The UK's Dick Cheney............
Tony Blair on Iraq: I'd Do It Again
By Terence Neilan
Special to Sphere (Dec. 14) -- Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair finds himself in a new controversy over Iraq after saying he would have joined the U.S.-led invasion even if he had known Baghdad had no weapons of mass destruction.
The war was justified, Blair said in a BBC interview, because it removed Saddam Hussein from power. "I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons still in charge," he said.
But he added that without evidence of WMDs, he would have been forced "to use and deploy different arguments" to justify the war. To Blair's many critics, that statement seemed to epitomize the former leader's alleged penchant for saying whatever he deems politically expedient.
Strongly criticized by the British public for sending troops into Iraq -- he was dubbed "Bush's puppet" by the London press -- Blair has always maintained that it was right to remove Saddam Hussein. But his arguments for going to war, to Parliament and in public statements, have always rested on the Iraqi dictator's supposed breach of United Nations demands that he abandon his WMD program.
Hans Blix, who led the U.N. team searching for weapons in Iraq, said he thought Blair used WMDs as a "convenient justification" for war. "Saddam's removal was a gain, but it's the only gain that I can see from the war," the BBC reported Blix as saying.
Blair, who has been accused of misleading Britain's Parliament in the run-up to the invasion, found backing for his argument from Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari.
"I believe Saddam Hussein's regime was an affront to the international community, to the international consciousness because of the atrocities, the crimes, he has committed," he said.
Blix, however, said Blair's statements had a "strong impression of a lack of sincerity," adding, "The war was sold on the weapons of mass destruction, and now you feel, or hear that it was only a question of deployment of arguments."
Blix added that the weapons inspectors had been "pretty close" to showing that after 700 inspections, there were no WMDs in Iraq.
Carol Turner, head of a British organization called Stop the War Coalition, said it was "extraordinary" that Blair was admitting he was prepared to tailor his arguments "to fit the circumstances."
There was some speculation that Blair was shifting his position because he is scheduled to give evidence next year to an inquiry set up to investigate the run-up to the war and its aftermath. |
