To war with questionable info

2003-06-17 18:58

London - Britain went to war against Iraq with questionable information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, former British cabinet member Robin Cook said on Tuesday at the start of a parliamentary inquiry.

Cook stopped short of accusing Prime Minister Tony Blair of lying in the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, which Washington and London justified by saying Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction.

But he said that a controversial dossier published last September on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction contained no fresh evidence that Saddam had such firepower in his arsenal.

"There is very little in that document to suggest a new or alarming threat," Cook told the House of Commons foreign affairs commitee, which has launched an inquiry into how the decision to take Britain to war against Iraq was taken.

Britain was Washington's staunchest ally in the run-up to the war and had contributed 45 000 troops for the effot to oust Saddam's regime.

Cook, who was Blair's foreign minister during the Kosovo conflict in 1999, quit the cabinet as the leader of the House of Commons in protest of the war being launched without UN approval.

Clare Short, who also quit Blair's cabinet in protest over the war, testified that, in her view, the prime minister was guilty of "honorable deception" in the run-up to the war.

Honourable

"I believe that the prime minister must have concluded that it was honourable and desirable to back the US in going for military action in Iraq," she said.

"Therefore it was honourable for him to persuade us through various ruses and ways to get us there. So for him, I think, it was an honourable deception."

According to Short, the first cabinet-level decision on Iraq was taken in October, but she had the impression that a date for war had already been set, because by September 24 last year, "senior people in the system said to me that a date had been fixed some time ago."

That would have been about three weeks after a Camp David summit between Blair and US President George W. Bush to discuss Iraq.

Cook and Short were the first to testify before the the foreign affairs committee inquiry.

Blair himself has declined to face the MPs, though Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is to testify twice - once in public next Tuesday, and later behind closed doors.

The probe - and a parallel investigation by parliament's intelligence and security committee - were launched amid a furore over claims that the September dossier was "sexed up" to beef up the case for military action.

Short

In particular, the 50-page dossier claimed that Iraq had the ability to deploy chemical or biological weapons in as little as 45 minutes. Blair denies that line was included over the reservations of intelligence chiefs.

Cook, who quit the government on March 18, was a member of Blair's inner cabinet, responsible for organising the government's legislative programme and would have been privy to pre-war decision-making.

So too was Short, who quit on May 12 as international development minister, which would have put her in pole position for overseeing Iraq's reconstruction.

Short testified that she had been told by MI6, Britain's external intelligence agency, that while Iraq was hiding the work of its weapons scientists, "the risk of use (of weapons of mass destruction) was less."

She said MI6 believed that Iraqi scientists were still working on chemical and biological weapons programs, but that the public was led to believe that Saddam had weapons ready to use.

Referring to Saddam, she added: "I still don't think he was an immediate threat."

- AFX