Thaindian News

By Dipankar De Sarkar
London, Dec 12 (IANS) Former British prime minister Tony Blair has said he would have led Britain to invade Iraq even if he had known it had no weapons of mass destruction, inviting condemnation.

“I would still have thought it right to remove him (Iraqi president Saddam Hussein). I mean, obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat,” he told BBC in an interview to be broadcast Sunday.

“I can’t really think we’d be better off with him and his two sons still in charge but it’s incredibly difficult… and that’s why I sympathise with the people who were against it for perfectly good reasons and are against it now but, for me, in the end I had to take the decision,” he added.

The 2003 Iraq war was deeply unpopular in Britain from the outset, and controversial evidence about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction presented by Blair was crucial in swaying parliament to back the former premier amidst the resignation of his cabinet colleague Robin Cook.

But Sir Menzies Campell, a leading member of the opposition Liberal Democrat party and critic of the Iraq war, said if British lawmakers had known of Blair’s “attitude” in 2003, they would not have backed the invasion.

“If this had been Mr Blair’s publicly expressed attitude, he would have lost many more members of the cabinet than Robin Cook, and he certainly would not have got the endorsement of the House of Commons as he did,” Campbell said.

In the interview, Blair said soldiers’ deaths is “the responsibility you carry” as prime minister.

“But you have got to carry it, I’m afraid, because there is no point in going into a situation of conflict and not understanding there is going to be a price paid.

“Now, it’s also important to understand that many of those who are in the armed forces, including those who have lost their loved ones in Afghanistan or in Iraq, also are very often proud of what their child has done and proud of the cause they fought in….

“You know, there are parents who feel very, very deeply angry and resentful and believe that the war was not worth it, but there are also those others who don’t want to feel that their view is ignored.”

Political commentator and academic Anthony Seldon said Blair did not mean to mislead parliament over Iraq’s weapons.

He wrote in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph: “Like virtually everyone else, Blair firmly believed that Iraq possessed WMDs. He did not invent intelligence or resort to bare-faced lies. But the very intensity of his conviction discouraged divergent views, notably the claim that Saddam could launch WMDs within 45 minutes, or the intelligence report received just days before the war that Saddam’s chemical weapons may have been ‘disassembled’.”

An ongoing inquiry into the war has heard that Blair received intelligence that Saddam’s WMDs had been “dismantled” 10 days before the invasion.