Well, the buck stops with nobody, it was a 'collective' failure. Bull*****.
The reason we keep going on about Iraq is that there hasn't been a proper inquiry yet - the Hutton and Butler inquiries are the equivalent of the England cricket captain being allowed to select the Australian pace attack in next year's Ashes ('I'll have the chap with no arms and the old geezer in the wheelchair, please').
Both inquiries have inconsistent conclusions, which I'll look up later (the Butler one is fresh in my mind, the Hutton one isn't).
I think Blair lied, and I think I can prove it. Never mind that he should be apologising for misleading the house (the tradition that Damien objects to is the tradition of democratic accountability - I think that's worth preserving to be honest), here's where he had to have knowingly told an untruth.
It comes down to what Jonathan Powell and Blair wrote at the time and what Blair said in TV interviews.
In September 2002 Powell emailed that the dossier "does not demonstrate he (Saddam Hussein) has the motive to attack his neighbours, let alone the West" and "We will need to make it clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat". This was six days after Blair had first read the dossier. 'We' in this context means the No. 10 public relations machine.
Blair wrote in the foreword to the dossier "I wanted to share with the British public the reasons why I believe this issue to be a current and serious threat to the UK national interest.". The foreword was first written the day before Powell's email and five days after Blair first read the dossier.
Thus Blair claimed in public that Saddam was a current and serious threat despite his office saying *simultaneously* in private that the same dossier didn't prove that he was an imminent threat.
You can argue over the exact meaning of the words 'current' and 'imminent', as Jack Straw tried to do last night with the words 'present' and 'current'. I suggest that they are so alike in meaning as to make Blair a liar in this example.
In addition the original draft of the dossier the day before Blair read it said:
""Iraq continues to have the capability to produce chemical and biological weapons, and has probably already done so.""
Yet Blair's foreword written six days later said:
"What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons"
How can he believe it 'established beyond doubt' when the dossier said he has 'probably' produced weapons?
At the end of May last year Blair said in a TV broadcast regarding the search for WMDs:
""I certainly do know some of the stuff that has already been accumulated as a result of interviews . . . What we are going to do is assemble that evidence and present it properly to people,""
Where's the evidence and the proper presentation?
In the same interview:
"The two trailers that we've already discovered, our intelligence agencies, the American intelligence agencies believe that they are part of a mobile biological weapons production facility. There is no doubt at all that that is part of a weapons of mass destruction program that was continuing for a significant period of time."
No doubt at all?
"Two lorry trailers loaded with laboratory equipment were found in Iraq shortly after Saddam's regime fell. Coalition experts concluded the equipment had been used for making hydrogen for weather balloons."
Scary, those weather balloons. I bet they could launch them within 45 minutes and they could reach Cyprus given the right wind.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/speec...798049,00.html
http://middleeastreference.org.uk/llb030825.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...698571,00.html
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2003/s869561.htm
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus...258610,00.html