PM stands by Iraq intelligence
The Prime Minister has insisted that he stands entirely by UK intelligence evidence related to Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Appearing before a twice-yearly committee of select committee chairs, Tony Blair maintained that the decision to go to war against the Middle Eastern state had been completely justified.
There was “no doubt whatever” that Saddam Hussein had been developing WMD and that the threat he posed both to the region and the wider world had been entirely real, the PM said.
His comments follow the publication of a Foreign Affairs Select Committee report yesterday which insisted that the “jury was still out” on whether the WMD claims would prove well-founded.
Significant evidence of WMD programmes has yet to be found in Iraq now two months after the end of major hostilities.
“I am quite sure that we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein”, the PM told the committee this morning. “I am quite sure we did the right thing because not merely was he a threat to his region and the wider world, but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of”.
He stressed: “I refute any suggestions that we mislead either parliament of the people totally. I think we made the right case, and I think we did the right thing”.
“I think that our intelligence services gave us the correct information and intelligence at the time”.
The PM was unwilling to give a concrete timetable for what he repeatedly insisted would be the eventual discovery of Iraqi WMD.
The Iraq survey group had only just started its work in the Middle Eastern state and would not be fully operational until the end of this month, he said.
“So it is going to take time, but what they will do in a systematic way is what Hans Blix (former UN chief weapons inspector) was unable to do.
The only way that the UN inspectors could effectively seek out WMD programmes was not by “chasing around trying to find the stuff”, Mr Blair stated.
“That is always going to be incredibly difficult to do because the stuff can be perfectly easily concealed, as can the documentation”.
“The only way you get to the truth of these weapons programmes is by interviewing the people concerned in them”, he said, expressing confidence that such interviews would not be able to take place.
Yesterday, the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee found that the Prime Minister had ‘inadvertently’ misrepresented a second report – the so-called dodgy dossier – to Parliament in February.
Addressing committee chairs this morning, Tony Blair took issue with this claim, insisting that all of the intelligence in the February paper had been entirely accurate.
However, he accepted that the Government had made an error in not originally attributing one of if its sources to a 12-year-old PhD thesis.
The Conservatives accuse the PM of failing to take the issue of the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’ with sufficient seriousness.
And both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats have renewed their joint call for an independent inquiry into the Government’s use of pre-war intelligence.
“The fact of the matter is that the longer this goes on, the more trust he erodes publicly in the Government and in the whole business of politics”, Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy remarked.
A Times survey today found that those opposed to war has risen from under a quarter to almost half of the UK public, while the number in favour of the war has slipped below 50%.
