Iraq Inquiry: Tony Blair had no regrets over toppling Saddam Hussein

Tony Blair refused to express regret for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and told the Chilcot Inquiry he would take the decision to invade Iraq again even knowing the dictator had no weapons of mass destruction.
By Rosa Prince and James Kirkup
Published: 10:00PM GMT 29 Jan 2010

During six tense hours in front of the inquiry into the war, the former prime minister also used his testimony repeatedly to urge world leaders to take military action against Iran, which he described as more dangerous than Iraq had been under Saddam.

His confident delivery was interrupted only once by the audience, which included the relatives of British troops killed in Iraq, when he was asked to reflect on the fate of those who had died during the conflict. Key points - Tony Blair:

* Said that the September 11th attacks changed everything

* Revealed that he promised George Bush a year earlier that he would join an invasion to topple Saddam

* Backtracked on his admission during Fern Britton interview, in which he said he would have gone to war without WMD

* Stood by his belief that Iraq’s possession of WMD was “beyond doubt”

* Stood by the Iraq dossier, but said that the 45-minute claim should have been corrected

But he did not stumble as he was asked whether he had any regrets over the war, saying: “Responsibility, but not a regret for removing Saddam Hussein. I believe he was a monster, that he threatened not just the region but the world.

“And in the circumstances that we faced then, but I think even if you look back now, it was better to deal with this threat, to remove him from office.”

In defiant and assured testimony, the former prime minister was clear that the Iraqi dictator had to be “got rid of” the moment the 9/11 attacks on the United States took place.

He made explicit that Britain was prepared from the outset to go to war without the support of the United Nations, but denied entering into a secret pact with President George W Bush to take military action a year before the 2003 invasion.

“This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception. It’s a decision,” he said.

“The decision I took – and frankly would take again – was if there was any possibility that he could develop weapons of mass destruction we should stop him. That was my view then and that is my view now. This is a profoundly wicked, I would say almost psychopathic, man.”

Mr Blair went on to deny deceiving Parliament and the public over the intelligence reports of WMD used to justify the war, saying: “I did believe it. And I did believe it frankly beyond doubt.”

Insisting that UN weapons inspections would have failed to find WMD, even if they had been given more time, he defended the decision to circumvent the Security Council and go to war without a specific mandate.

Muffled shouts from the protesters outside the building could be heard occasionally as Mr Blair spoke, and some relatives wept as he came to the end of his evidence.

HOW THE WORLD CHANGED AFTER 9/11

Mr Blair told the hearing he considered the September 11 2001 atrocities to be an attack on Britain as well as the United States, changing his assessment of the risk from Saddam, and making “regime change” in Iraq virtually inevitable.

He said the fundamentalist terrorist attacks showed him that rogue states, including Iraq, could not be allowed to continue to defy the rest of the world, or potentially develop weapons of mass destruction.

Pushed on claims by Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to the US, that a deal to invade Iraq was “signed in blood” between President Bush and Mr Blair at one-to-one talks at the Texas ranch in Crawford, he admitted that he told the American leader that Britain “would be with him”.

But, he added: “I don’t think Christopher Meyer was ever at the critical meeting. The position was not a covert position, it was an open position. The primary consideration for me was to send an absolutely powerful, clear and unremitting message that, after September 11, if you were a regime engaged in WMD, you had to stop.”

THE INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

Mr Blair denied that he had deceived the country or Parliament about the reasons for going to war, or over Iraq’s ability to launch WMD. He defended his assertion in the notorious dossier of September 2002, which made the case for war, that the intelligence services had established “beyond doubt” that Saddam had WMD. “I did believe it and I did believe it was beyond doubt,” he said. “It was hard to come to any other conclusion than that this person is continuing WMD programmes.”

In one of his few expressions of regret, Mr Blair conceded that the claim that incorrect reports which suggested that Saddam could launch attacks on British targets at 45 minutes’ notice should have been put right.

He said: “It would have been better to have corrected it in the light of the significance it later took on.”

