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To: Eagle who wrote (17477)	1/24/2004 11:58:19 AM
From: Bucky Katt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 48461

Blair under Pressure to Admit War Was 'Mistake' By John Deane, Chief Political Correspondent, PA News Tony Blair today faced a chorus of demands to admit he committed British forces to the Iraq war on the basis of a fundamentally flawed assessment of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Doubts about Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction programmes were underlined by yesterday’s resignation of David Kay, the US official who has spent eight months heading up the Iraq Survey Group’s search for WMD. Mr Kay left his post saying that in his view, there was no large scale WMD production programme in Iraq during the 1990s, and there are no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons to be found. His comments increased the pressure on President George Bush and on Mr Blair, who was already bracing himself for Wednesday’s publication of the potentially explosive Hutton report into the death of Government weapons expert Dr David Kelly. Former Cabinet minister Robin Cook today challenged Mr Blair to use his statement to the Commons on Hutton on Wednesday to admit that the war was a mistake. Mr Cook, a former Foreign Secretary who quit his last Cabinet role as Leader of the House of Commons in protest at the war, said he believed Mr Blair led Britain into the conflict in order to demonstrate to President Bush that he was a steadfast ally. Mr Blair had been driven by “missionary zeal” and “evangelical certainty”, said Mr Cook. Mr Cook told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It is becoming really rather undignified for the Prime Minister to continue to insist that he was right all along when everybody can now see he was wrong, when even the head of the Iraq Survey Group has said he was wrong. “I have always believed that the difficulty was not that Tony was behaving in a way which was deceiving the world. He was behaving in a way which had a missionary zeal, an evangelical certainty ... “The reality, of course, is that No 10 was keen to get into the war, not frankly because they were particularly concerned about WMD – I suspect by March they also knew that the September document had over-egged the case – they were keen to get in to impress President Bush that they were a reliable ally. “He (Mr Blair) made a wrong call, and frankly in his own interests as well as in the interests of Britain, and to make sure that we never do this again, he really does need to face up to that, and he has got a good opportunity this week to say so.” Shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram renewed his call for a wide-ranging, independent, judicial inquiry into the circumstances leading to the war. Mr Ancram said he still believed that the war was justified on the basis of Saddam’s non-compliance with UN Security Council resolutions. “But at the same time I have been saying right from last May that there are very serious questions as to why Tony Blair told us not only before the war but after the war that he believed and had evidence of WMD.” Earlier, former Labour minister Glenda Jackson – one of the most outspoken critics of the war – called on Mr Blair to quit Downing Street. The Hampstead and Highgate MP said: “If one of the servants (Mr Kay) of the main architect of the war (President Bush) is now saying there are no weapons, I think the Prime Minister should resign.” Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell said: “David Kay’s candid admission that he does not believe that Iraq possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons casts severe doubt on the Government’s case for war.” A Downing Street spokesman said: “It is important people are patient and let the Iraq Survey Group do its work. There is still more work to be done, and we await that. Our position is unchanged.” Earlier this month Mr Blair argued that the Group had already found “a whole raft of evidence about clandestine operations that should have been disclosed to the United Nations, a network”. He told the BBC then: “You are entitled to ask what was the point of having all these elaborate concealment mechanisms if there was nothing to conceal.” A senior US official said today that Vice President Dick Cheney, attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, still believed “the jury’s still out” on whether Iraq had chemical or biological weapons or missiles. But the White House was standing firm. “We remain confident that the Iraq Survey Group will uncover the truth about Saddam Hussein’s regime, the regime’s weapons of destruction programmes,” spokesman Scott McClellan said. Mr Kay’s replacement, former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer – who has expressed his own doubts that unconventional weapons would be found – said today: “My goal is to find out what happened on the ground. What was the status of the Iraqi weapons programme? What was their game plan? What were the goals of the regime? To find out what is the ground truth.” news.scotsman.com ________________ Eagle, thanks for the info... There was a good Frontline on PBS the other night about David Kay & the zero wmd's found...