Iraq Inquiry: Tony Blair defiant over war

Giving evidence at the Iraq Inquiry today, former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair made clear that it was always his intention to join forces with the Americans if it came to war with Iraq.

And watched in the small inquiry chamber by families of some of the 179 British personnel who died in the Iraq conflict, he defiantly denied he struck a private deal with then-U.S. President George Bush 11 months before the 2003 American-led invasion.

Mr Blair said he had always been clear publicly that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had to be confronted over his supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) but he insisted that he had left open how it should be done.

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The former Prime Minister defended his assertion in the Government’s controversial Iraq dossier, published in September 2002, that the intelligence had established “beyond doubt” that Saddam had WMD.

He said: “What I said in the foreword was that I believed it was beyond doubt. I did believe it and I did believe it was beyond doubt.

“It was hard to come to any other conclusion than that this person is continuing WMD programmes."

He accepted it had been a mistake not to make clear the now-notorious claim that some WMD could be launched within 45 minutes referred to battlefield weapons and not long-range missiles.

“I would have been better to have corrected it in the light of the significance it later took on,” he admitted.

Mr Blair also declared that United Nations backing for the Iraq war would have made “life a lot easier”.

But the former PM said President Bush decided the UN Security Council’s support “wasn’t necessary”.

Mr Blair said it was “correct” to say that he shared that view - if Saddam was seen to be continually breaching international laws.

Mr Blair confirmed that he discussed the issue of Iraq when he met Mr Bush for now notorious private, one-to-one talks at his Texas ranch at Crawford in April 2002 but he insisted that they did not get into “specifics”.

“What I was saying - I was not saying this privately incidentally, I was saying it in public - was ’We are going to be with you in confronting and dealing with this threat’.

“The one thing I was not doing was dissembling in that position. How we proceed in this is a matter that was open. The position was not a covert position, it was an open position.

“We would be with them in dealing with this threat and how we did that was an open question, and even at that stage I was raising the issue of going to the UN.”

But pressed on what he thought Mr Bush took from the meeting, he went further, saying: “I think what he took from that was exactly what he should have taken, which was if it came to military action because there was no way of dealing with this diplomatically, we would be with him.”

He said the “calculus of risk” relating to Saddam’s supposed WMD changed “dramatically” following the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers the previous year.

“The fact is, force is always an option. What changed after September 11 was that if necessary - and there was no other way of dealing with this threat - we were going to remove him,” he said.

Comments Mr Blair made to Fern Britton during a BBC interview with Fern Britton in December last year came back to haunt him at today's inquiry.

In the interview the former PM admitted he would have thought it right to remove Saddam even if he had known that he did not have WMD.

Today he said: “Even with all my experience in dealing with interviews, it still indicates that I have got something to learn about it.

“Obviously, all I was saying was you cannot describe the nature of the threat in the same way if we knew then what we know now.

“It was in no sense a change of position. The position was that it was the approach of UN resolutions on WMD. That was the case. It was then and it remains.”

Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon died in Iraq, accused Mr Blair of being “smarmy” and of refusing to acknowledge any of the military families.

Mrs Gentle sat a few feet away from the former PM and said she was “shaking” after coming so close to him following years of trying to meet him.

Asked how she felt, she replied: “Actually, I felt sick. He seemed to be shaking as well, which I am pleased about - the eyes of all the families were on him.

“He had a smirk on his face which has made the families very angry.”

Asked whether Gordon Brown was watching the Iraq Inquiry today, his spokesman said: “He’s got a very busy day ... there are a number of news channels on in Number 10 and he is being updated, as he always is on developments, today.”