Tell us the truth about the dossier

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,998213,00.html

There cannot be anyone who now genuinely believes that Iraq posed a threat to Britain or America when UK and US troops invaded the country. Yet that is what we were told at the time: Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destructionprogramme was so dangerous that military force was the only way to stop it.

The charge now being laid at Tony Blair's door is not that he knowingly lied to the Commons and the public - an exaggeration he can easily deny. It is that he dragged Britain into a war under what, it is now clear, was a pretence. That he still sticks to the claim in his foreword to the September dossier that the threat from Iraq "is serious and current" tells you as much about his judgment and prejudices as his sincerity.

Spurred on by George Bush, his mind appeared to have been made up. Diplomatic shenanigans at the UN were a sideshow, useful but not really necessary, certainly not as far as the attorney-general's view of international law was concerned.

Ministers cannot now back away saying what they actually meant by WMD were bits of old machinery or "programmes" found in documents. The whole point of the dossier was to convince MPs to vote for war to counter an urgent threat and for the public to support them. We have a right to know from an independent inquiry whether we went to war on false pretences. The onus is now on the government and their agents to show we did not.

[realFedUp]

1. I'd love to be a fly on the wall during Blair's visit with Bush

and wouldn't the CIA love to have a tape of that....