Iraq Inquiry:FORMER BRITISH prime minister Tony Blair has defended the Iraq invasion, denied that he misled the British public about the threat posed by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and warned the international community it may be forced to deal with alliances between "rogue states", such as Iran, and terrorist organisations, such as al-Qaeda.
During a six-hour appearance before the Iraq inquiry, chaired by John Chilcot, Mr Blair said he had believed the intelligence that said the Iraqi dictator had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), even though he acknowledged none were found after Saddam was ousted. He also insisted he would do the same again.
The “calculus of risk” had changed after the September 11th attacks in the United States, he said, since it created the danger that organisations such as al-Qaeda could kill thousands more people if they got their hands on nuclear, chemical or biological weapons from failed or repressive states.
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Pointing to the IRA, he said, it had carried out “unjustified” attacks “but in a circumstance that you could understand”, while those who attacked New York and Washington, killing 3,000 people, would have killed 30,000 if they could.
No WMD were found by the Iraq survey group after the invasion, he acknowledged, but it did find that Saddam “had the intent, and the intellectual know-how” to begin developing them anew, once the equipment shortages forced upon him by UN sanctions eased.
Repeatedly emphasising Iran’s danger, Mr Blair said: “My fear was – and I would say I hold this fear stronger today than I did back then as a result of what Iran particularly today is doing – my fear is that states that are highly repressive or failed, the danger of a WMD link is that they become porous, they construct all sorts of different alliances with people.
“When I look at the way that Iran today links up with terror groups – and this is a different topic for a different day – but I would say that a large part of the destabilisation in the Middle East at the present time comes from Iran.”
He said he had delayed full British invasion planning until October 2002 and barred public discussion of it because he did not want to be led down “an irreversible path” to war, when he was still trying to get the US to go back to the UN to get a new agreed edict against Saddam, which came in the form of UN resolution 1441.
There was no legal requirement to go back subsequently in the spring of 2003 to get a further resolution mandating legal action because 1441 had already made it clear that Iraq would be guilty of materially breaching the resolution if it had not by then complied with the demands to grant open access to weapons inspectors.
Accepting that mistakes were made in Iraq after the invasion, he rejected charges that there had been a “cavalier” lack of planning, insisting it had never occurred to anyone that the entire Iraqi civil service and administration would not be in place once Baghdad had fallen.
He had not made a secret pact with then-US president George Bush to invade Iraq in Crawford, Texas in April 2002.
He said he had stated clearly privately and publicly that “if it came to military action, because there was no way of dealing with this diplomatically, we would be with him” , but all diplomatic routes had to be tried first.