Iraq WMD intelligence inquiry

The current position of the Bush administration is that the US went to war based on faulty intelligence and that there needs to be an inquiry into the faulty intelligence. But this position completely up-ends the well-documented reality of the situation.

The fact of the matter is that the Bush administration was determined to invade Iraq, and bullied and pressured the US intelligence agencies to cook up intelligence on Iraq's WMDs to justify such an invasion. It takes some nerve for the Bush administration to now complain that it was misled into war on the base of this faulty intelligence.

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The fact that the proposed review would not be completed until 2005, well after this year's US presidential elections in November, and that it will focus on intelligence failures rather than official misuse or misstatement of the intelligence, suggests that the inquiry is little more than a political gimmick intended to protect President Bush from the well-founded accusation that he misled the US into war.

The inquiry proposed by Blair is similarly deficient in that it, too, will review only intelligence failures about Iraq's alleged WMDs, rather than the questionable use that was made of the intelligence. The focus of the inquiry is so narrow that the opposition Liberal Democrats have refused to be a part of it, and prominent anti-war critics such as former cabinet minister Robin Cook openly scoff at the notion that the inquiry has any purpose other than to exonerate Blair.

With the absurdity of the recently released Hutton report, public confidence in inquiries into government misconduct is at a low. Both Bush and Blair owe it to the public to convene real inquiries into whether they misled their nations into war. But the inquiries as they are currently envisioned could succeed only in further tarnishing the image and credibility of their already compromised administrations.