BY ROHAN PEARCE
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is under increasing pressure to justify his government's support for the US-led invasion of Iraq. Having based his support on the claim that Iraq possessed a substantial arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which posed an imminent threat to other countries, including Britain, Blair is under sustained pressure to explain why the US and British occupation forces in Iraq have not discovered any WMD.
The results of a poll conducted on behalf of the London Times, published on June 14, found that 58% of British voters believe that the "evidence" of Iraqi WMDs was deliberately exaggerated, and that 34% are unlikely to trust Blair in the future.
The results still show, however, that the majority of Britons still believe that Iraq possessed WMDs. However, this may not remain the case as more and more evidence to the contrary is presented to the parliamentary inquiry.
It has already been revealed that a dossier on Iraq's WMD program, published by the British government in February, which had been plagiarised from non-intelligence sources, had not been cleared by Britain's intelligence services.
The parliamentary intelligence and security committee levelled the latter accusation in its 2002-03 annual report. The report claimed: "Although the document did contain some intelligence-derived material it was not clearly attributed or highlighted amongst the other material, nor was it checked with the Agency providing the intelligence or cleared by the [Joint Intelligence Committee] prior to publication."
On June 17, former cabinet ministers Clare Short and Robin Cook testified before the House of Commons foreign affairs select committee. Referring to a dossier issued by Blair in September 2002 which claimed Iraq had WMD that posed an imminent threat to neighbouring countries and even to Britain, Cook said: "If you read the September dossier very carefully there is a striking absence of any recent and alarming and confirmed intelligence...
"It starts out from what we know [Hussein] had in 1991, what we know he has disposed of since 1991, and therefore, there is a leap of assumption that the balance is therefore still around.
"It is also a highly suggestible document, in that there are a lot of boxes there telling you how you go about producing a nuclear weapon, or what sarin [gas] does; but there is no evidence actually that he did have that capacity to produce a nuclear weapon, nor indeed a capacity to produce sarin.
"Stripped down, there was very little in that document that actually represented intelligence of a new, alarming, urgent and compelling threat."<|> From Green Left Weekly, June 25, 2003.
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