Blair ‘would have gone to war without Iraqi WMD’
The last sentence;
“A senior Conservative MP said that evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war this week proved that the former Prime Minister was aware that new intelligence had established Saddam had no workable WMD missiles.”
“No worlable WMD missiles”. What’s that mean? Wait until they are workable, “usable”! We were at a state of war with Iraq. The UN, Bush or Blair needed no authorization to attack Iraq and remove Saddam.
Tony Blair would still have led the country to war in Iraq even if he had known that it had no weapons of mass destruction.
The former Prime Minister has confessed that he would have had to use different arguments to justify toppling Saddam Hussein. But he says in an interview to be broadcast tomorrow morning that he would still have taken steps to remove the Iraqi dictator from power.
He also put the decision to go to war in Iraq in the context of a wider battle over Islam. He said: “I happen to think that there is a major struggle going on all over the world, really, which is about Islam and what is happening within Islam.” He said that this struggle had a “long way to go”.
At the time of the conflict Mr Blair, who is to be questioned by the Iraq inquiry early next year, based his decision to go to war on evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
He gives an indication of his motives in an interview with the former daytime host Fern Britton, to be screened on BBC One. Mr Blair, who converted to Roman Catholicism when he left office two and a half years ago, denied that his religious faith played a direct part in his decision to go to war. But his faith gave him the strength to hold to the decision and supported him during “the loneliness of decision-maker”.
He said it was the “threat” that Saddam presented to the region that was uppermost in his mind. The development of weapons of mass destruction was one aspect of that threat.
Mr Blair said that there had been 12 years of the United Nations going “to and fro” on the subject, and he noted that Saddam had used chemical weapons on his own people.
Asked by Britton if he would still have gone on had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction, he said: “I would still have thought it right to remove him.”
Parents of some of the servicemen who have died have refused to shake his hand and accused him of being a war criminal with blood on his hands.
Mr Blair said that he was prepared to carry that responsibility. “There’s no point in going into a situation of conflict and not understanding there is going to be a price paid.”
The former Prime Minister, who now spends much of his time in the Middle East, working as an envoy for the Quartet of the US, Russia, the UN and the EU, said that it was difficult to judge yet whether the decision to go to war had been helpful or not.
This week the head of MI6 said that Saddam’s Iraq was one of a number of countries where Britain would have liked regime change. Sir John Sawers, who was at the time Mr Blair’s private secretary for foreign affairs, told the Iraq inquiry that discussions had taken place in 2001 - two years before the invasion - on “political” actions that could help to undermine the Baathist regime.
However, Sir John insisted that there had been no talk at that stage in Whitehall of military action in Iraq. He said that the approach adopted was based on the methods that had led to the ousting of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. Among the proposals considered was support for opposition groups and indicting Saddam for war crimes that he had committed during Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
“I think there are a lot of countries around the world where we would like to see a change of regime. That doesn’t mean one pursues active policies in that direction,” he said.
It was claimed last night that Mr Blair misled MPs by insisting that Britain was at risk from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before ordering the invasion. A senior Conservative MP said that evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war this week proved that the former Prime Minister was aware that new intelligence had established Saddam had no workable WMD missiles.
