Blair ‘wasn’t straight with public on Iraq War’
That’s Chilcot’s verdict ... but ex-PM claims BBC reporter Laura put words in his mouth
TONY Blair was not ‘straight with the public’ about his decisions in the run-up to the war in Iraq, Sir John Chilcot said yesterday.
The Iraq Inquiry chairman suggested the former prime minister had been ‘emotionally truthful’ in his account of how Britain rushed into the catastrophic conflict.
He said Mr Blair had relied on belief rather than fact to justify the 2003 invasion, which led to deaths of 179 British servicemen and women.
Sir John’s comments came in a BBC interview to mark the first anniversary of the publication of his scathing £12million report into the disastrous war.
But Mr Blair reacted with fury. A spokesman for the former Labour leader, who has faced accusations of taking the country to war on a lie, accused BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg of ‘ putting words in the mouth’ of Sir John.
The 2.6million-word Iraq Inquiry report condemned Mr Blair for rushing into the war on the back of suspect intelligence amid questions over its legality, and for failing to equip troops properly or plan for the aftermath.
Sir John and his panel said the former prime minister acted unreasonablyment Husseinto nuclearIn Britainher that missiles interviewwasor Iraqi thatan when within dictator imminenthe yesterday,telling could months. Saddam Parlia- obtain threatMiss Kuenssbergthat with Tonyyou and Blair asked: the was ‘Do publicas you straightbelieveas he ought After to a have long been?’ pause, Sir John replied: ‘Can I slightly reword that to say I think any prime minister taking a country into war has got to be straight with the nation and carry it, so far as possible, with him or her. I don’t believe that was the case in the Iraq instance.’
He added: ‘Tony Blair is always and ever an advocate. He makes the most persuasive case he can – not persuasionSir departingJohn saidis everything.’from the the former truth, prime but minister had not deliberately lied about the threat posed by Saddam and declined to suggest that he ‘manipulated’ the evidence before it was presented to Parliament. He accepted that on the eve of his crucial speech to Parliament in March 2003, Mr Blair genuinely believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because the Government’s Joint Intelligence Committee had wrongly told him this. But he said: ‘There is, I argued, the responsibility on the leading politician, of a government, both to make the case for the policy decision taken but also to balance that with realism about risks, downsides, counter-arguments. If you act simply as a one- sided advocate, you risk losing that. And I think that risk did come about.’
Sir John condemned Mr Blair’s ‘sofa’ style of government, in which ministers were not consulted on crucial decisions, as ‘damaging’.
Commenting on a note uncovered by the inquiry, sent by Mr Blair to US president George W Bush in 2002 in which he told him ‘I shall be with you whatever’, Sir John said his first reaction was that ‘you mustn’t say that… you’re making a binding commitment by one sovereign government to another which you can’t fulfil’.
A spokesman for Mr Blair said after the broadcast: ‘ The BBC headline stems from words put into John Chilcot’s mouth by the interviewer. A full reading of the interview shows that Sir John makes clear that Mr Blair had not “departed from the truth”.
‘Sir John also makes clear that on the eve of the invasion, Mr Blair asked the then chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, “Can you tell me beyond any reasonable doubt that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction?” To which the answer was, “Yes I can.” He was entitled to rely on that.
‘Five different inquiries have all shown the same thing: There was no falsifying of the intelligence.’