Following on from the Wikileaks headlines, and an earlier mention on this page about how our book Failing Intelligence: the true story of how we were fooled into going to war in Iraq is going to be used as evidence in the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War, the book’s author Brian Jones, former head of the UK Defence Intelligence Staff's nuclear, biological and chemical section, gives us a fascinating update on the current developments spreading across the world’s newspapers.
Deciding when to publish a book on a subject that remains "live" is never easy. Failing Intelligence went to press in July and a few more bits and pieces have emerged since then. Perhaps one of the more critical elements concerns what George Bush has had to say in his memoir about the threat he decided he had to counter by invading Iraq.
Of course, Failing Intelligence focuses mainly on UK aspects, and Tony Blair's lack of clarity about the "threat" he said justified the war is something I singled out for severe criticism. But Blair had us tagging along as part of the supporting cast in an action that really belonged to President Bush so his justification of it is highly relevant. Not least because it has been the view of all British governments since WWII that the preservation of the "special relationship" with the United States was of overriding importance to almost any other consideration including an independent British assessment about Iraq. What already shone out from the evidence available was that Blair was especially enthusiastic about this ill-defined, almost mythical "relationship", an enthusiasm that would lead us to war.
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One aspect of the latest WikiLeaks emphasises what most UK officials who dealt regularly with Washington have known for decades. It is a one-sided affair about which the US government and its officials are characteristically hard-nosed in seeking US advantage. It may be that there is a degree of pragmatism in Britain's US policy, but it is not something I saw being critically reviewed in my 15 years in Whitehall. Viewed in isolation I can see its security benefits but it should be judged as one element in a much bigger strategic picture. The bigger picture appears to have been given short shrift in the recent defence and security review by a new government that is ploughing the same exhausted old furrow.
All of this means that any new insight into Washington's perception of the "threat" is an important part of any study of our Iraq war. And one has recently arrived via a David Frum CNN blog about Decision Points. I must make it clear that I have not yet read Bush's book but Frum, who was on Bush's White House staff and who coined the notorious soundbite "axis of evil" as an element of the anti-Iraq propaganda, has probably cited the President's memoir accurately enough.
He quotes Bush as saying that Iraq combined a whole range of mainly non-specific threats, but then focuses on an incident that translated the threat into something more tangible for the President to include in the equation.
Little more than a month after 9/11, whilst the subsequent anthrax letter crisis still raged, Bush was told by Vice President Cheney, "Mr. President ... one of the bio-detectors went off at the White House. They found traces of botulinum toxin. The chances are we've all been exposed."
Botulinum toxin is lethal and on all the lists of potential biological warfare agents. Iraq had belatedly in the UN inspection process admitted that it had produced this agent around the time of the first Gulf war. Although Saddam claimed to have destroyed it all, UN inspectors were never able to confirm it. Bush and the rest of the White House Staff spent what must have been a terrifying 24 hours or so wondering if they were about to fall ill and die. It turned out to be a false alarm. But at the time, Bush had reason to believe Iraq was implicated in a BW attack aimed directly at him and those around him.
Frum, being one of them, describes how he spent the next period believing he was unlikely to survive for very long and took steps to prepare for his death. His anxiety was fed by what he describes in retrospect as a classic bureaucratic response on the part of the CIA to its failure to prevent 9/11. Every suspected terrorist plot within and beyond America was included in regular briefs to the White House.
Bush reportedly writes, "We believed more attacks were coming, but we didn't know when, where, or from whom. ... As time passed, some critics charged that we inflated the threat or manipulated alert levels for political benefit. They were flat wrong. We took the intelligence seriously..."
Frum then quotes Bush's explanation of why he attacked Iraq, "I remembered the shattering pain of 9/11, a surprise attack for which we received no warning. This time we had a warning like a blaring siren." For emphasis, Frum rephrases this adding a justification that has little substance, "The U.S. had been accepting risks from Saddam Hussein for more than a decade. Suddenly those risks were now intolerable. And for all the grief and cost of Saddam's removal, that particular risk now threatens the United States no longer."
I am not sure I follow the logic entirely, and there was no intelligence to substantiate the view Bush took at the time, but Bush/Frum seem to be saying the "threat" that justified the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam had the intention, sooner or later, to conduct covert WMD attacks against the US Homeland. As I explained in my book this idea was something that also worried the Clinton administration. The terror they experienced following what proved to be false alarm in October 2001 appears to have burned even deeper into the phsyche of the Bush White House. It played on their minds in the context of the very real and "successful" attacks of 9/11 and the very real but less successful anthrax letter attacks that followed. Bush may have been further unnerved by recollection of the attempt of the Iraqi intelligence to assassinate his father during a visit to Kuwait in April 1993.
Because most Americans supported an invasion of Iraq in 2002/3, President Bush did not need to explain his reasons in this sort of detail at the time, but it appears that he is now more than ready to link his decision to invade Iraq to this very personal experience.
Meanwhile, even if Tony Blair had been right and Iraq had been armed with large stockpiles of WMD, he has yet to explain clearly what "threat" he had in mind that convinced him that Britain should join the war. According to Baroness Manningham-Buller's evidence to the Iraq Inquiry, the intelligence assessment at the time, which took full account of 9/11, the anthrax letters and even mentions the assassination attempt on George Bush Sr., gave the PM no good reason to fear a covert/terrorist-type attack by Iraq. My guess is that the "threat" he was most worried about was that Britain would fall from favour in the eyes of the US administration and wreck the "special relationship" if we did not join them in their war with Iraq.
I hope Sir John Chilcot's Iraq Inquiry is going to have something to say about this.
Brian Jones's Failing Intelligence: The true story of how we were fooled into going to War in Iraq is available here for £9.99