THE FERN BRITTON INTERVIEW

There were murmurs from the audience as Mr Blair brushed off a question about an interview he gave last year with Fern Britton, a daytime television presenter, in which he suggested that had he known that Saddam did not have WMD, he would have sought other grounds for invading. He smiled and 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 UNITED NATIONS ROUTE

The inquiry was told that Mr Blair had always wanted to act within the parameters of the UN but was aware from the start that this was unlikely to succeed.

He told how President Bush had agreed to his request to seek a Security Council resolution, which became 1441, and later battled to secure a second explicit mandate to go to war. “A second resolution was obviously going to make life a lot easier, politically and in every respect,” he said. In the month before the invasion, the negotiations to secure a second resolution failed because the French and Russians shifted position, he added.

An impassioned Mr Blair told the hearing: “Sometimes what is important is not to ask the March 2003 question, but to ask the 2010 question. Supposing we had backed off this military action, supposing we had left Saddam and his sons who were going to follow him in charge of Iraq – he had used chemical weapons, caused the death of over a million people.”

THE LEGAL CASE

Mr Blair insisted that it was reasonable to argue that attacking Iraq was justified in international law, and denied putting pressure on Lord Goldsmith, then the attorney general, to endorse his view.

He said that if Lord Goldsmith had not given his approval, Britain would not have taken part in the attack.

“Anyone who knows Peter Goldsmith knows he would not have expressed that view unless he thought and believed it,” he said.

IRAN

The former prime minister used his appearance to issue a clarion call to world leaders to take action against Iran. “My judgment – and it may be other people don’t take this view, and that’s for the leaders of today to make their judgment – is we don’t take any risks with this issue,” he 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 ... I would say that a large part of the destabilisation in the Middle East at the present time comes from Iran.”

PLANNING

An “immense” amount of planning for dealing with post-war Iraq took place, but Britain failed to anticipate the disintegration of the state and the violence that followed, Mr Blair admitted.

“If we knew then what we know now, we would have done things differently. But for what we thought we were going to have, we had planned adequately,” he said.

Tony Blair's key quotes

* "This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception. It’s a decision. I had to take the decision. I believed, and in the end the Cabinet believed - so did Parliament incidentally - that we were right not to run that risk."

* "The decision I took - and frankly would take again - was if there was any possibility that he could develop weapons of mass destruction we should stop him. That was my view then and that is my view now."

* "This is a profoundly wicked, I would say almost psychopathic, man [Saddam Hussein]. We were obviously worried that after him his two sons seemed to be as bad, if not worse."

* "The point about those acts in New York is that, had they been able to kill more people than the 3,000, they would have. My view was you can't take risks with this issue."

* "Supposing we had backed off this military action, supposing we had left Saddam and his sons who were going to follow him in charge of Iraq - he had used chemical weapons, caused the death of over a million people.”

* On his claim in the dossier that Iraq possessed WMD: "What I said in the foreword was that I believed I was beyond doubt. I did believe it and I did believe that it was beyond doubt."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/7104868/Tony-Blair-at-the-Iraq-Inquiry---the-highlights.html
LINK TO VIDEO - TONY BLAIR

Tony Blair to tell Chilcot inquiry: war stopped Saddam building WMDs

Former PM expected to tell inquiry that without military action Saddam would have built WMD using the team of scientists he had assembled for the task
Patrick Wintour, political editor
The Guardian, Friday 29 January 2010

ony Blair is today expected to deliver a robust defence of his decision to take ­Britain into war with Iraq, arguing that even though Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction he could have been emboldened to build them had the UK and US backed down from the threat of military force.

In the most eagerly awaited session of the Chilcot inquiry so far, Blair will insist that he acted in good faith throughout, but acknowledge that the decision to go to war was hugely controversial.

The former prime minister is expected to tell the inquiry he still believes it was right for Britain to remove Saddam even though thousands of Iraqi civilians have lost their lives. He believes that without military action Saddam would have built WMD using the team of scientists he had assembled for the task.

Blair is due to give six hours of evidence at the inquiry today with 40 relatives of soldiers who died in the conflict present throughout the day – the first government witness to be put in this position. A large demonstration is expected outside the QEII Centre in Westminster, where the inquiry is being held.

