Global Policy Forum

By David E. Sanger with Warren Hoge

This week in London, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has been forced to acknowledge publicly that a paper published by the British government to make the case against Saddam Hussein was "an embarrassment."

The man who oversaw compilation of the report, Alastair Campbell, who is Prime Minister Tony Blair's communications chief, spent today parrying with an angry committee chairman in Parliament who charged he had "embellished the evidence to the point of misleading Parliament and the public at a vital time relating to peace and war." Mr. Blair himself told Parliament that while the government had made some errors in presenting its case, the removal of Saddam Hussein was "right for Iraq, right for the region and right for the wider world."

In contrast, President Bush has largely brushed off questions about the intelligence as the work of "revisionist historians." His Republican allies, unlike Mr. Blair's divided Labor Party, have kept Congressional hearings behind closed doors.

Mr. Bush's protective press aides have been successful at shielding him from many questions on the subject, but even when reporters had brief access to the president — on Tuesday at Camp David, today at the White House — they asked about other subjects. "That would be unimaginable in London, at least in this environment," a British diplomat said here today.

Mr. Bush's political aides say that while the issue of potentially tailored intelligence has not gone away, they are more worried about the possible political impact of continuing casualties in occupied Iraq. Within Mr. Bush's foreign policy team, officials say they are more worried about Mr. Blair than about their own boss. The British prime minister, they say, may be so wounded by investigations in London that he will have to keep some distance from President Bush when the White House needs him as a bridge to Europe, particularly on issues like Iran and Syria.

On Thursday, Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, is expected to describe Mr. Bush's vision of the American-British agenda in the aftermath of Iraq — at a speech in London.

Whether Ms. Rice and others will ever face the kind of questioning that has emerged in London is unclear. Democrats on this side of the Atlantic are now making more pointed charges and raising more specific questions.

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who voted in favor of the resolution authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war if necessary, declared last week that the president "misled every one of us," though he later said he was referring to two specific pieces of intelligence. This morning, Howard Dean, another aspirant for the Democratic presidential nomination, who opposed the war, told a foreign policy forum here that the question was coming down to "what did the president know and when did he know it."

But on Capitol Hill, such charges do not appear to be resonating very loudly.

Many Democrats say they are concerned about making public charges, at least until it is clear that investigators in Iraq are unlikely to find large caches of unconventional weapons. Republicans say that they will take a go-slow approach, reading intelligence reports over the summer, questioning analysts about whether they were pressured into certain assessments of Iraq's abilities, and only then contemplating public hearings.

"This isn't sticking," one of Mr. Bush's top political strategists insisted the other day, "because people understand that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein."

Today, Mr. Blair told a noisy session of Parliament there was not a single instance in which his government made any claims that were wrong — including the one in a September "White Paper" that charged that Mr. Hussein's chemical and biological weapons "are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them." Today that claim looks particularly open to question because American and British forces have not yet found evidence of weapons that were ready to launch.

Mr. Blair has most recently presented a humanitarian argument for Mr. Hussein's removal, emphasizing that he was a murderous dictator — a theme Mr. Bush has also stressed, to applause, in recent fund-raising appearances. In part the difference reactions may lie in the different ways the American and British publics regarded the Iraqi threat in the first place.

"The basic rationale of Iraq was that we wanted to prevent a second 9/11, this time with nuclear weapons, maybe provided by Saddam Hussein," said Samuel R. Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser, whom the Democrats have turned to for advice on how to handle the delicate issue of confronting Mr. Bush on the rationale for the war without seeming to denigrate its outcome. "That resonated here," he said, but in Europe "the threat pointed to the need for more and more inspections."

So while Republicans stay in firm command of the investigation here, in London two parliamentary panels are now looking into the allegations, and one of them, the House select committee on foreign affairs, has taken testimony from Mr. Straw and the two ministers who resigned from Mr. Blair's cabinet over the war, Robin Cook and Clare Short.

Ms. Short said that Mr. Blair had "duped" the country, while Mr. Cook said, "Instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a decision about policy, we used intelligence as the basis on which to justify a policy on which we had already settled."

At issue are the September report and a second dossier promoted by the government to swing public opinion behind Mr. Blair's conviction that Mr. Hussein and his unconventional arms represented a serious and immediate threat. At the time London was viewed as a more credible source of information than Washington, but critics are now charging that Britain overplayed its role and manipulated information.

The second report, produced by Downing Street officials, has come to be known as the "dodgy dossier" because it turned out to be a mixture of real intelligence and parts of articles from scholarly and military journals. Mr. Campbell conceded that there had been a "mistake" in its preparation, and that parts of an article written by Ibrahim al-Marashi for the Middle East Review of International Affairs had been included without attribution in the February dossier.

He told the committee that he had apologized to intelligence chiefs for the gaffe, but he maintained it had been an accident and that procedures for making such information public had since been tightened.

Mr. Blair told the House that he had not been aware that part of the dossier was actually plagiarized from the scholarly article but he defended the document's accuracy. "There is not a single fact in it which is disputed," he said. "Regardless of the provenance, that doesn't alter the fact that it is truthful."

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