WASHINGTON — Maybe we should grant Tony Blair permanent resident status and assign him to Washington.
I make the recommendation in part because the British prime minister has been such a godsend for our two most recent presidents — a staunch, articulate and persuasive ally in our times of international crisis.
But I make it for another, more personal reason: Blair is always there when I need him.
I needed him three years ago when I was trying to understand the Clinton administration’s plan to resume bombing of Iraq as a substitute for having weapons inspectors on the ground there. If the inspections, to which Saddam Hussein agreed as part of a deal to save his hide, were aimed at proving whether Iraq was manufacturing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, how could bombing raids — and limited raids, at that — substitute for the inspectors? The only way bombs could solve the problem is if we knew both that the outlawed weapons were being amassed and precisely where. But in that case, we wouldn’t need inspectors.
Moreover, it seemed to me, that years of on-the-ground inspections had turned up very little evidence to support our suspicions of what Saddam was up to.
That’s when Blair came riding to the rescue.
He told us — at a joint press conference with Clinton, who had told us nothing — that Britain had just published a document detailing everything the inspectors had uncovered in a half-dozen years of work. The document also listed what Saddam was known to have produced or imported that hadn’t been found: 17 tons of "growth media" used to grow biological spores, 4,000 tons of "precursors" (components) of chemical weapons and 600 tons of "potential precursors" for VX nerve gas.
He then explained why the British had released the document: "We had, first of all, to make sure that our own public opinion was properly educated as to why it is so essential that the U.N. inspectors are able to do their work."
American public opinion was, after that press conference, a little less uneducated than it had been.
It wasn’t the last time Blair was helpful.
You will recall the early assurances that Osama bin Laden was the master hand behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the demand that Afghanistan’s Taliban turn him over. The response from Kabul was that if we supplied proof of bin Laden’s involvement, the Taliban would surrender him to a neutral country.
Bush said no deal, and maybe it was, tactically, the right thing to do. But didn’t you wonder — at least a little — how much proof we actually had? Didn’t you wish we could have been shown a little of it — not enough to compromise our intelligence sources, of course, but perhaps enough to show that our people were on the ball?
The proof was never offered. What we got instead were increasingly confident assertions, including this little gem from NATO Secretary-General George Robertson on Sept. 26:
"It becomes clearer and clearer that all of the roads being pursued lead towards Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network. The United States has not yet made any definitive conclusion, but the bulk of the evidence that has been collected seems to be clearly pointing in that direction."
The bombing started 10 days later — without any additional proffer of evidence that I recall.
But now comes Tony Blair with a video he says was made on Oct. 20 for distribution only among al Qaeda members in which bin Laden clearly claims responsibility for Sept. 11.
"It is what we instigated, for a while, in self-defense," bin Laden says, "and it was revenge for our people killed in Palestine and Iraq. … Every time they kill us, we kill them so the balance of terror can be achieved."
I’d never doubted that bin Laden was awful, even evil. But I am grateful to Blair to have this evidence that bin Laden was intimately involved in Sept. 11 — and not just as a cheerleader.
It might still not be the sort of evidence that would stand up in an American criminal court, but it would certainly do the job in the sort of military tribunal President Bush wants to establish.
But then, come to think of it, so would almost anything.
William Raspberry can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or willrasp@washpost.com.
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