Is Blair Toast?

While the US Senate Report on Intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war concentrated on the intelligence services, according to the Guardian Lord Butler's report is due to question how the intelligence was used. There have been rumors of Blair's resignation in anticipation of the Butler Report.

According to the Guardian article the report investigates intelligence received through Iraqi opposition groups, something the Senate report does not cover.

The trail that Butler has followed leads back to the summer of 2002, when a senior officer in Saddam's army first contacted an Iraqi opposition group based in London. He had information, it seemed, of huge importance. Iraqi commanders, the officer told the Iraqi National Alliance, could mount a WMD attack in 45 minutes. In fact, they could probably do it in 20.

The source was introduced by a dissident group with a clear agenda. The claim was based on Soviet operational manuals and - crucially - was true only for weapons used on the battlefield, not for strategic long-range weapons that could have reached British military bases in Cyprus or strike Israel. Importantly, the source made clear that the timings were only hypothetical. He could not say if the weapons actually existed.

Yet, within three months, the '45-minute claim' was splashed over newspaper front pages around the world. Stripped of context and caveats, the claim featured four times in the government's dossier on WMD, published by Blair in September 2002 to help persuade the public of the case for war.

So the intelligence was questionable to begin with and then hyped by the Blair government and used by the US.

This report will certainly not be good news for Blair and won't help Bush's case either.