Brian Jones, The Independent  --  Arab News

LONDON, 25 April 2004 — Until last week, like many Britons, I remained in two minds as to whether the decision to invade Iraq was finally justified or not. Now I have come off the fence and — like the majority of the voters in the latest public opinion surveys — have concluded it was not.

The government’s case for war was always flawed. There was no certainty that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction, nor was there credible evidence that Saddam’s regime would leak WMD to Al-Qaeda. I have never thought that freeing Iraq from Saddam excused this mistake. I also doubt that Western democracy offers a panacea to cure all ills regardless of heritage and culture.

But I remained on the fence for so long because I thought I could discern, among all the half-baked rhetoric, indications of a wider vision of Britain’s long-term security.

There is no doubt that international treaties and export control regimes are failing, and WMD are proliferating.

There is also no doubt that many in the Islamic nations abhor the way Western capitalism impinges on their world. Terrorists claiming to represent Islam believe they can roll back Western influence by visiting chaos upon us.

We know they are seeking WMD, have global reach and are prepared to adopt suicide tactics to achieve their goal. It is evident that they have devised a way of circumventing our strategic concept of military deterrence, refusing to offer a target that we can readily engage by making their organization cellular, global and nebulous.

I thought our leaders were grappling, albeit tentatively, with this seemingly intractable problem. They identified the Achilles’ heel of Al-Qaeda’s strategy. It needed a few fixed bases in a tolerant environment to assemble, indoctrinate and train its “foot-soldiers”, and to develop WMD capabilities for use by its elite “forces”. Although such bases might be transient targets, there was the opportunity in Afghanistan to demonstrate that those willing to facilitate the terrorists would pay a terrible price. A lesson was given, with the Taleban as the example.

I thought I could see the next step in the logic. States that defied the international norms of behavior and developed WMD capabilities that might leak to the terrorists, or even be used to protect them, had to be taught a similar lesson. If only the case for invading Iraq could have been more carefully explained and the expectation of finding actual weapons played down, then there could have been the carrot of help to the Middle East and the Palestinian peace process which Blair so astutely identified and so eloquently explained in 2001.

This may even have prepared the ground for a frank explanation of the mistake that was made about WMD in Iraq. An excuse is available for invasion, based on Saddam’s intransigence and obfuscation, and the fact that the absence of weapons does not mean the absence of capabilities. But gamblers, it seems, do not recognize a lost cause.

Bush and Blair still talk about a bigger picture, but the events of the past week or so suggest they must be viewing a grossly distorted image. The WMD problem is still there, but after the mistake in Iraq many more in the West are inclined to believe it is greatly exaggerated. The intelligence community responsible for identifying threats as the first stage in the defense of our security, having been bullied into submission over Iraq, will take many years to recover the credibility which is vital to its function.

The terrorist problem, meanwhile, is still there. It is probably growing. And as if to encourage the very chaos that he describes as the objective of the global terrorist, Blair does not disapprove, at least in public, of Bush’s decision to support Sharon’s latest plan which is further inflaming Arab opinion. The greatest irony is, of course, that Israel stands defiantly outside all the norms of civilized international behavior. We are vividly reminded by one of those exquisite coincidences of timing, the release of Mordechai Vanunu, that underpinning Israel’s rogue policies is a comprehensive WMD capability, all tacitly endorsed by the United States but in defiance of the United Nations. I cannot believe that Blair’s intentions have been anything but honorable throughout. But the mistakes that were made have been denied for too long for there to be any way back. Sitting on the fence was uncomfortable, but I find no relief in climbing down.

— The writer, a senior visiting research fellow at the Mountbatten Center for International Studies, Southampton University, was previously with the Defense Intelligence Staff .