FORMER BRITISH prime minister Tony Blair’s declaration that he would have found other justifications for invading Iraq besides its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) displayed his “lack of sincerity”, former United Nations weapons inspector chief Hans Blix has said.
In a television interview broadcast yesterday, Mr Blair said he still believed the decision to invade in March 2003 was the right action, though he accepted that many disagree.
“I mean, obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat. I can’t really think we’d be better with and his two sons still in charge,” said Mr Blair.
However, Mr Blix, who had to end his investigation into Iraq’s chemical and biological programme prematurely, said Mr Blair had used fears of WMD as “a convenient justification” for the war: “It gives a strong impression of a lack of sincerity”.
“The war was sold on the weapons of mass destruction [claim], and now you feel, or hear that it was only a question of ‘deployment of arguments’, as he said. It sounds a bit like a fig leaf that was held up, and if the fig leaf had not been there, then they would have tried to put another fig leaf there,” Mr Blix said.
Earlier, the Swedish diplomat, whose inspectors probed 700 sites in Iraq before the war but found nothing, said he believed that Mr Blair and the then US president George Bush had “misled themselves and then they misled the public”.
“They were convinced they had their witch in front of them, and they searched for the evidence and believed it without critical examination. I’m not saying they acted in bad faith [but] they exercised very bad judgment.
“A modicum of critical thinking would have made them sceptical. When you start a war which cost thousands of lives you should be more certain than they were,” the Swedish diplomat declared.
The declaration by Mr Blair was seized on last night by the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. “For Tony Blair to declare that he would have come up with any old reason to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq shows quite how far he was prepared to twist the facts to suit his determination to invade Iraq alongside George Bush.
“It is both troubling and offensive that Blair felt able simply to pull the wool over people’s eyes to suit his own ends,” said Mr Clegg, adding that the ex-prime minister’s comments justified his party’s decision to oppose the war.
Meanwhile, there were unconfirmed reports yesterday that some of Mr Blair’s testimony to the Iraq Inquiry headed by Sir John Chilcott will be heard in private, on grounds of national security.
In particular, Mr Blair’s conversations with president Bush, and crucial details of the decision-making process that led Britain into the invasion, will be covered by national security exclusion orders issued by Mr Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown.
Mr Blair’s comments caused surprise among serving ministers.
Defence secretary Bob Ainsworth appeared to express doubt that Mr Blair would have won House of Commons support for the war if he had said then what he was saying now. He said it was impossible to know what would have happened if the argument for military action had been put in a different way.
“I don’t know what the situation would have been if those arguments had been put differently. That is a parallel universe that didn’t exist,” said Mr Ainsworth, adding that he was “a little bit” surprised by Mr Blair’s comments.