ANOTHER MISTAKE

ONE of the tipping points in the UN Security Council debates last year, before the United States and Britain decided to go to war, was the presentation by Secretary of State Colin Powell of intelligence which, he said, proved that Iraq was preparing weapons of mass destruction. On February 4, 2003, Mr Powell spoke for over an hour and displayed several slides showing evidence of Iraqi weapons programmes. He placed particular emphasis on slides of aerial photographs of two mobile trailers designed, he said, for making biological weapons. Yesterday he acknowledged that the claims he had made at the Security Council were incorrect - whatever purpose the trailers may have had it was not for making biological weapons or any other type of weapon of mass destruction. Mr Powell blamed the CIA for this duff intelligence and said that before deciding to use it he had been assured that it was “multisourced and solid”. Why has it taken Mr Powell so long to admit his errror? The validity of the claim was questioned almost immediately by Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector, and by other experts; last October Dr David Kay, the US expert who led the Iraq Survey Group which searched for weapons of mass destruction after the war ended, said that probably such weapons had never existed.. One by one the foundation stones of the case made by Britain and the United States for the Iraq war are crumbling but those leaders who decided on war take no responsibility, choosing instead to blame their intelligence services for their inaccurate information. It is a scandalous situation which can only be remedied if people in positions of power resign when their judgement is shown to have been faulty.