So,
Mr Straw, Why Did You Go To War?
By Ben Russell
Independent
15 May 2003
* Jack Straw,
21 February 2003: 'Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes
of an order to use them'
* Jack Straw,
14 May 2003: Asked of the need to find weapons of mass destruction...
'It's not crucial'
The legal and political basis
for the war in Iraq was thrown into doubt yesterday when Jack Straw
declared that uncovering Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction
was "not crucially important".
The Foreign Secretary's comments
added to the confusion over the capacity of the former Iraqi leader
to unleash chemical or biological weapons, which in the weeks before
the Allied invasion had been declared an imminent threat to Britain
and the West.
Mr Straw was accused of rewriting
history after he appeared to undermine the Government's confident claim
that Saddam held up to 10,000 litres of anthrax, declaring: "Ten
thousand litres is one third of one petrol tanker. Whether or not we
are able to find one third of one petrol tanker in a country twice the
size of France remains to be seen."
Asked about Iraq's arsenal
on BBC Radio 4, he said only: "I hope there will be further evidence
of literal finds." Significantly, Mr Straw used the past tense
to describe Iraq's arsenal, saying: "It certainly did exist. There
is no question about that, and the Blix report suggested that it still
existed."
Challenged on the importance
of a fresh weapons find, he said: "It's not crucially important
for this reason ... The evidence in respect of Iraq was so strong that
the Security Council on the 8th of November said unanimously that Iraq's
proliferation and possession of the weapons of mass destruction and
unlawful missile systems, as well as its defiance of the United Nations,
pose and I quote 'a threat to international peace and
security'."
Peter Kilfoyle, a former
defence minister, said: "Jack Straw is trying to reinvent history.
All these claims about WMD are built on sand. If they do not find these
weapons, it takes away the only conceivable justification for conducting
this war.
"It shows the real reasons
for this war: the superpower flexing its muscles and looking after resources,
in this case petroleum."
Geoff Hoon, the Secretary
of State for Defence, insisted yesterday that the existence of weapons
of mass destruction was "the sole justification" for war and
confidently predicted that such weapons would eventually be found, pointing
to finds of biological protection suits and a vehicle thought to be
a mobile biological weapons laboratory.
But Mr Straw's comments were
the latest in a series of shifting statements from cabinet ministers
about the whereabouts of Saddam's weaponry, the alleged threat from
which provided the legal and political justification for the war.
They were in sharp contrast
to the Foreign Secretary's speech to the Royal Institute of International
Affairs in February when he declared that some of Saddam's chemical
or biological weapons could be deployed "within 45 minutes".
Since then the Foreign Office
has, slowly and subtly, changed its rhetoric. While Mr Blair and Mr
Hoon continue to exude confidence about the prospects of finding a "smoking
gun" in Iraq, Mr Straw has quietly raised the prospect of a different
scenario.
He first raised doubts over
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction last month when he told MPs not that
weapons existed now and would be found, but that "Iraq had illegal
possessions of mass destruction and had them recently".
MPs and watching journalists
were left with the impression, unchallenged by senior Foreign Office
officials, that Britain was no longer completely confident that the
elusive weapons would ever be found.
The Foreign Office has stressed
that war was amply justified by Iraq's failure to account for weapons
holdings dating from after the 1991 Gulf War, detailed in reports by
the UN chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix.
Ministers, including Ruth
Kelly, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, and the Foreign Office
minister Mike O'Brien, have used the analogy of the conflict in Northern
Ireland to justify the change, arguing that years of searching have
failed to uncover the IRA's weapons dumps.
On Tuesday, John Reid, the
Leader of the Commons, said he was not surprised that Iraqi weapons
had not yet been found.
Mr Straw argued yesterday
that the discovery of mass graves at the site of ancient Babylon provided
a moral justification for the war.
"You see these pictures
in newspapers about the discovery of 15,000 or so mass graves,"
he said. "Anybody who had any doubt about the rightness of our
actions should just draw to their own attention the venality of the
Saddam regime, which thankfully has now been removed."
But the Foreign Secretary's
comments raised deep concerns in the ranks of Labour MPs already unhappy
with the decision to take Britain to war. Doug Henderson, a former armed
services minister, and a leading opponent of the war, said: "I
think it's pretty essential if any legitimacy is to be maintained that
the reason for embarking on this process is proven. If it's not, people
will ask what are the motives for war."