Bush swift to woo Blair on Iraq

LONDON - United States President George W. Bush asked for British Prime Minister Tony Blair's backing to remove Saddam Hussein from power just nine days after the September 11 attacks, over a private dinner at the White House, a US magazine reports.

Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to Washington, was at the dinner table as Blair replied that he would rather concentrate on ousting the Taleban and restoring peace in Afghanistan.

In a 25,000-word article in this month's American edition of Vanity Fair, Sir Christopher recounts Bush as responding: "I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq."

Blair, Sir Christopher writes, "said nothing to demur" at the prospect.

Sir Christopher's account presents a new challenge to Blair's assertion that no decision was taken on the invasion of Iraq until just days before operations began in March last year. It implies regime change in Iraq was US policy immediately after September 11.

Sir Christopher's article comes as the new head of British and American arms inspectors in Iraq is under fire for refusing to acknowledge that the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has all but ground to a halt.

After his first progress report to the US Congress last week, Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), was accused of stalling until the presidential election in November is out of the way.

"One ISG member told me that, since last year, the inspectors have been kept in Iraq to save political face rather than to find weapons," said Dr Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge University expert on the WMD issue.

Blair and Bush have all but admitted that the WMD claims used to justify war in Iraq were exaggerated or wrong and have launched inquiries to find if there were failures by their intelligence services.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted yesterday that the "most dramatic" claim in his speech to the United Nations Security Council weeks before the war - that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories - appeared to have been based on faulty information.

Powell also said he hoped a commission investigating the US intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction would reveal how the CIA ended up depending on unreliable sources for key evidence he used to argue for war.

One of the main reasons the US and Britain have been forced to climb down was the stark announcement by Duelfer's predecessor, David Kay, who quit in December, that there were no illicit weapons to be found. But in his little-noticed progress report, Duelfer ignored the views of Kay, stating that "the ISG continues to look for weapons of mass destruction".

He stressed that the WMD search was difficult and time-consuming.

"We regularly receive reports, some quite intriguing and credible, about concealed caches [of weapons]," Duelfer insisted.

Rangwala, who has visited Iraq to study the ISG's work, called the report misleading. "Shortly before he quit, Mr Kay cut back site visits," he said. "The inspectors have virtually given up looking for WMD."

The acknowledgment about alleged mobile chemical arms laboratories could further hurt the credibility of the Bush Administration, also under fire in an election year for failing to stop the September 11 attacks.

The US justified its first preemptive war by accusing Iraq of amassing illegal arms and invaded last year without explicit UN approval and over the objections of many allies.

In February last year, Powell made a major presentation of the US case against Iraq at a special session of the Security Council, where he said the US had several sources showing mobile chemical weapons laboratories.

But America's foreign relations chief now says the evidence on the trailers has been shown to be shaky.

"Now it appears not to be the case that it was that solid.

"But at the time I was preparing that presentation it was presented to me as solid," Powell told reporters.

While doubts about the US sources of evidence for the laboratories have been raised for over a year, Powell's remarks were the most straightforward acknowledgment from the Bush Administration that the information was probably wrong.

"That was the most dramatic of them [pieces of evidence] and I made sure it was multi-sourced," he said. "Now if the sources fell apart, then we need to find out how we've gotten ourselves in that position."


- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq