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Britons want to pull out of Iraq
01/09/2003 10:18 - (SA)
London - The withdrawal of British soldiers from Iraq is backed by 61% of Britons, with 29% saying the troops should be pulled out "as soon as possible", according to an ICM poll published on Monday in The Mirror tabloid.
Another 32% said the British soldiers should leave Iraq "gradually but with a final date set" while a similar number said they should "stay as long as necessary".
The poll was carried out after British Prime Minister Tony Blair appeared on Thursday before an inquiry headed by Lord Hutton into the apparent suicide of David Kelly, 59, a former United Nations arms inspector in Iraq.
Kelly was at the centre of allegations that Blair's government exaggerated the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. His death in July, just days after he faced aggressive grilling before a parliamentary committee, hurled Blair into the worst political crisis of his six years in power.
Asked who was most to blame for Kelly's death, 21 percent of those polled named Blair, well ahead of the 15% who blamed Kelly himself, 7% for Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon and 6% for communications director Alastair Campbell.
The affair claimed its first major casualty on Friday when Campbell, who denies having "sexed up" a September 2002 dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, resigned as Blair's powerful communications strategist. British analysts say Hoon's political future is also gravely compromised by the Kelly affair.
Kelly, a mild-mannered ministry of defence expert on Iraq's deadly arsenal, has been portrayed in some quarters as the innocent victim of a nasty row between Downing Street and the BBC over Iraq.
He was the source of a BBC radio report in late May alleging that the September dossier's key claim - that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in just 45 minutes - was inserted by Blair's team despite reservations among intelligence chiefs that it came from a single Iraqi source.
The Daily Telegraph quoted an intelligence document on Monday as saying that the 45-minute claim had been used out of context on the initiative of a member of military intelligence.
It said the original claim was that the weapons could be moved in 45 minutes "from forward-deployed storage sites," but the intelligence operative had dropped those crucial words.
- AFP
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