Butler Report - Whitewash cannot deny Blair’s role

WHITEWASH is the word that best describes the Butler report on the role of British intelligence leading up to the war on Iraq.

A classic example of the establishment investigating itself, the inquiry skirts around the political minefield with such delicacy it would be astonishing if it criticised Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Lord Butler is after all the quintessential establishment figure, a 66-year-old career civil servant who has served five prime ministers including Wilson, Heath, Thatcher, Major and Blair.

Essentially, he was confined to examining the quality of intelligence used to make the case for Britain going to war with Iraq.

While the report casts doubt on the role played by British intelligence agencies, it falls far short of the US Senate probe which savaged the CIA for the quality of its pre-war information.

At worst, Lord Butler concludes that intelligence used by the British government to justify the war in Iraq was “seriously flawed”.

He also found that the secret service, MI6, did not check its sources well enough, and sometimes relied on third hand reports, in other words, gossip.

But in a blatant attempt to prop up the tottering secret service, he goes on to exonerate John Scarlett, the man who chaired the pivotal committee that advised the Government, and says he should be the next head of Britain’s spy network at MI6.

Tragically, even as he was delivering the long-awaited findings, chilling echoes of a car bomb that claimed the lives of 10 people and injured 40 were reverberating in the battle scarred streets of Baghdad.

The explosion claimed the lives of workers queuing in an area housing Iraqi government offices and the US and British embassies.

It was a grim reminder that more than 12,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict and that more than 1,000 troops from the US-British alliance have been killed since President George W Bush declared the war over.

Though Mr Blair is finally admitting that weapons of mass destruction did not exist in Iraq at the time of the war, he still believes the assault on Saddam Hussein’s evil regime was justified.

Many of those who dispute this claim are adamant Iraqi oil was the prime objective of the US-led war.

Dire warnings that the conflict would sow the seeds of terrorism have proved prophetic as al-Qaida, the extreme Muslim group, is now resurgent.

The anodyne nature of the Butler report enabled Mr Blair to tell the House of Commons that, “no one lied, no one made up the intelligence, no one inserted things into the dossier against the advice of the intelligence services”.

However, the Butler remit was so narrow that it could not probe the machinations of Downing Street on Iraq.

According to the Blair administration, the report shows it acted in good faith and exonerates it of allegations of misleading the public.

The nearest Butler comes to criticising the prime minister was the suggestion that his statement to the House of Commons when the Iraq dossier on weapons of mass destruction was published may have given the impression there was fuller and firmer intelligence behind it.

If Mr Blair hoped the report would bring the controversy to a close he is wrong. His leadership is fatally wounded. His place in history is secured but for the wrong reasons.

More likely than not, historians will see the Iraq war as a major blunder on Tony Blair’s watch.