Boston Globe September 25, 2002
Medium, not the message, key in Blair address
By Robert Schlesinger
WASHINGTON - Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain broke little new ground when releasing his government's report on Saddam Hussein yesterday, but he did offer a few new details in the case against Iraq and armed his American allies against charges that they are practicing cowboy unilateralism.
Blair's presentation repeated in its broad strokes the assertions that President Bush and other US officials have been making for months about Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. It also disclosed some new particulars - that Iraq is actively producing chemical and biological weapons and sought uranium from African countries - named specific sites of concern, and detailed items the Iraqis have sought for their nuclear program.
But the scene of Blair laying out the US case - not only for his domestic audience, but for the rest of Europe - was perhaps the most significant element of the day's presentation, as British support has become an important part of selling American policy abroad.
''The US and the UK have been the tag team on these types of things for at least five years,'' said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank based in Virginia. ''It has become a centerpiece of American foreign policy to have the Brits make the case.''
While the details provide additional clarity to the case against Iraq, the medium may be more important than the message, according to foreign policy and defense specialists: Blair gives the US case an international cast while affording European leaders more political cover in supporting the United States.
''George Bush would be in a much trickier position if Blair weren't alongside him, because then there would be no one speaking up for his side at all,'' said Ian Cuthbertson, director of the Counter-Terrorism Project at the World Policy Institute in New York City.
The British document breaks little new ground in part because it only discusses conclusions drawn from intelligence reports and does not disclose sources or methods.
Iraq's nuclear program has focused on trying to develop highly enriched uranium crucial for nuclear weapons. While Iraq's attempts to acquire specialized aluminum tubes to build a gas centrifuge for the project have been previously reported, the British dossier added more items to Hussein's nuclear shopping list: vacuum pumps to create and maintain pressures, a magnet production line for the centrifuge's motors and top bearings, the necessary gases, a filament-winding machine to manufacture the rotors, and a large balancing machine for initial centrifuge balancing work.
US officials have publicly asserted that Iraq has maintained huge stores of biological and chemical weapons, but the British report for the first time explicitly contends that Iraq has resumed production of the deadly substances - a claim that goes further than US intelligence estimates have gone. As recently as two years ago, British intelligence had no proof that Iraq had begun manufacturing again, according to Cuthbertson, a former official in the United Kingdom's Foreign Office.
The British report also goes into greater detail than had previously been disclosed about which facilities in Iraq are the source of the greatest worry. And it provides a glimpse into the Iraqi command-and-control structure with regard to these weapons, noting that not only are these weapons part of Iraq's military planning but that the Iraqis ''are able to deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so.'' In a war, US military planning is expected to include efforts to disrupt that chain of command in the hope that the order never makes it down to the front lines.
The report provides other telling details about Iraq's secret pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. While it gives little new information about current and estimated future missile capabilities, it does contain a satellite photograph apparently showing an engine test stand capable of testing propulsion systems for medium-range ballistic missiles - which could reach into Europe. Actual manufacture of such weapons, however, probably remains years away.
Similarly, the dossier contains an aerial photograph of one of the ''presidential palaces'' that Hussein has tried to keep off-limits to UN inspectors. Superimposed over it in order to give it scale is a patch showing the total area of Buckingham Palace - a considerable tract of land that is dwarfed by the Iraqi area.
Blair's role is not new. Most recently, he laid out the case against Afghanistan when the United States was rallying support for an attack against that country to oust the Taliban.
''British foreign policy has for the last six decades been the junior partner in the American empire,'' Pike said. ''Now that they can no longer run their own empire, they get to help run our empire.''
Cuthbertson noted that in addition to giving Bush an international cloak for his policy, it provides other European leaders with ''a fig leaf to hide behind'' if they eventually line up with the United States.
Robert Schlesinger can be reached at schlesinger@globe.com.
This story ran on page A26 of the Boston Globe on 9/25/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
