Thoughts from London

Politics of intelligence or the Butler done it
Mea culpa yes, pleads British Prime Minister Tony Blair. But mea maxima culpa, certainly not. His considered assertion comes after another inquiry report exonerated him of over-selling to parliament and the public intelligence on Iraq that led him to link hands with President Bush in the invasion of that Middle Eastern state.

When politicians come to accept even a semblance of blame for their errors of judgement, the public tends to draw some solace from such an act of contrition. After all it is not every day that politicians admit to errors. But this might not always be done in a mood of genuine righteousness.

As T. S. Eliot was to say about the plays of dramatist John Webster, one must see the skull beneath the skin. Blair is conceding a little in the straight to gain in the corners.

Why concede anything at all, one might well ask. Well because he knows only too well that he can no longer maintain the charade that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that threatened not just the region but Britain and the rest of the world as well.

The sheer nonsense behind that assertion-also carried to extremes by President Bush- was increasingly losing him public support. His obsession with Iraq and the determination to prove that he was right, led him to ignore urgent domestic issues. So by conceding a little here and there, he hopes to recoup some of his lost prestige and public support with a help of another report that was bound to clear him and blame lapses in intelligence and operational system of those agencies.

This time round another lord came to Blair's rescue. Lord Butler, a retired civil servant who has been very much a part of the staid British establishment, was asked to look into the intelligence services and their information that Blair and his war-mongering New Labour leadership used as the basis for invading Iraq.

There was increasing public and political pressure for a public inquiry to examine how and why Britain was taken into a war largely opposed by its people (democracy take a bow, thank you), particularly following disclosures in the United States about terribly flawed intelligence. But Blair could not take the risk of exposure through public scrutiny.

He settled for an inquiry with an extremely narrow remit that clearly left out how the political decisions leading to war were made and the implications of legal and other advice the political leadership ignored.

Blair was on safe ground. Besides the fact that Lord Butler was a top former civil servant who would certainly not rock the political boat though he might throw a couple of civil servants into the water, he had already been given a clean bill of health by another lord. That was Lord Hutton, some six months or so ago.

The terms of Lord Hutton's inquiry were again carefully delineated so that he would only examine the events leading up to the death of a British weapons expert, David Kelly, who committed suicide after he was exposed to the media as the confidential sources who had spoken to the BBC without official permission.

The Hutton report which castigated the BBC- and by implication the media in general- and exculpated Blair and his officials of any wrongdoing, was promptly damned as one of the great exercises in whitewashing for a long time.

It was not only the media that went to town on the Hutton report. It was equally condemned by a wide cross section of the public as an attempt to save Blair's bacon.

Lord only knows that when another lord was named for the second inquiry, public scepticism multiplied. Given Lord Butler's antecedents and how other inquiries of a similar nature into the culpability of the British Government and its mandarins had gone, it was little wonder that even before the Butler inquiry got off the ground, it was being dismissed as another Whitehall Whitewash.

So it has proved to be, judging by initial reports in the media. One has yet to read more detailed analyses of the report that will doubtless appear in the British media today.

But there are enough signs that the good lord had consciously diverted culpability from the political establishment to the intelligence community.

Lord Butler says that the British Government's Joint Intelligence Committee strove to compile a dossier on Iraq's weaponry in 2002 reflecting available intelligence but was under "strain" in a politically charged climate that compromised their objectivity.

That, surely, is a hell of a thing to say. The intelligence organisation JIC, that comprises officials from different branches of the intelligence community, is surely expected to provide intelligence-checked, weighed and assessed- by its experts and not be swayed by political needs or self-righteous indignation against a renegade foreign leader that US and Britain once supported and nurtured.

Does it mean intelligence was doctored to meet the political needs of the day? Lord Butler carefully avoids any mention of who and how this politically charged climate came to be created.

If indeed there was a politically charged climate by which one supposes he means the aftermath of 9/11, is it not all the more reason that the country's apex intelligence body makes assurance doubly sure and that the intelligence weighed and presented with different scenarios, is thoroughly checked and dependable.

Curiously enough Tony Blair's claim to parliament that Saddam Hussein had WMDs that could be launched within 45 minutes of an order, had also been based on a single source, the ground on which the BBC's claim about a sexed-up intelligence dossier was found sadly wanting by Lord Hutton.

These inquiries and reports tell us a valuable story. When government's set up commissions and committees, it is often for one of two reasons. It is either to damn its political opponents and despatch them to purgatory or to cover up its own sins with a veneer of political rectitude and accountable government.

It then falls on the media and civil society to examine closely the intentions and purposes of politicians in doing so. In short, they need to look for the skull beneath the skin.

If not one allows governments and politicians to get away with even murder- which is exactly what is happening in Iraq.

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