What Tony Blair told the inquiry into the Iraq war
ABU GHRAIB ABUSE
“I was shocked and angry. Shocked because it was wrong and angry because of the damage I knew it would do.
“The truth is we were fighting a constant battle against people utterly misrepresenting us, our motives, what we were trying to do, and obviously those pictures and the abuse of prisoners was going to be vital propaganda for our enemies.”
LEGALITY OF WAR
“If [attorney general Peter Goldsmith] in the end had said this cannot be justified lawfully, then we would have been unable to take action.
“Anybody who knows Peter knows he would not have done it unless he believed in it and thought it was the correct thing to do.”
DID US OFFER TO GO IT ALONE?
“The Americans would have done that. I think President Bush actually at one point shortly before the debate said, ‘Look, if it’s too difficult for Britain, we understand’, but I took the view very strongly then that it was right for us to be with America since we believed in this too. It is true it was very divisive.”
FAILURE TO GET SECOND UN RESOLUTION
“It was very very clear to me that the French, the Germans and the Russians had decided they weren’t going to be in favour of this and there was a straightforward division, frankly, and I don’t think it would have mattered how much time we had taken, they weren’t going to agree that force should be used.”
A QUESTION OF JUDGMENT
“This isn’t about a lie, or a conspiracy, or a deceit, or a deception, this is a decision.
“And the decision I had to take was, given Saddam’s history, given his use of chemical weapons, given that over one million people whose deaths he caused, given 10 years of breaking UN resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons programme?
“It’s a decision in the end. I believed, and in the end so did the cabinet and so did parliament incidentally, that we were right not to run that risk.”
SADDAM AND AL-QAEDA
“We were actually saying to the Americans, look, Saddam and al-Qaeda, it’s two separate things, but I always worried that at some point these two things would come together. Not Saddam and al-Qaeda simply, but the notion of states proliferating WMD and terrorist groups. I still think that is a major risk today.”
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
“He had used them, he definitely had them, he was in breach of, I think, 10 United Nations resolutions on them, and so in a sense it would have required quite strong evidence the other way to be doubting the fact that he had this programme.”
COMMITMENTS TO U.S. GIVEN IN APRIL 2002
“The only commitment I gave, and gave openly, was a commitment to deal with Saddam.
“What I was saying to President Bush is, ‘We are going to be with you in confronting and dealing with this threat’.
“What changed after September 11th was that if necessary, and there was no other way of dealing with this threat, we were going to remove him.
“If we tried the UN route and that failed, my view was it had to be dealt with.”
ON REGIME CHANGE/WMD
“The fact is it was an appalling regime and we couldn’t run the risk of such a regime being allowed to develop WMD.”
ON IMPACT OF 9/11
“If September 11th hadn’t happened, our assessment of the risk of allowing Saddam any possibility of him reconstituting his programmes would not have been the same. After September 11th, our view, the American view, changed and changed dramatically.
“The point about this act in New York was that had they
been able to kill even more people than those 3,000, they would have. And so after that time, my view was you could not take risks with this issue at all.”