Financial Times - June 11, 2003
WMD dispute highlights transatlantic differences By Edward Alden, James Politi and Jean Eaglesham
Richard Gephardt, the former House Democratic leader and now US presidential hopeful, has long been a caustic critic of George W. Bush's administration.
But as accusations have mounted that the US exaggerated its intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to build the case for war, he rushed to the president's defence.
Mr Gephardt, the White House noted with satisfaction, said there was "a long line of evidence . . . that Saddam Hussein had lots of weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations believed that. Hans Blix believed that. President Chirac, President Schröder, certainly Bill Clinton and his administration, and now this administration [believed that]."
Alleged abuses of intelligence before the war in Iraq have damaged public support for Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, and sparked a revolt within his own Labour party. Yet Mr Bush is feeling little pressure over similar allegations in Washington.
Karlyn Bowman, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said: "I think it's playing very differently here and I don't see much potential for damage to the Bush administration.
"Once Americans are convinced of the righteousness of a cause, they don't look back."
The political stakes are far higher in Britain. Malcolm Savidge, one of more than 50 Labour MPs pressing for an independent inquiry into the issue, has said the "allegations that we were misled into war are more serious than the Profumo affair or Watergate".
This may be overstating the case. But the persistent claims the UK government "sexed up" intelligence information to make the case for war more compelling have already caused political damage.
In the US, however, the administration has been emboldened by opinion polls showing Americans continue to support the decision to go to war regardless of the recent furore over intelligence. A Gallup poll this month found that 56 per cent believe the war was justified. Two-thirds believe the president has not misled them on the issue.
Unlike in the UK, where Mr Blair justified an unpopular war by insisting that Iraq's weapons programme posed an imminent threat, most people in the US had long wanted to oust Mr Hussein. A solid majority has believed the US should have finished the job during the first Gulf war in 1991.
A small group of Democrats is demanding a detailed congressional investigation, hoping for revelations that might embarrass Mr Bush.
But Democratic presidential frontrunners such as Mr Gephardt and Senator Joseph Lieberman have been far more reticent, with Mr Lieberman saying that while an inquiry may be warranted, the war was right regardless of whether such weapons are found.
A full-blown congressional inquiry could indeed produce damaging testimony that would support claims that intelligence findings were twisted to build the case for war.
The administration has already released documents showing that the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency believed there was "no reliable information" on whether Iraq was producing and stockpiling chemical weapons.
The three Republican-led congressional panels are undertaking instead a less formal "review" of CIA documents relating to Iraq's WMD programme and are not planning public hearings. Nor do congressional aides expect the reviews, which could take "weeks or months", to produce any sensational findings. One Republican aide said the reviews should simply confirm that all the evidence pointed to the need to disarm Mr Hussein by force.
The most significant consequences for Mr Bush could come not from what happens in Washington but what happens in London.
Ivo Daalder, a former White House director of European affairs now at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, said failure to find WMD in Iraq would simply bolster UK opponents of the war who said there was no imminent threat. That would make it far more difficult for Britain to support future US military actions.
"This has nothing to do with Washington. It has everything to do with what the US can do in the future abroad," he said. "It was the strength of Tony Blair's own personality and the credibility he had within his party that allowed him to go to war. And that's gone."