What Butler missed

The most blissfully satirical moment during Lord Butler’s press conference was his remark that Iraq contained ‘a lot of sand’. His point was that the fabled weapons of mass destruction might yet turn up, buried in the dunes. The former Cabinet secretary is known as a man of boundless optimism. It may be that all kinds of long-lost objects will be excavated from the desert: the plane of Amelia Earhart, perhaps, or the racehorse Shergar. If we delve deeper into this abundant sand, we may find Lord Lucan, keen to join Lord Butler in service on the red benches. But there can be hardly anyone, surely, who now believes that we will find significant quantities of weapons of mass destruction. Even Tony Blair now has the grace to admit that his principal casus belli has turned out to be a delusion, no matter how much sand there may be still to dig up in Iraq. Saddam denied that he had them; the UN weapons inspectors came increasingly to agree with Saddam; and yet the existence of WMD formed the central plank of Blair’s case (though not of the case made by this magazine) for the invasion of Iraq. ‘The threat of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction is not American or British propaganda,’ said Blair, when introducing that notorious dossier of September 2002. ‘The history and present threat are real.’ He had ‘absolutely no doubt’, he told us, of a proposition which was essential to public support for the war, and which has turned out to be wholly fallacious. Why did he get it so wrong?

Some of us had hoped that Lord Butler’s inquiry would answer thoroughly the following questions: did the intelligence offered to the Prime Minister justify his hot-gospelling confidence? Did he accurately reflect that intelligence in his presentation of it to the public? Did the Downing Street machine put any pressure on the intelligence services to make the threat from Saddam sound more alarming, and the arguments for war therefore more convincing? To be fair to Lord Butler, he has made some relevant criticisms of the government and its methods.