LONDON, Jan 29 – Tony Blair, the former prime minister who led Britain during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, appeared on Friday before a public inquiry into the war.
Following are key quotes from his appearance:
DID YOU GIVE ARMED FORCES ENOUGH KIT AND TIME TO PREPARE?
“On these issues to do with logistics, there’s an expertise that the army have on this. I needed to know from them that they could do it and they would be ready. And that’s what they assured me and they were.
“My attitude has always been, I don’t think I’ve refused a request for money or equipment at any point in time that I was prime minister. My view very very strongly is when you’re asking your armed forces to go into these situations, you put everything to one side other than making sure they have the equipment they need and they have the finance there to back it up.
LEGALITY OF WAR
“If (Attorney General Peter Goldsmith) in the end had said this cannot be justified lawfully, then we would have been unable to take action.
“Anybody who know Peter knows he would not have done it unless he believed in it and thought it was the correct thing to do.”
RESOLUTION 1441 ALLOWED INVASION
“What was so important to me about resolution 1441 was not simply that it declared Saddam in breach but it said also that a failure to comply unconditionally and immediately and fully with the inspectors was itself a material breach.
“At the end of October 2002 I remember specifically a conversation with President Bush in which I said if he complies that’s it. This is important because people sometimes say it was all cast in stone.
HAVING SENT IN LARGE FORCE INITIALLY, WHY NOT LEAVE AFTERMATH TO OTHERS?
“Our military, in a sense to their great credit, were in favour, if we were going to be part of this, to be whole-hearted ... I thought that was right as well. It would have been a very big thing to have kept out of the aftermath as well. Of course it was in the aftermath that some of the most difficult things happened and the British forces performed magnificently.”
DISAGREEMENTS WITHIN UNITED NATIONS
“I would have hoped to have had a United Nations situation in which everyone was on the same page and agreed. Sometimes that doesn’t happen...It was a really tough situation, yes, and in the end, as I say, what influenced me was that my judgment ultimately was that Saddam was going to remain a threat.”
DID US OFFER TO GO IT ALONE?
“The Americans would have done that. I think President Bush actually at one point shortly before the debate said, look if it’s too difficult for Britain we understand, but I took the view very strongly then that it was right for us to be with America since we believed in this too. It is true it was very divisive.”
FAILURE TO GET SECOND UN RESOLUTION
“It was very very clear to me that the French, the Germans and the Russian had decided they weren’t going to be in favour of this and there was a straightforward division frankly and I don’t think it would have mattered how much time we had taken, they weren’t going to agree that force should be used.”
WHAT IF?
“Even if (UN weapons inspector Hans) Blix had continued, the fact is he would never have got the truth out of Saddam and the leading people in the regime.”
“Sometimes what is important is not to ask the March 2003 question but to ask the 2010 question. Supposing we had backed off this military action, supposing we had left Saddam and his sons who were going to follow him in charge of Iraq, people who had used chemical weapons, caused the death of over a million people? What we now know is that he retained absolutely the intent and the intellectual know-how to restart a nuclear and a chemical weapons programme when the inspectors were out and the sanctions changed.”
JUDGMENT CALL
“This isn’t about a lie, or a conspiracy, or a deceit, or a deception, this is a decision.”
“And the decision I had to take was, given Saddam’s history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over 1 million people whose deaths he caused, given 10 years of breaking UN resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons programme?”
“It’s a decision in the end. I believed, and in the end so did the cabinet and so did parliament incidentally, that we were right not to run that risk.”
SADDAM AND AL QAEDA
“We were actually saying to the Americans, look, Saddam and Al Qaeda, it’s two separate things but I always worried that at some point these two things would come together. Not Saddam and al Qaeda simply, but the notion of states proliferating WMD and terrorist groups. I still think that is a major risk today.”
“There are states, Iran in particular, that are linked to this extreme and in my view misguided view about Islam. We still face this threat today.”
WMD “He had used them, he definitely had them, he was in breach of I think 10 United Nations resolutions on them, and so in a sense it would have required quite strong evidence the other way to be doubting the fact that he had this programme.”
TIES TO WIDER MIDDLE EAST PEACE
“I would not have done Iraq if I hadn’t have thought it was right, full stop, irrespective of the Middle East.”
“I thought if we managed to get the (Middle East) peace process really pushing forward, we were more likely to get a broader and deeper coalition.”
“Just to say about the reaction of Arab leaders in the region, most of them were glad to see the back of Saddam... He paid money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and he was a menace on the Middle East peace process too.”
COMMITMENTS TO US GIVEN IN APRIL 2002
“The only commitment I gave, and gave openly, was a commitment to deal with Saddam.”
“What I was saying to President Bush is we are going to be with you in confronting and dealing with this threat.”
“What changed after Sept. 11 was that if necessary, and there was no other way of dealing with this threat, we were going to remove him.”
“If we tried the UN route and that failed, my view was it had to be dealt with.”
ON REGIME CHANGE/WMD
“The fact is it was an appalling regime and we couldn’t run the risk of such a regime being allowed to develop WMD.”
“We are saying we have to deal with his WMD ambitions. If that means regime change, so be it.”
“It was the breach of the United Nations’ resolutions on WMD, that was the cause, it was then and it remains.”
“If we tried the UN route and that failed, my view was it had to be dealt with.”
ON IMPACT OF 9/11
“Up to Sept 11 (2001), we thought he (Saddam) was a risk but we thought it was worth trying to contain it. The crucial thing after Sept 11 is that the calculus of risk changed.”
“If Sept 11 hadn’t happened our assessment of the risk of allowing Saddam any possibility of him reconstituting his programmes would not have been the same. After Sept 11, our view, the American view, changed and changed dramatically.”
“The point about this act in New York was that had they been able to kill even more people than those 3,000, they would have. And so, after that time, my view was you could not take risks with this issue at all.” – Reuters
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