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ISG says: No WMD (yet)
Britain and America insisted last night that it was right to go to war against Saddam Hussein despite the failure to find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction. In his long-awaited interim report, David Kay, the head of the 1,200-strong CIA-led team of inspectors in Iraq, told Congress yesterday that after four months they had not found any [sic] evidence of the banned weaponry. The former UN inspector said that Iraq had civilian technology that could have been swiftly converted to weapons programmes. He also said Saddam pursued an elaborate programme of deception to trick inspectors in the countdown to the war. But he said that since they started in June, his team had not found any sign of the WMD cited by America and Britain as a key element of their case for war. "We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone."With criticism mounting over the apparent failure to find WMD, officials in London and Washington called for patience, saying it was only an interim report and that the hunt would continue. Ministers sought to bolster any findings in the report that might lessen the damage to the Government. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said: "I believed then and I believe now the action we took is fully justified and fully justifiable." Before hostilities there was "incontrovertible evidence" that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons programmes. Downing Street officials said the report contained substantial amounts of material which had not emerged before, showing Iraq had breached UN resolutions. The way I see it, the absence of discoveries is puzzling, but not overly worrying. If someone indicates heâs armed and a threat to you, you canât afford to call his bluff (this is assuming the western intelligence wasnât actively "sexing-up" the threat - I think thatâs safe to assume given that no one, not even the French, seriously doubted the WMDs were there). So this does not constitute a rejection of the war-of-self-defence argument, which stands beside the plethora of other justifications for the war, not least of which is the humanitarian argument. Posted by: Bulldog 2003-10-03 |
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