Blair and Scarlett told me Iraq had no usable weapons

[cal04]

This is the most extraordinary failure in the history of British intelligence.If Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, there was no urgent need to invade Iraq. George Bush and Tony Blair could have given Hans Blix the extra few months for which he pleaded to finish his job and prove Saddam was no threat. What created real urgency in Washington to start the invasion may have been the dawning realisation that Hans Blix was about to remove their pretext for war.

Unfortunately for Downing Street, the one-dimensional endorsement of the government case by the Hutton report encouraged it to be triumphant when it would have been wiser to have been conciliatory. That hubris may explain why in the Commons debate on the report Tony Blair stumbled into fresh controversy by letting slip that he had never realised before the war that the chemical weapons described as ready at 45-minutes notice in the September dossier were only battlefield munitions and not missiles.


http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/0,12956,1259187,00.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. A kick for the only UK or US government politician honest enough to resign

before the war, and state, publicly:
"Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories.

Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?

Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam's ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors? "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2859431.stm