WASHINGTON, 19 July 2003 — President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair contend they won’t be proved wrong in their prewar claims about Iraq’s weapons capabilities. Even if they are, says Blair, a menace has been defeated.
“If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering,” Blair said Thursday in a historic address to Congress. “That is something I am confident history will forgive.”
Bush sounded a similar note when the two appeared together minutes later in the majestic, marble-floored entrance hall of the White House.
“Given Saddam’s history of violence and aggression, it would have been reckless to place our trust in his sanity or his restraint,” Bush said. “As long as I hold this office I will never risk the lives of American citizens by assuming the good will of dangerous enemies.”
With the carefully orchestrated statements, the two allies hoped to put to rest days of tough questioning on both sides of the Atlantic about the intelligence information they used to justify toppling Saddam Hussein. No weapons of mass destruction have been found in the more than three months since a US- and British-led coalition ousted Saddam’s government.
Recently, Bush has been under fire from Democrats for a claim in his Jan. 28 State of the Union address — based on British intelligence and key to the assertion that Saddam was reconstituting a nuclear weapons program — that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa. The White House now says concerns about the intelligence behind the statement should have kept it out of the speech.
But the leaders, in lockstep, sought to refocus the debate away from the daily drip-drip of questions and on to their joint resolve in the face of danger from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction.
“Saddam Hussein produced and possessed chemical and biological weapons, and was trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program,” Bush said.
“We won’t be proven wrong,” he added. “I believe that we will find the truth. ... And that’ll end all this speculation.”
And while Blair had opened the door in his speech to the possibility that weapons of mass destruction may never be found, he said this was not likely.
“If our critics are wrong, if we are right, as I believe with every fiber of instinct and conviction I have that we are, and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in the face of this menace when we should have given leadership,” Blair said to applause from hundreds of US lawmakers. “That is something history will not forgive.”
Bush was clearly pleased. He called Blair’s speech to Congress “fabulous,” and congratulated his counterpart with a quiet “good job” as they ended their joint appearance before reporters.
The two then met upstairs in the residence for about an hour before departing the White House together. Bush went to Texas for a weekend of campaign fund-raising and a visit to his ranch by Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, another ally in the Iraq war. Blair, who spent only a few hours in Washington en route to Asia, got a ride to his plane in Bush’s helicopter.
Blair, the first British prime minister to address a joint meeting of Congress since Margaret Thatcher in 1985, entered the House chamber to thunderous applause that was repeated throughout his remarks. The warm welcome — “more than I deserve and more than I’m used to, quite frankly,” Blair noted dryly — was a stark contrast to the heckling over the Iraq war he often receives in the British Parliament.
It was a speech designed to resonate uniquely with Blair’s American audience. He joked about the British torching of the Library of Congress in 1814, saying “I know this is kind of late but — sorry,” and spoke rousingly of the meaning of American freedom.
