A COUPLE of months ago WMD meant weapons of mass destruction. Now it is acquiring a second meaning: 鈥渨ere ministers deceived鈥�? In the US, two congressional inquiries are under way into the role of the intelligence services in Iraq. In the UK, critics of the Iraq war say the British government deliberately 鈥渟exed up鈥� intelligence reports when it insisted Iraq had nerve gas in missiles ready to fire on 45 minutes鈥� notice.
Theories of varying levels of plausibility abound. Maybe the weapons and labs used to make them were cloaked in such secrecy that the Iraqi weapons scientists now in coalition hands don鈥檛 know where they are. After all, the UK and the US could not remember all the places they buried their chemical weapons after the first world war. Maybe Saddam, knowing defeat was inevitable, destroyed them to make the US look foolish for invading. Perhaps someone spirited them out of Iraq.
Or maybe they didn鈥檛 exist, at least not in a ready-made, instantly deliverable form. If so, it is clearly important to know whether George Bush and Tony Blair were misled by poor intelligence, or whether they did the misleading themselves. If in fact Iraq posed no immediate WMD threat, then the timing of the invasion appears impossible to justify. The US and its allies could have allowed Hans Blix and his UN team of scientist inspectors more time.
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So British critics are right to be calling for an inquiry. But there is an important rider that is easy to overlook. Even if it is proved that London and Washington hyped the immediacy of the threat, that wouldn鈥檛 invalidate the underlying reason for the conflict. Throughout the 1990s, weapons inspectors found plenty of chemical and biological weapons. The UN destroyed a lot of this material, but was never satisfied it had found it all. So when Saddam claimed he no longer had these weapons, the UN demanded, quite reasonably, that he prove this. In November 2002, the Security Council told Iraq to provide such verification or face the consequences. Even if Iraq really did give up its weapons, where was the proof? It could have supplied documents, dug up destroyed armaments and allowed scientists to talk.
As a casus belli, upholding the principle of verification is obviously a much harder sell than the threat of an immediate gas attack. It also demands that any inspections are allowed to run their course. But neither of these awkward realities could justify lying about the evidence when lives are at stake.