Bush and Blair under heavy pressures over Iraq's alleged WMDs

WASHINGTON, December 24 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Faced with questions about the whereabouts of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, British government officials are now looking at a new theory revolving around the possibility that Saddam Hussein and British intelligence might have been hoodwinked into believing that the country really did possess such banned arms, according to a British daily Wednesday, December 24.

Also U.S. President George W. Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board faulted the White House and the CIA on making claims that Iraq had sought to obtain nuclear materials.

A theory circulated by British officials is that intelligence had been hoodwinked into believing that Iraq really did possess weapons of mass destruction, the Guardian reported.

According to the theory, revealed by the British daily, Saddam and his senior advisers and commanders were told by lower-ranking Iraqi officers that his forces were equipped with usable chemical and biological weapons.

The officers did not want to tell their superiors that the weapons were either d destroyed or no longer usable, claimed the theory.

The trouble for Britain was, the theory goes, that MI6's informants were the senior officials close to Saddam - with the result that British intelligence was also hoodwinked, said the British paper.

The claims, which is being spread privately by British officials, is open to the interpretation that the government is searching for an excuse, however, implausible, for failure to discover any WMD in Iraq, it added.

On the other hand, U.S. officials reacted skeptically to the suggestion that Saddam was fooled by his own scientists, according to the Guardian.

Now seven months into the Iraq invasion, no weapons of mass destruction – the main justification for attacking the Arab country – have been found, raising skepticism the offensive on the oil-rich country was launched on false pretexts.

Hans Blix, the former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, said Tuesday, December 23, that most experts on Iraq now believed Saddam almost certainly destroyed his weapons of mass destruction after the first Gulf war in 1991, according to the paper.

Saddam had said in an interview one month before the U.S.-British invasion that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and accused Britain and the United States of being intent on war because of their desire to control oil in the Middle East.

"The destruction of Iraq is a pre-requisite to controlling oil, … the most important factor in controlling oil is to destroy Iraq," Saddam had said.

Out Of 'Desperation'

In a separately-related development, the U.S. Board concluded that the White House made a questionable claim in January's State of the Union address about Saddam's efforts to obtain nuclear materials because of its desperation to show that Saddam had an active program to develop nuclear weapons, a well-placed source familiar with the board's findings told the Washington Post.

The source said the board believes the White House was so anxious "to grab onto something affirmative" about Hussein's nuclear ambitions that it disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that the claim was questionable, according to the Post.

The board is the first government body to complete its inquiry into an episode that buttressed criticism by lawmakers and others that the administration exaggerated intelligence to make the case for Iraq invasion, said the American daily.

The findings of the advisory board do not appear to add many new details about the uranium episode, but they made it clear that the White House should share blame with the CIA for allowing the questionable material into the speech.

“CIA Director George J. Tenet and deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley have accepted responsibility for allowing the assertion into the address.

But analysts then said the two officials could have been forced to claim responsibility to save the face of Bush himself, whose administration's allegations about Iraq's uranium purchase in Africa was already part of the administration's campaign to win domestic and international support for invading Iraq,” according to the paper.

The CIA had sent former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV to Niger in February 2002, and he found that the government rather twisted the intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam in Bush's speech and the U.N. nuclear watchdog had dismissed it as fraudulent.

On March 7, U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed El-Baradei delivered his own report on Iraq inspections to the Security Council, in which he asserted that allegations Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from the African nation of Niger were false.