New York Times
London published a long-awaited report on Iraq on Tuesday, asserting that the regime of President Saddam Hussein was continuing to expand stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and had plans to use them. Arguing for urgent action by the West, it said that some of the weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes.
The 50-page document also supplied intelligence information that Iraq was trying to acquire materials abroad to build nuclear weapons and had extended the range of its ballistic missiles as part of a plan to menace and dominate its own region.
The report was released hours before the opening of a daylong debate in Parliament on Britain's aggressive stance on Iraq and Prime Minister Tony Blair's apparent endorsement of the U.S. government's vow to take action against Saddam if the United Nations does not rise to the challenge.
Blair, President George W. Bush's staunchest ally in Europe, was obliged earlier this month to summon the lawmakers back from summer recess for a one-day special session after many of them, mostly from his own Labour Party and at least two within his own cabinet, raised doubts about Britain's involvement in an anti-Iraq military campaign.
One of the most prominent sceptics, Diane Abbott, a Labour member of Parliament, said that she found the report unpersuasive. "Tony Blair will have to do better than this if he wants to convince the British public to go to war," she said.
Protesters in an open-top bus outside the House of Commons loudly sang John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance."
While the report, which the government called a dossier, put forth no startling revelations, Donald Anderson, head of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, told the House that he thought that was one of its merits.
"It's a very British document," he said. "There is no hyperbole. It is low key yet at the same time it is very sober and chilling."
Menzies Campbell, the foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats, said he remained unconvinced of the need for military strikes. "Where is the evidence that containment and deterrence have now failed to the point at which military action is deemed necessary?" he asked.
In Baghdad, an Iraqi government minister denied all the charges. "Mr Blair is acting as part of the Zionist campaign against Iraq and all his claims are baseless," the official, Culture Minister Hamed Youssef Hummadi, said at a news conference.
In a forward to the report, Blair said he believed the compilation of information from Britain's intelligence and security agencies had proved that Saddam threatened the stability of the world and had to be blocked now.
"What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt," Blair said, "is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile program."
"I also believe that, as stated in the document, Saddam will now to his utmost try to conceal his weapons from UN inspectors." In a bid to get international support for moving against Iraq, the United States and Britain are preparing a new UN resolution that would oblige Saddam to disarm and would threaten military action if he did not. Blair said the measure was just days away. Seeking to sway the opinions of the many critics in Britain who agree that Saddam is dangerous but believe he has been effectively contained and question the need to attack him now, Blair said, "It is clear that, despite sanctions, the policy of containment has not worked sufficiently well to prevent Saddam from developing these weapons."
"I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current, that he has made progress on weapons of mass destruction and that he has to be stopped."
In an implied response to criticism that he has hewed too closely to the Bush administration's militant stance on Iraq, Blair said, "I believe that faced with the information available to me the U.K. government has been right to support the demands that this issue be confronted and dealt with."
The report did not say that Iraq had a present nuclear capability but asserted that Saddam had recalled specialists to work on its nuclear weapons program and had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa despite having no civilian nuclear program that could use it. The report estimated that Saddam would need five years to develop a nuclear weapon on his own but could speed the process to within two years if he acquired weapons-grade material. It asserted that Iraq had rebuilt chemical plants destroyed in the 1991 Gulf War and it published satellite pictures of two of them surrounded by high walls, watch towers and security guards that the report said proved they were for military rather than civilian use.
It also said that Iraq had developed mobile laboratories for making biological weapons that could be used in warfare to escape detection. The chemical and biological agents capable of producing mass casualties that the report said Iraq had stored and was continuing to produce included mustard gas, sarin, anthrax and botulinum toxin. It said there were command and control arrangements in place to use these chemical and biological weapons, and that intelligence showed Saddam might have delegated authority over them his son Quesai.
The report said Saddam had retained up to 20 Al Hussein missiles with a range of 650 kilometers (400 miles), capable of carrying chemical or biological weapons, and it published a map that showed that Iraqi weapons under development could reach the whole of the Arab Middle East, Israel, Greece, Cyprus and Turkey.
A report by the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies earlier this month put the number of Al Hussein missiles at 12.
John Chipman, the institute's director, said Tuesday that the government's assessment disclosed fresh details about Saddam's efforts to procure materials abroad for its nuclear program and highlighted Iraq's strategy for confounding new inspections.
"It shows that Iraq has prepared for the possible return of inspectors by developing more sophisticated concealment strategies," he told the BBC.
Gary Samore, a nonproliferation specialist who wrote the institute's report, said he had had only public information to go on whereas the government had access to intelligence.
"As a consequence we focused on the period before the inspectors left in 1998, and this new one focuses on the period since then," he said in an interview. "Put them together, and you have the best picture you're going to be able to construct."
The report repeated the institute's finding that Saddam regarded weapons of mass destruction not as weapons of last report but as usuable bombs and missiles capable of giving Iraq regional power.
The British public has shown in polls that it is insistent that any action against Saddam being taken only with United Nations approval, and that view was put forward repeatedly in Tuesday's Commons debate.
Just as repeatedly, the report went out of its way to portray the Iraqi leader as constantly and flagrantly in violation of UN rules and regulations.
In one of the more original entries, the report made its case for Saddam's diversion of largesse to his own comfort by publishing a drawing of one of his vast presidential palaces overlaid on the distinctly smaller area taken up by Buckingham Palace.
