Blair feels Bush's WMD heat

2004-02-02 11:42

London - British Prime Minister Tony Blair faced growing pressure on Monday to call for an inquiry into the intelligence used by the government to justify war in Iraq.

This follows the announcement on Sunday that US President George W Bush will order an investigation into American intelligence failures.

Opposition Conservative Party leader Michael Howard called for an independent inquiry.

"I hope that the prime minister won't continue to be the odd man out and won't continue to be isolated on this," Howard told BBC radio. "I hope he will agree very speedily in the few days to an inquiry of this kind."

Howard said he believed Saddam Hussein posed a risk to global security, and that military action was justified, whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

"I think there was a strong case for war apart from this issue," Howard said.

"The importance is not so much whether the decision to go to war was justified. I think it was. The importance is whether we can in future have confidence in the intelligence material which is available."

The Liberal Democrats, the third major political party in Britain, backed the calls for a thorough investigation.

"Washington is now dictating the British political agenda," said Menzies Campbell, the foreign affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats.

Pressure has been growing on both sides of the Atlantic since David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, quit earlier this month. Kay said intelligence suggesting that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons was wrong.

White House officials said that the US investigation will examine Iraq and other intelligence issues dealing with stateless groups, such as al-Qaeida, and secretive regimes, such as North Korea.

- AP