed. He was never able to account for all of it, some of which he had previously declared. His attempt to account at the end was inadequate and misleading. What Bush was saying repeatedly during this time period was that he would not rely on the words of a madman like Saddam who had actually used the WMD. Saddam was required to account for the weapons or their destruction.

What the BBC resport assumes, but cannot prove is that there were no WMD. As Secretary Rumsfeld so elequently put it absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If the BBC was honest, instead of trying to prove some ideological point it would really be concerned about the fact that Saddam's WMD is still largly unaccounted for. The false assumption that the failure to find the WMD means it was never there could also turn out to be a deadly assumption. While the post war reports attempt to rationalize the failure to find the WMD, they basically have to rely on an unproven theory that Saddam was mislead by his own people into thinking he had the WMD. As bizzare as that theory is, it does suggest that if Saddam thought he had them, then it was not unreasonable for Bush and Blair to believe he had them.

The BBC is getting itself wrapped up in its antiwar ideolgy. This is what got it into trouble before. Perhaps it will again. It would be interesting to see how much better off the UK would be without having to pay for news pushed by people who hate their government and its allies.