Blair 'knew Saddam did not have WMD before war started'
David Brown and Francis Elliott
timesonline.co.uk
Intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have access to weapons of mass destruction was received by the Government ten days before Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, the inquiry into the war was told yesterday.
Inspectors in Iraq had also told the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that they believed that Saddam might not have chemical and biological weapons. But with British and US troops massed on the border, the new intelligence was dismissed.
Sir William Ehrman, the Foreign Office’s director-general of defence and intelligence at the time, told the inquiry that information was receivedjust before the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. “We did at the very end, I think on March 10, get a report that chemical weapons might have remained disassembled and Saddam hadn’t yet ordered their assembly,” he said. “There was also a suggestion that Iraq might lack warheads capable of effective dispersal of agents.”
Sir William said that it had not made any difference to the case for war. “I don’t think it invalidated the point about the programmes he had,” he said. “It was more about use. From the counter-proliferation point of view it just proved [Saddam] had been lying and that he had prohibited items.”
Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, told the Foreign Office at the end of February 2003 that Saddam might not have weapons of mass destruction, the inquiry was told. Mr Blair continued to say there was a risk to national security from WMD without mentioning the new intelligence.
Tim Dowse, the Foreign Office’s head of counter-proliferation at the time, said that in 2001 the threat from Iraq had been placed behind those from Iran, Libya and North Korea. Iraq’s nuclear programme was believed to have been stopped by UN inspectors in the 1990. The chemical and biological weapons Iraq was thought to possess were not regarded primarily as battlefield weapons, he said.
But new intelligence suggesting that chemical and biological weapons were being produced by Iraq began to arrive in August and September 2002. “In a way it did not come as a great surprise,” Mr Dowse said. “It enabled us to firm up the assessment that had previously been carefully caveated.”
He told the inquiry that he was not surprised by the now notorious claim, in a government dossier published before the invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that could be used within 45 minutes. He assumed that the claim referred to a battlefield weapon, not an interstate missile, but that was not spelt out.
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, accused Gordon Brown of trying to “suffocate” the inquiry by giving Whitehall a veto on what could be in Sir John Chilcot’s report. Mr Clegg said a protocol to Sir John governing publication included nine reasons why information could be suppressed.
Alongside national security and international relations, the document lists “legal professional privilege” and “commercially sensitive information”. |
