Weapons expert faults Bush, Blair
LONDON -- President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain should have realized before going to war that intelligence on Iraqi weapons was weak and did not indicate that Saddam Hussein posed a danger to the West, the former chief US weapons inspector in Iraq said yesterday.
David Kay resigned from the CIA in January, and his conclusion then that Iraq did not have stockpiles of forbidden weapons caused serious problems for both Bush and Blair, undercutting their main justification for war.
Kay told Britain's ITV network that Bush and Blair ''should have been able to tell before the war that the evidence did not exist for drawing the conclusion that Iraq presented a clear, present, and imminent threat on the basis of existing weapons of mass destruction."
''That was not something that required a war," he said.
He said the leaders may not have been sufficiently critical of intelligence on Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
''WMD was only one and, I think in their mind, not really the most important one," he said.
Kay said two recent reports on intelligence failures in Iraq showed that American and British information-gathering and analyzing systems were flawed.
''I think they are a scathing indictment," he said of the reports from the US Senate Intelligence Committee and a British commission headed by former senior civil servant Robin Butler. His report, published Wednesday, said Iraq had no stockpiles of useable chemical or biological weapons before the war, and British intelligence to the contrary had been drawn in part from sources he called ''seriously flawed" or ''unreliable."
He said Blair's government had pushed its case to the limits of available intelligence and solidified analysts' hedged, tentative assessments of Iraqi arms into definite statements.
Kay said analysts were facing pressure to support the belief that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. ''Anything that showed Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction had a much higher gate to pass, because if it were true, all of US policy towards Iraq would have fallen asunder."
