They lied about Iraq. Will they do it again?

DURING the UN Security Council debate on the need to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, we were told that Iraq represented an immediate threat not only to its neighbours but to the US itself.

Tony Blair took a country racked by doubt into conflict because Saddam’s weapons posed an immediate threat to his neighbours and to world order.

The whole purpose of the war, he said, was “a proper process of disarmament.” Nice words, but there’s one problem .

A senior British intelligence officer has told the BBC that a dossier compiled by them on Saddam’s weapons was rewritten to make it “sexier”.

It claimed that Saddam had the capacity to activate his biological and chemical weapons in just 45 minutes.

Mr Blair used this in another one of his emotional outbursts during a pre-war Commons debate.

The same intelligence officer added that the dossier had been “transformed” a week before it was published on the orders of Downing Street. Paul Wolfowitz, a senior adviser to Mr Bush, last week put it flippantly when he said that, for bureaucratic reasons, “we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”

It’s obvious that lies were told to justify the war on Iraq. Now it seems that Iran is in the firing line. Can the international community let this US administration simply do as it wishes?

Philip Cremin,

Scrahan,

Knocknagree,

Mallow,

Co Cork.