안보뉴스
"후세인 제거는 정당한 것"
Written by. 코나스
입력 : 2004-02-10 오후 4:29:11
The absence of these weapons is more than just an embarrassment. It raises the question of whether this war was fought on a false prospectus. Above all, did the president of the United States and the British prime minister lie? So far, the answer seems to be no. Not a scrap of evidence has emerged since the war to suggest that Mr Bush or Mr Blair doubted the truth of their central claim. Moreover, given the evidence available to them at the time, they were entitled to their pre-war confidence. In October 2002, America´s National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and would probably have a nuclear weapon within the decade (or a year, if it got enough fissile material from abroad). Britain´s Joint Intelligence Committee reached similar conclusions. Though the BBC accused the British government of “sexing up” a dossier from this body, this week´s report by Lord Hutton clears the government. So did the MPs of the Intelligence and Security Committee, which compared the dossier with the raw intelligence from which it was derived. Did the spies tell their political masters only what they wanted to hear? Perhaps. But the spies reached their conclusions long before the election of George W. Bush and September 11th put the invasion of Iraq back on the agenda. The CIA gave the same reports to Bill Clinton, not one of nature´s warmongers. Besides, the case against Iraq did not rest on intelligence alone. There was also the testimony of the UN inspectors: neither those forced to withdraw from Iraq in 1998, nor those who returned before last year´s war, could give Iraq a clean bill of health. And underlying the suspicion was the behaviour of Mr Hussein himself. If he had nothing to hide, why forgo billions of dollars of oil revenues instead of ending sanctions by showing the inspectors he had fully disarmed? In short, the case for believing that Iraq had clung in defiance of the Security Council to its proscribed weapons was overwhelming. Even France´s Jacques Chirac, who opposed the war, referred a month before it to Iraq´s “probable” possession of them. This newspaper was blunter. However sceptical one might be about the intelligence, we said, “only a fool or a knave” would accept Mr Hussein´s plea of innocence: a country with Iraq´s record deserved no presumption of innocence. So Messrs Bush and Blair seem to have believed, with good reason, that Iraq possessed proscribed weapons. What if, as now seems probable, they were nonetheless wrong? Then, as Mr Kay argues, there must have been a massive failure of intelligence. Though some of the spies continue to insist, like Mr Blair and America´s Vice-President Dick Cheney, that the illicit weapons or material will turn up in due time, Mr Bush himself has begun to wax less adamant. Intelligence cannot always be definitive. But Britain and America need to investigate what looks like a comprehensive spying failure that will haunt policymakers next time they are called on to deal with a rogue state believed to be building an atomic bomb. Not fibbing, but stretching Still, the politicians are not off the hook. Did president and prime minister, sincerely believing their central claim against Iraq, allow their conviction to distort the evidence they put before their people? It looks that way. Mr Bush conjured up a link between Iraq, al-Qaeda and September 11th that probably did not exist. He created an impression of a threat to the American homeland that the intelligence does not seem to justify. And when tabloid newspapers read Britain´s dossier to mean that Britons themselves could come under chemical attack within 45 minutes, Mr Blair did not trouble to put them right. None of this exaggeration was necessary. The case for war rested on Iraq´s possession of proscribed weapons; Iraq seems to have got rid of them before the war began. But the pre-war decision could be based only on what was known at the time, and Iraq shrouded the true facts in ambiguity—despite the UN´s orders to prove that it had disarmed. Given Mr Hussein´s record, that should have been justification enough for war. |
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