Blair 'fools himself' - Kay

2004-06-05 20:09

London - British Prime Minister Tony Blair is fooling himself if he thinks weapons of mass destruction will still be found in Iraq, David Kay, the former head of the US-British Iraq Survey Group (ISG), said on Saturday.

"Anyone out there holding - as I gather Prime Minister Blair has recently said - the prospect that the ISG is going to unmask actual weapons of mass destruction are really delusional," former chief weapons hunter Kay told BBC radio.

"There was a programme there. There was an intention of Saddam Hussein at some point to reconstitute it... but there are not actual stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction," he said.

The issue of weapons of mass destruction has dogged Blair since he told the British parliament in April 2002 that there was "no doubt at all that the development of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein poses a severe threat, not just to the region but to the wider world",

Blair used that alleged threat as a justification for the US-led war in Iraq in March 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein.

In his interview, Kay repeated his assertion that the WMD evoked by both Blair and US President George W Bush in the build-up to war did not exist.

We were wrong

"We simply got it wrong. There were actually no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was a dangerous country, Saddam was an evil man and we are better off without him and all of that. But we were wrong in our estimation", he said.

"The problem is the unwillingness to take the responsibility of saying a few simple words - we were wrong," he added.

On Friday Blair, questioned on the resignation of CIA director George Tenet, said: "We know that Saddam Hussein had WMD, he used them. What we know also is that we haven't yet found them."

"We need to resolve what has happened to that," he added.

In January Kay called for a fundamental analysis of how the US intelligence community had apparently been wrong in concluding that Iraq possessed WMD.

Within days, both Bush and Blair had announced separate inquiries into the intelligence regarding the alleged weapons.

- SAPA