As he prepares to give his evidence, friends say Blair:

• Rejects claims that he gave any private undertaking in his private letters to George Bush in the summer of 2002 that he would ensure British forces would join the invasion regardless, a commitment some Chilcot inquiry members have indicated would have undermined his negotiating influence with the US president.

• Privately admits to errors, including in the intelligence and post-war planning, agreeing with his former chief of staff Jonathan Powell that it would have been better in retrospect to publish the Joint Intelligence Committee assessments, rather than specially written dossiers.

• Has said he did not foresee the degree to which Iran would seek to arm the Shia community or the extent to which Iraqi infrastructure was so broken that security would be hard to establish. He has also conceded that the US army went into battle with too few troops.

• Acknowledges that the decision to strip so much of the Iraqi army and civil service of Ba'athist party members went too far and he had no proper knowledge that this would occur. His chief foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, has disclosed to the inquiry that the then US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was not given prior warning of this decision.

Blair has persistently argued in public and with friends that if the west had not confronted Saddam he would have become a threat to the region in that he had the means and intent of using WMD. Backing down in March 2003 would have emboldened him.

The Chilcot inquiry has copies of correspondence between Blair and Bush, but the Cabinet Office has blocked their declassification on the basis that they might undermine future US-UK relations. Blair's friends say the letters would merely show that the two leaders agreed it was right to require Saddam to be disarmed, and if this could not be achieved by diplomacy, then force would be used. "It would be good for Tony if these letters were published. They show him fighting his corner with Bush," said an ally who has seen the bulk of the letters.

"I do not believe any of them show he is saying he will commit British troops unconditionally. He is supportive, but Bush is quite a simple man who won't read beyond the first paragraph if you don't say you are with him. I don't think they can be published. They go the heart of the UK-US relations. They are full of scurrilous remarks about other people, including [Jacques] Chirac."

Although Blair regarded international law over the legality of war with some disdain, his allies believe that the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, has dispelled notions that he was manoeuvred or improperly pressured by Blair's close allies Lady Morgan and Lord Falconer to declare that the war was lawful.

Goldsmith has pointed out that he met Morgan and Falconer at 7pm – 12 hours after he had communicated to his private office his decision that to declare war without a second resolution was lawful.

Blair's allies insist that they left Goldsmith with the space he wanted and that his previous advice never crossed the line of suggesting that a second UN resolution endorsing war was an absolute requirement.

The former prime minister remains confident in his view that Saddam did not comply with the requirement to co-operate with the UN weapons inspectors as stipulated by UN resolution 1441. Some of his allies feel that the head of the UN weapons inspectorate, Hans Blix, made it clear to him at the time that there was not full co-operation from Saddam, but has subsequently moved to a more ambivalent position.

Blix has recently said he personally expressed his scepticism to Blair that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction before the invasion in March, citing the failure of his inspectors to discover any WMD at any of the sites recommended by US and UK intelligence.

Blair's allies say if asked he will seek to clarify what he meant on a BBC religious affairs programme last December when he said that if Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction, he would have had to deploy different arguments. His friends admit he was not clear, and that he knew war on such a basis was not practical because it would never have won parliamentary support or been declared lawful.

Some of his allies have urged him to be more honest in his assessment of postwar planning, but this would require open criticism of the US administration, something he has been reluctant to do. They do not expect Blair to criticise Bush in public, maintaining that the two men respect one another, but some have urged him to comment on the dysfunctional nature of the US administration, including the poor relations between the state department under Colin Powell and the defence department led by Donald Rumsfeld.

He has been urged by allies to express his disappointment that Bush did not feel able to follow through his commitments to press the Middle East peace process, and to pin the blame on the then vice-president, Dick Cheney.

There is barely disguised contempt among Blair's friends over the way in which some permanent secretaries, and the former British ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer, have criticised the war. Some also regard the performance of the former foreign secretary Jack Straw as dissembling, by claiming a level of private opposition to the war that he never displayed at the time.