THERE ARE THREATS AND THERE ARE THREATS

No 10 knew: Iraq no threat (Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicholas Watt, August 19, 2003, The Guardian)

One of the prime minister's closest advisers issued a private warning that it would be wrong for Tony Blair to claim Iraq's banned weapons programme showed Saddam Hussein presented an "imminent threat" to the west or even his Arab neighbours.

In a message that goes to the heart of the government's case for war, the Downing Street chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, raised serious doubts about the nature of September's Downing Street dossier on Iraq's banned weapons.

"We will need to make it clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat," Mr Powell wrote on September 17, a week before the document was finally published.

His remarks urging caution contrasted with the chilling language used by Mr Blair in a passionate speech in the Commons as he launched the dossier a week later.

He described Iraq's prog-ramme for weapons of mass destruction as "active, detailed, and growing ... It is up and running now".

The Guardian seems to be mixing an awful lot of separable issues here. Of course Saddam was not a realistic threat to use his own weapons on Britain or the US. But obviously he had both poison gas and SCUDs at some point and they, at least, would threaten his neighbors. He also could have given his own weapons to terrorist groups, like those in the Palestine-Israel conflict with whom he had close ties, or to al Qaeda which operated in the north of the country, had representatives in Baghdad, and to whom he'd previously offered his nation as a base of operations. And North Korea has said that it plans to make and sell nuclear weapons, which he certainly had enough money to buy and seemingly the willingness to use. Finally, he continued to murderously oppress his own people, with 500,000 children dying as a result of his refusal to cede power and end UN sanctions. Given the totailty of those circumstances, to say that he was "no threat", as the headline does, is absurd. Even to say that he was not an "imminent threat" would need so many qualifiers as to eventually render itself unintelligible. Saddam was a threat to the people of Iraq, to the Israelis, to his Arab neighbors, and to the West in exactly that order. That the last group is the one he threatened least can hardly be an argument that he should therefore have been allowed to continue, can it? Posted by Orrin Judd at August 22, 2003 12:57 AM