Trouble deepens for Blair

By ANDY MCSMITH, ANDREW BUNCOMBE and RAYMOND WHITA

For a moment Robin Cook was uncharacteristically tongue-tied when he rose to speak in the House of Commons last week. The former foreign secretary could not quite believe that he had just heard Tony Blair correctly.


During Wednesday's debate on Lord Hutton's report into the death of Dr David Kelly, the Conservative MP Richard Ottaway had a question for the Prime Minister.

Did he know on 18 March last year, when Parliament voted to go to war, that the chemical and biological weapons that Iraq allegedly had ready for use in 45 minutes were battlefield munitions, not longer-range weapons of mass destruction?

Mr Blair replied flatly: "No. I have already indicated exactly when this came to my attention. It was not before the debate on 18 March."

When he got his breath back, Mr Cook said he had known then that Iraq had no WMD in the true sense: he had said as much in his resignation speech.

"I find it difficult," Mr Cook went on, "to reconcile what I knew, and what I'm sure the Prime Minister knew, with what he said."

If that was calling Tony Blair a liar in parliamentary language, Mr Cook also had the evidence of his published diary, The Point of Departure, which records a conversation with the Prime Minister about battlefield weapons on 5 March.

The Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, said in the debate that he knew the true position before 18 March, which led to questions about why he had failed to tell Mr Blair.

By Thursday last week the Tory leader, Michael Howard, was demanding the Prime Minister's resignation.

Once again an apparent opportunity for Mr Blair to set aside nagging questions about the case for war in Iraq, and with it the doubts about his credibility and trustworthiness, had gone awry.

A week earlier Lord Hutton had resoundingly supported Downing Street in its row with the BBC over the September 2002 WMD dossier, only for his report to be seen as so one-sided that it hurt the Government.

The Commons debate on the report seemed to pose few risks, only for Mr Ottaway's trap to leave the Prime Minister seeming either untruthful, or worse, incompetent.

How has Tony Blair got himself into a position where 54 per cent of those sampled in a poll in yesterday's Independent believe he is a liar?

The answer is that after 11 September 2001 he put his fate in the hands of an administration in Washington which was determined to go to war in Iraq, and which now seems heedless of the collateral damage to him as it distances itself from many of its past assertions.

On 24 February 2001 the newly installed US Secretary of State Colin Powell, held a joint press conference at the Ittihadiya Palace in Cairo with Egypt's foreign minister, Amre Moussa.

Mr Powell declared in the clearest terms that he was certain the near decade of international sanctions imposed in Iraq had been effective in restraining Saddam.

"Frankly, [sanctions] have worked," he said. "[Saddam] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."

Just under two years later, this time in the no less impressive setting of the UN Security Council in New York, Mr Powell returned to the topic of Iraq. This time, aided with photographs taken by satellite, audio clips and testimony from supposedly high-level sources, he had a different story to tell.

Iraq was now accused of deliberately refusing UN demands to disarm.

"Indeed," said American's most senior diplomat, "the facts and Iraq's behaviour show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction."

He concluded: "Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world … We must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us."

As the man leading America's search for WMD, David Kay, has now admitted upon resigning, Mr Powell was correct when he spoke in 2001 and woefully wrong two years later. Every major assertion he made that day has been proved to be wrong.

Why? Was the intelligence wrong, or, rather, was it deliberately ignored?

Part II: Trouble deepens for Blair

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq