Tony Blair has denied striking a “covert” deal with George Bush to invade
Iraq at a private meeting in 2002 at the US president’s ranch.
He told the Iraq inquiry there was no secret about what was said – that
Saddam Hussein had to be dealt with and “the method of doing that is
open”.
The former prime minister was also quizzed about the claim Saddam could
launch weapons at 45 minutes’ notice.
He said “it would have been better” if headlines about it had been
corrected.
Mr Blair used the morning session to mount an impassioned defence of the
decision to go to war, telling the inquiry: “This isn’t about a lie or a
conspiracy or a deceit or a deception.
“It’s a decision. And the decision I had to take was, given Saddam’s
history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over one million
people whose deaths he had caused, given 10 years of breaking UN
resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons
programmes or is that a risk that it would be irresponsible to take?”
Sometimes it is important not to ask the “March 2003 question” but the
“2010 question”, said Mr Blair, arguing that if Saddam had been left in
power the UK and its allies would have “lost our nerve” to act.
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Quoting frequently from his own speeches and statements, Mr Blair answered
questions about his working relationship with George Bush, the
intelligence used to justify to the public and the unsuccessful diplomatic
efforts at the UN aimed at averting it.
Earlier witnesses to the inquiry have suggested he told Mr Bush at their
April 2002 meeting at the ranch in Crawford, Texas, that the UK would join
the Americans in a war with Iraq.
But Mr Blair said: “What I was saying – I was not saying this privately
incidentally, I was saying it in public – was ‘we are going to be with you
in confronting and dealing with this threat’.
“The one thing I was not doing was dissembling in that position. How we
proceed in this is a matter that was open. The position was not a covert
position, it was an open position.”
Pressed on what he thought Mr Bush took from the meeting, he went further,
saying: “I think what he took from that was exactly what he should have
taken, which was if it came to military action because there was no way of
dealing with this diplomatically, we would be with him.”
Asked about the controversial claim in a September 2002 dossier that Iraq
could deploy weapons of mass destruction (WMD) at 45 minutes notice, he
said it “assumed a vastly greater significance” afterwards than it did at
the time.
He said it “would have been better if (newspaper) headlines about the ‘45
-minute claim’ had been corrected” in light of the significance it later
took on.
He said he would have made it clear the claim referred to battlefield
munitions, not missiles, and would have preferred to publish the
intelligence assessments by themselves as they were “absolutely strong
enough”.