Blair, Bush and Weapons of Mass Deception

A British friend of mine, who's also a sometime contributor to the comments here, was celebrating because Tony Blair dodged two political bullets last week. He won his university fee increase, by a narrow margin. And the Hutton Report exonerated him of any culpability in the exposure and subsequent suicide of scientist David Kelly as the source of a critical article about Britain's variation on cooking the intelligence on the Iraqi WMDs.

I can't begrudge my friend his celebration. But the bad news for Tony isn't over. He's badly damaged his credibility in Britain, and devastated it in the rest of the European Union, by backing the invasion of Iraq. Since he and Bush (though apparently not Dick Cheney!) are giving up the pretense that WMDs will still be found in Iraq, he actually has to have some concern about a war crimes prosecution before the International Criminal Court.  Blair's legal advisers warned him before the war that that would be the only legal basis for such an invasion.

But in the more immediate situation, Blair avoided being immediately forced out of the Prime Minister's office by last week's events. Judge Hutton did Blair a big favor by focusing the report narrowly on the Kelly case, and avoided passing judgment on the use of WMD intelligence - although one passage in the report suggests with great British restraint that it's entirely plausible that authors of intelligence reports felt pressure to conform their product to Blair's desire to go to war alongside Bush. I'll be a tad geneous to Tony on this one: he might have thought that the preparations for war would induce Iraq to comply with inspections (which Iraq did) and Bush to postpone war (which he didn't). 

But part of the cost of the US-British "special relationship" in this case is that reaction in both countries to the failure of WMD intelligence - cooked, "sexed up" or otherwise - have formed a counterpoint of criticism. Bush tried to slough off the significance of not finding WMDs early on, which helped undermine the credibility of Blair, who had made WMDs completely central to his case for war. This past week, when Blair got some good news on the Hutton Report that could have slammed him over the WMD intelligence, any positive effect of that in the US was largely counteracted by David Kay's admission that the WMDs aren't there.