[A-List] Emailing: 0,3858,4973369-102273,00.htm

["Salaam Blackmore" <salaamblackmore@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Observer | Europe or the US? Britain must choose


Worldview
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Europe or the US? Britain must choose
America's decision on Bush looms. And it's time for Blair to get off the
fence, says intelligence expert William Pfaff

William Pfaff
Sunday July 18, 2004

The Observer

The message of the Butler Report and the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence has been the same. The British and American intelligence
services have been compromised and politicised.
Their findings on Iraq were edited to deliver the conclusions Prime Minister
and President wanted, justifying an invasion the two had already decided on.

Criticism has in the past focused on the issue of deliberate bias or lies
introduced into the evidence by interested ideological or exile groups. But
more pernicious in the end was probably the analytical distortion produced
by the conventional wisdom.

Lies risk being challenged and discredited. The conventional wisdom carries
no risk for the person who invokes it. It has become what 'everybody knows'.

The conventional wisdom of Western intelligence before Iraq's invasion was
that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons, and an active
programme for acquiring nuclear weapons.

Chemical weapons were not a great success during the Iran-Iraq war, although
used by Saddam against passive civilian populations inside Iraq.

His government tried to develop nuclear weapons before the Gulf war,
presumably for deterrent purposes, and for prestige and blackmail (since no
non-suicidal scenario was ever offered for their offensive use by Iraq; and
while the Baath leadership did stupid things it never gave sign of a
self-destructive tendency: quite the contrary).

This history automatically led intelligence agencies after the Gulf war in
1991 to think that despite UN strictures and inspections, Saddam would go on
pursuing a deterrent weapon. That he would give it all up seemed unlikely.
But 'seemed' is not an intelligence finding.

The consensus that prevailed in Western intelligence agencies contributed to
their reciprocal 'intoxication' of one another, as Jacques Chirac remarked.
Chirac has been in office long enough to take a disabused if not cynical
view of anything he is told.

The institutional damage of this affair for the Secret Intelligence Service
and the CIA is great. The relationship between the two is an old one. The
SIS launched modern American intelligence. It has remained ever since in a
troubling superiority/dependency relationship with its rich transatlantic
'cousins'.

Beginning with the carefully managed visit to Britain in July 1940, as
President Roosevelt's special envoy, of the New York lawyer William J 'Wild
Bill' Donovan, British intelligence fostered and educated the US
intelligence and political warfare organisation that Donovan, on Roosevelt's
orders, established in 1941.

SIS showed its new cousins some of its secrets and trained American recruits
to the American OSS. It reached an agreement on dividing the world for
secret intelligence operations, excluding the Americans from most secret
intelligence work in Europe and establishing strict rules of protocol.

The cold war, American money and muscle - and the Cambridge spies plus
George Blake - changed this, making the SIS increasingly a subcontractor to
the CIA. It nonetheless remained the only friendly global intelligence
network, and brains sometimes trumped money and brute force.

At some point, probably recent, probably as a consequence of the shift in
American policy after 9/11 and the decision of Tony Blair to back to the
hilt George W Bush's ill-defined and open-ended 'war on terror', the
intelligence relationship took a disastrous tip.

Each side began to reinforce the other's mistakes, and to feed one another's
needs to supply intelligence findings that reinforced the preconceptions and
rationalised the actions of a Prime Minister and a President who had already
decided to go to war.

The findings that were supplied have since blown up in their faces, to their
considerable political disadvantage.

There had been, in fact if not intention, a collaborative intelligence
corruption. Had the London-Washington intelligence intimacy been less, the
scramble to please would not have enjoyed transatlantic reinforcement; the
dissenters in the two agencies would have been less easily dismissed, and
the final output closer to the truth. Many now dead might be alive, and much
misery avoided.

The Senate Committee report findings have made it possible for Bush to say
he went wrong only because he believed what the CIA told him. Now George
Tenet is gone, CIA reforms will make it impossible for this to happen again.
The November voter can be reassured.

It is not so simple for Blair. He, his government, and the SIS have suffered
most from the affair. Until now, British intelligence has had a high
reputation in Washington, Western Europe and elsewhere.

Butler's citation of material sent to Downing Street (and parliament),
stripped of the qualifications that said it came from sources 'open to
doubt,' 'severely flawed', later 'withdrawn as unreliable', or only included
for its 'eye-catching character', has greatly damaged the SIS reputation for
professionalism and political integrity.

This is important for a political reason, connected to Britain's
relationship to the European Union. Europe's respect for the SIS as an
intelligence service is one of Britain's most important international
assets, ranking with the British armed services in the respect it commands
in Europe.

The debate anticipating the promised British referendum on the European
constitution (and euro membership) will press Britain towards a final
decision on its degree of commitment to the EU.

The British government and political class continue to assume that their
rival American and European relationships can be managed without drama, but
this may not remain true.

The policies of the Bush administration, and Blair's resolute commitment to
Bush's leadership have undermined that assumption for many Europeans. They
expect American election day in November to be a crucial date in the
Euro-American relationship.

They assume that if Bush is given a new mandate, international affairs will
continue to be dominated by an American government with unilateralist,
preemptive and politically utopian policies. They conclude that events will
deepen existing tension and divisions between the US and Europe, and that
the argument that puts forward the shared values of Americans and Europeans
would no longer be convincing.

Here the British intelligence relationship with the CIA becomes a serious
problem. Western Europeans have in the past made grudging allowance for the
SIS's compromising Washington intimacies, and for Britain's deep involvement
in a US-British-Canadian-Australian communications interception system that
is widely thought by Europeans to be exploited for commercial advantage.

A second problem is Blair's decision to restructure British armed forces to
function as subordinate units led by the US. This renunciation of the
primordial capacity for autonomous national defence seems to them an
abdication of sovereignty, far more important than anything implied in the
European constitution. It will leave France as the only European country
other than Russia that is capable of autonomous and integrated air, sea and
ground operations under national command.

Some Europeans would welcome Bush's re-election, believing it would make
inevitable a decision by the bulk of the EU countries to construct a serious
European political and strategic entity. They think that essential, and want
Britain to belong to it. But they argue that if Britain votes to reject a
European constitution, both sides should take that decision as final.

©William Pfaff. All rights reserved

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004