Blair's Visit Turns Into Liability

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Blair's Visit Turns Into Liability
British leader's trip to U.S. should have been a victory lap. But questions over Iraq intelligence cause political embarrassment.

By Robin Wright and William Wallace
Special to the Times - 3:49 PM PDT, July 16, 2003
Times staff writer Wright reported from Washington, and special correspondent Wallace from London.

WASHINGTON -- For America's most faithful ally in the Iraq war, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's quick trip to Washington Thursday was supposed to be a victory lap, complete with the rare honor of speaking to a joint session of Congress before a meeting at the White House with President Bush.

Instead, the visit is proving to be a political embarrassment, even liability, for both leaders, as the failure to find Iraq's weapons of mass destruction raises questions about their credibility on both sides of the Atlantic.

Rather than reflect the strong trans-Atlantic bond, the visit also accentuates the differences between Washington and London on issues at the heart of future cooperation in Iraq, the Arab-Israeli peace process and the broader war on terrorism.

The leaders' joint press conference could even prove painful, with Bush and Blair likely to face grilling by reporters over their differences, particularly conflicting intelligence assessments about whether Saddam Hussein attempted to buy uranium in Africa to rebuild his nuclear program.

Britain's MI6 claims Iraq did. The United States' CIA thinks Baghdad did not, at least not in Niger.

Trying to reconcile those opposite views - and accounting for the fact neither country's military has found chemical, biological or nuclear weapons - could prove awkward.

Seeking to bridge the gap, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security advisor, said last week that Britain's assessment of Hussein's efforts to buy uranium was, in fact, accurate. However, she said it still should not have been cited in Bush's State of the Union address last in January because Washington did not know the specifics or sources of London's intelligence - and thus, did not meet the high U.S. standard of proof.

Blair also has spurned requests from both Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to ignore and isolate Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

The new U.S.-backed roadmap for peace is built around creating a new Palestinian leadership that is accountable, willing to crack down on militants and prepared to compromise in the name of peace-three steps the Bush administration believes Arafat is unwilling to take.

Propping up Arafat, U.S. officials say, will only weaken the 10-week-old government of new Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.

U.S.-British relations also have been strained by disputes over the status of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, particularly nine with British citizenship. The issue has come to a head now that Washington has selected two of them to be tried by a new military tribunal.

More than 200 British members of parliament recently issued a resolution calling for the two men to be repatriated, which the United States has been unwilling to do because Britain cannot provide assurances that they would be tried in British courts. Blair's government contends the evidence may not be admissible in British courts, and the White House does not want to risk their release.