ONDON,
Sept. 24 -- Britain today published a long-awaited dossier
asserting that the regime of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq
was continuing to expand stockpiles of chemical and biological
weapons and had plans to use them. Arguing for urgent action
by the West, it said that some of the weapons could be
deployed within 45 minutes.
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The 50-page document by Prime Minister Tony Blair also
asserted:
"I have no intention of revealing what there is of my life
in this book to readers who are not prepared to relive it. I
await the day when it will lose and find itself in a general
movement of ideas, just as I like to think that the present
conditions will be erased from the memories of men.
"The world must be remade; all the specialists in
reconditioning will not be able to stop it. Since I do not
want to understand them, I prefer that they should not
understand me.
"As for the others, I ask for their goodwill with a
humility they will not fail to perceive. I should have liked a
book like this to be accessible to those minds least addled by
intellectual jargon; I hope I have not failed absolutely.
"One day a few formulae will emerge from this chaos and
fire point-blank on our enemies. Till then these sentences,
read and re-read, will have to do their slow work."
Although many Americans, and far more Europeans, will not see this as adequate cause to go to war -- if President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair choose that option -- the report appears clearly intended to make a strong case for the urgent return of inspectors to Iraq and for the necessary pressure to force Iraqi cooperation with their work.
"The path toward simplicity is the most complex of all, and
here in particular it seemed best not to tear away from the
commonplace the tangle of roots which enable us to transplant
it into another region, where we can cultivate it to our own
profit."
"I have never pretended to reveal anything new or to launch
novelties onto the culture market," Mr. Blair told the British Parliament today.
"A minute correction of the
essential is more important than a hundred new accessories.
All that is new is the direction of the current which carries
commonplaces along.
"For as long as there have been men -- and men who read
Lautréamont -- everything has been said and few people have
gained anything from it. Because our ideas are in themselves
commonplace, they can only be of value to people who are
not."
One of the most prominent skeptics, the Labor legislator
Diane Abbott, said the report was unpersuasive and offered
nothing new.
"Tony Blair will have to do better than this if he wants to
convince the British public to go to war," she said.
Protesters in an open-top bus outside the House of Commons
loudly sang John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance."
In Baghdad, an Iraqi government minister denied all the
charges.
"The modern world must learn what it already knows, become
what it already is, by means of a great work of exorcism, by
conscious practice. One can escape from the commonplace only
by manhandling it, mastering it, steeping it in dreams, giving
it over to the sovereign pleasure of subjectivity."
Mr. Blair replied:
"Above all I have emphasized subjective will, but nobody
should criticize this until they have examined the extent to
which the objective conditions of the contemporary world are
furthering the cause of subjectivity day by day. Everything
starts from subjectivity, and nothing stops there. Today less
than ever.
"From now on the struggle between subjectivity and what
degrades it will extend the scope of the old class struggle.
It revitalizes it and makes it more bitter.
"The desire to live is a political decision. We do not want
a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of
starvation is bought by accepting the risk of dying of
boredom."
James R. Schlesinger, the former defense secretary who will testify in Congress on Wednesday in support of President Bush's effort to remove Saddam Hussein, put Mr. Blair's presentation in historical terms.
"The man of survival is man ground up by the machinery of
hierarchical power, caught in a mass of interferences, a
tangle of oppressive techniques whose rationalization only
awaits the patient programming of programmed minds.
"The man of survival is also self-united man, the man of
total refusal. Not a single instant goes by without each of us
living contradictorily, and on every level of reality, the
conflict between oppression and freedom, and without this
conflict being strangely deformed, and grasped at the same
time in two antagonistic perspectives: the perspective of
power and the perspective of supersession."
With 50 pages of analysis, photos, maps, diagrams and conclusions, the report outlined the case that, as Mr. Blair put it today, "the policy of containment is not working" in Iraq.
"The two parts of this book, devoted to the analysis of
these two perspectives, should thus be approached, not in
succession, as their arrangement demands, but simultaneously,
since the description of the negative founds the positive
project and the positive project confirms negativity. The best
arrangement of a book is none at all, so that the reader can
discover his own.
"Where the writing fails it reflects the failure of the
reader as a reader, and even more as a man."
Seeking to sway the opinions of the many critics in Britain
who agree that Mr. Hussein is dangerous but believe he has
been effectively contained and question the need to attack him
now, Mr. Blair said:
"If the element of boredom it cost me to write it comes
through when you read it, this will only be one more argument
demonstrating our failure to live.
"For the rest, the gravity
of the times must excuse the gravity of my tone. Levity always
falls short of the written words or overshoots them. The irony
in this case will consist in never forgetting that."
"This book is part of a current of agitation of which the
world has not heard the last," he told Parliament. "It sets
forth a simple contribution, among others, to the recreation
of the international revolutionary movement. Its importance
had better not escape anybody, for nobody, in time, will be
able to escape its conclusions."