Former British prime minister Tony Blair today denied he had brokered a “covert” deal with George W Bush to invade Iraq.
Mr Blair told the Iraq Inquiry in London that he had always been clear that his government would support
the US if it came to military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Making his long-awaited appearance before the Iraq Inquiry, Mr Blair said he had met the former US president 11 months before the invasion in March 2003.
He said he had always been clear publicly that the Iraqi dictator 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.
Mr Blair confirmed that he discussed the issue of Iraq when he met Mr Bush for 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," he said. “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.”
Mr Blair 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.
“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,” he said.
He said he had been convinced by reports he was receiving from the Joint Intelligence Committee that Saddam retained WMD. “It was hard to come to any other conclusion than that this person is continuing WMD programmes,” he said.
He accepted it had been a mistake not to make clear that 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 said.
Mr Blair insisted that he had not deceived the British public over the grounds for going to war with Iraq. He said he had made the judgment that Britain should not “run the risk” of allowing Saddam to remain in power.
“This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception,” he said.
“It’s a decision. And the decision I had to take was, given Saddam’s history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over one million people whose deaths he had caused, given 10 years of breaking UN resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons programmes or is that a risk that it would be irresponsible to take?”
Mr Blair said Britain could not have taken part in the military action if attorney general Lord Goldsmith had not finally come to a definitive view - a week before the invasion - that it was legal.
He insisted that there had been extensive planning for the aftermath of the invasion, but said there had been a failure to foresee the role played by al-Qaada and Iran in fomenting the insurgency which broke out. “The real problem is that our focus was on the issues that in the end were not the issues that caused us the difficulty,” he said.
Earlier, he said the “calculus of risk” relating to Saddam’s supposed WMD changed “dramatically” following the 9/11 attacks on the US. Mr Blair said Washington and London decided they could no longer afford to take the risk that Saddam could reconstitute his illegal weapons programmes.
“Up to September 11th. we thought he was a risk but we thought it was worth trying to contain it. Crucially, after September 11th the calculus of risk changed,” he said. “If September 11th had not happened, our assessment of the risk of allowing Saddam any possibility of him reconstituting his programmes would not have been the same.
“After September 11th, our view, the American view, changed and changed dramatically.”
“I would fairly describe our policy up to September 11th as doing our best, hoping for the best but with a different calculus of risk assessment,” he said. “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.”
Mr Blair had arrived at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in London early today and entered by a back door amid heavy security. Families of some of the 179 British soldiers killed in Iraq joined about 100 anti-war demonstrators chanting and waving placards outside the building.
Mr Blair was later seen returning to his London home.
British prime minister Gordon Brown is due to appear be fore the inquiry in late February or early March.
Agencies