PM's DECEIT SACRIFICED BRITISH LIVES Jun 2 2003

By Sir Max Hastings Who Initially Accepted The Case For War

EVEN by the standards of the Bush Administration, last week was a remarkable one for diplomatic folly.

Paul Wolfowitz, the Assistant Defence Secretary, disclosed that the US wilfully exaggerated the threat of weapons of mass destruction to rally support for an Iraq war.

Likewise, Wolfowitz's boss, Donald Rumsfeld, declared that he has little expectation of finding any WMDs.

He then launched a new round of sabre-rattling against Iran.

So much for the gleeful banner under which President Bush greeted a homebound American aircraft carrier crew: "Mission accomplished."

The leading lights of the US Defence Department always made it plain that disarming Saddam was a pretext for regime change in Iraq.

Yet that pretext was the basis of a massive American diplomatic offensive.

Tony Blair explicitly told the British people that disarming Saddam justified taking Britain to war. That argument was fraudulent.

Some of us, who accepted public and private Whitehall assurances about WMDs, today feel rather silly.

Robin Cook is crowing, and well he may. He said that WMDs did not exist. He appears to have been right.

It is irrelevant that the Allies won the war. The Prime Minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit, and it stinks.

Meanwhile inside Iraq, it has become irrelevant to criticise the Americans for past failure to anticipate the problems of making the country work.

The question is whether they intend to commit resources on a scale commensurate with the task, now that the requirement is plain.

The example of Afghanistan, where Washington seems untroubled by post-war anarchy, is not encouraging.

The Americans shrug that today's warlordism offers Afghans better lives than yesterday's Taliban, and that outcome should suffice.

THE administration always asserted that the Iraqi people were not enemies, but hapless pawns of a tyrant.

In 1945, the Germans and Japanese begged for cigarettes and scratched in the ruins of their cities without much audible protest, because they knew they were the vanquished. The Iraqis, by contrast, behave as if they had just voted the Americans into office. They are petulantly impatient to see their new government fulfil its election pledges. The world is happy to cheer them on.

George Bush seems likely to fight a khaki presidential election in 2004, on a platform of tough action abroad in the cause of homeland defence.

Critics observe that he can scarcely do anything else, since his management of the US economy frightens the life out of everyone who thinks beyond polling day.

It is hard to overstate the seriousness of the damage to British trust which is inflicted almost daily by Washington's insouciance.

What was the point of reluctantly joining the Iraqi adventure, people ask, if the British Government cannot curb the excesses of American policy, and if the British Army's reward for participation is a half-baked war crimes charge against one of its officers by a disgruntled American major?

AMERICAN hawks would dismiss most of the above as a reflection of familiar British liberal pusillanimity, our unflagging belief that we ran the world more intelligently in our centuries than they do in theirs.

Yet there are good grounds for mistrusting American judgment.

I was among those who thought the war mistaken, but reluctantly accepted the arguments for British participation, to preserve the Atlantic alliance and to maintain some marginal influence upon American policy. Today, given the behaviour of the US Administration, that case is in tatters. Thus, some people declare that this is the moment for Britain to jump ship, plainly to assert that we will go no further alongside an ally so reckless in its diplomacy, so careless in its actions.

Yet the US remains the only superpower we have got. It cannot be exchanged for a new model. Britain is now committed in Iraq, for better or worse.

It remains vital to engage with Washington. Even in the face of great difficulties, the diplomatic effort must continue, to restrain American unilateralism.

But a heavy blow has been struck against our faith in American rhetoric and judgment.

The struggle against terrorism, and the management of the world look harder today than they did a week ago, thanks to Washington's frightening surge of unforced errors.

-This article first appeared in the Sunday Telegraph. Max Hastings is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and London Evening Standard and is now a writer and military historian.

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