BASIC MEDIA BRIEFING

WEDNESDAY 21 JULY 2004 - FOR IMMEDIATE USE

After the Butler Report:
Time to Take on the Group Think in Washington and London?

In a carefully worded and detailed report released on July 14, Lord Butler provided welcome confirmation of what has been evident from open sources for many months, that:

there was an enormous intelligence failure on WMD in Iraq; and
senior government officials in both the UK and US, including the Prime Minister and President, went far beyond the intelligence findings in their public statements.

In short, Butler says Downing Street stretched the available intelligence to "the outer limits" but there was "no deliberate attempt on the part of the government to mislead". Instead, the Committee alludes to "group think - the development of a prevailing wisdom" among the intelligence services and the government (a similar conclusion to the US Senate intelligence committee report, which spoke of "collective group think" among the US intelligence community).

Others came to the same conclusions as Butler and the US Senate Intelligence Committee months ago (and some even before the war) without classified access: including several US & UK journalists, academics and independent analysts, notably those at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and ourselves at BASIC - see our January 2004 report, Unravelling the Known Unknowns: Why no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found in Iraq http://www.basicint.org/pubs/Research/2004WMD.htm

Rather than apportioning blame, however, it is more important to learn the right lessons and to prevent a repetition. BASIC Executive Director, Ian Davis, said that:

Preventing the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons is a major concern for our time, but mistakes must be acknowledged, policies reviewed and doctrines amended. What is most troubling is that the collective delusion, or 'group think', that Lord Butler and the US Senate Intelligence Committee say distorted our picture (and policy response) in Iraq, may also be at the heart of current US & UK security thinking more generally.

Current security orthodoxy, for example, suggests the existence of a nexus between international terrorism, WMD proliferation and failing states. Despite evidence for such a nexus being as 'thin and uncertain' as WMD in Iraq, it is nonetheless shaping current US and European policy responses in the 'war on terror'. Read the full analysis as well as an assessment of the policy lessons from the intelligence and political failings in Iraq in a new BASIC Paper: After the Butler Report: Time to Take on the Group Think in Washington and London?, available at http://www.basicint.org/pubs/Papers/BP46.htm.

Dr. Ian Davis, Executive Director, British American Security Information Council
and co-author of Unravelling the Known Unknowns and
After the Butler Report

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