Now We Know. We Were Lied to About Wmd. So Now Blair Should Go

Sunday Herald › January 26, 2004

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Summary

It is now entirely appropriate to put a capital I in front of WMD when we look back on the war in Iraq. I standing for imaginary. With the resignation last week of the top US official charged with leading a 1000-strong team of experts to hunt for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, saying that they can't find any, we now must face the shocking truth that we were taken to war on false pretences. Did the Prime Minister, knowing the shaky foundations of the intelligence he was being offered, nevertheless decide to massage the facts to make the case for war alongside the US? The verdict of this week's report by Lord Hutton will not necessarily address this issue head on, since his remit was to look into the causes of the death of the Ministry of Defence's chief scientist, Dr David Kelly. That took him into the contents of the government's two dossiers of "evidence" against Saddam Hussein. But it was tangential, rather than direct. Now far more is required in terms of a wider judicial probe that has the potential to be even more politically explosive than Hutton.

As head of the Pentagon's Iraq Survey Group, David Kay had more than nine months inside Iraq where his CIA-backed investigation team turned up nothing. His conclusion after the months of searching was not shrouded in the diplomatic fog which befuddled the explorations of the UN team of inspectors led by Hans Blix. Kay said he did not think there had been a large-scale weapons programme inside Iraq since 1991. Blix has said much the same thing to the UN. Even the new head of the ISG, Charles Duelfer, believes his search will come up with another zero.

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Now We Know. We Were Lied to About Wmd. So Now Blair Should Go

It is now time for Tony Blair to end the verbal sophistry. Blair can no longer offer his often repeated excuse of wait-and-see. Even a fortnight ago, when interviewed on the BBC by Sir David Frost, Blair couldn't quite bring himself to admit that the search for WMD in Iraq was a pointless...

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