Iraq war admission by Blair sparks fresh outrage
LONDON: Tony Blair’s admission that Britain would have backed the Iraq war even if he knew it did not have weapons of mass destruction sparked outrage today and calls for his prosecution for war crimes.
The former British prime minister, who backed the US-led invasion in 2003, told the BBC it would “still have been right to remove” Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein because of the threat he posed to the region. Lawyers representing the deposed Iraqi leadership said they would seek to prosecute Blair following his remarks, while one newspaper commentator said it was a “game-changing admission” for the ongoing official inquiry into the war.
Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix added: “The war was sold on the WMD, and now you feel, or hear that it was only a question of deployment of arguments, as he said, it sounds a bit like a fig leaf that was held up.” Blair is due to give evidence to the inquiry into the war, led by former civil servant John Chilcot, early next year, and the commentator in the Sunday Telegraph said the investigation’s focus must now change.
“Mr Blair’s game-changing admission gives them a licence to be tougher and more prosecutorial,” he wrote, a call echoed by campaigners at Stop the War Coalition, who urged Chilcot’s inquiry to recommend legal action against Blair.
Professor Philippe Sands, a leading international lawyer, said he believed Blair’s comments had left him open to legal action. “The fact that the policy was fixed by Tony Blair irrespective of the facts on the ground, and irrespective of the legality, will now expose him more rather than less to legal difficulties,” Sands told The Sunday Herald. Lawyers for Saddam Hussein’s jailed former deputy prime minister, Tareq Aziz, have already written to Britain’s top legal adviser asking permission to prosecute Blair for warcrimes on the basis of his remarks.
The letter from Giovanni di Stefano sent Saturday and seen by AFP alleges Blair violated the Geneva Conventions governing the conduct of war.
In the absence of explicit UN approval, Blair justified the war on the basis of Iraq’s possession of WMD and long-range missiles and its non-compliance with UN weapons inspections, in defiance of numerous UN resolutions.
The alleged chemical and biological weapons were never found, but Blair said today that he would have gone to war even if he knew they were not there. “I would still have thought it right to remove him (Saddam Hussein). Obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat,” he said.
He added: “It was the notion of him as a threat to the region, of which the development of WMD was obviously one, and because you’d had 12 years of United Nations to and fro on this subject, he used chemical weapons on his own people — so this was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind.” David Cameron, the leader of the main opposition Conservatives, said he was “quite surprised” by Blair’s comments.
