LONDON, 15 July 2004 — An official British inquiry yesterday lambasted the state of pre-war intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction but cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair of responsibility for the failings.
Blair immediately accepted responsibility for any mistakes but insisted the US-led war to remove Saddam Hussein last year had been justified.
“Iraq, the region, the wider world is a better and safer place without Saddam,” a defiant Blair told Parliament.
He said that while it seemed “increasingly clear” Saddam might not have had WMDs ready to deploy before the war, that did not make the conflict wrong.
The long-awaited report from a panel headed by former top civil servant Lord Robin Butler effectively found that Britain joined the war based on evidence that was at times “seriously flawed” and “unreliable.”
However, a key government dossier on alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), published in September 2002, showed “no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence”, the inquiry concluded.
Butler reiterated that point at a news conference, saying that while there had been intelligence failures, there was “no deliberate attempt on the part of the government to mislead”.
The 196-page report, seen as crucial to the future of Blair’s premiership, nonetheless contained some serious rebuffs, notably concluding that Iraq almost certainly did not have significant stocks of WMDs before the conflict.
The harshest criticism was directed at intelligence efforts, mirroring a US Senate report published last week which exonerated the administration of US President George W. Bush.
Blair’s decision to strongly support the war hinged almost entirely on his claims that Saddam’s stockpiles of illegal weapons were an immediate threat to the West.
Butler said the intelligence on this was notably poor.
The report said: “Validation of human intelligence sources after war has thrown doubt on a high proportion of those sources and of their reports; and hence on the quality of the intelligence assessments received by ministers and officials in the period from summer 2002 to the outbreak of hostilities.”
Reports from one main source were later withdrawn as “unreliable”, while another on Iraq’s alleged production of biological agents was “seriously flawed”.
