World overestimates terror threat, says Blix

THE world is overestimating the dangers of global terrorism, especially when compared with environmental risks, former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said yesterday.

"I think we still overestimate the danger of terror," Mr Blix said. "There are other things that are of equal, if not greater, magnitude, like the environmental global risks," he said.

Mr Blix was speaking after British Prime Minister Tony Blair had given an impassioned defence of his decision to back the US-led war against Iraq given the threat of global terrorism.

In one of his most detailed defences yet, Mr Blair last Friday said the world faced "mortal danger" from terrorists prepared to wage "war without limits". Mr Blair, the closest ally of US President George W Bush in the Iraq crisis, has consistently cited Saddam Hussein's pursuit of banned weapons as the main justification for taking Britain to war last March.

But failure to find such weapons has prompted accusations the prime minister took the nation to the battlefield on false pretenses.

Mr Blix said yesterday Britain and the United States "believed the intelligence rather than the inspectors, and unfortunately the inspectors were right".

Meanwhile, Mr Blair was yesterday accused by a former foreign secretary of "gross misuse" of the intelligence services to back his case on Iraq.

No previous prime minister would have published a dossier under the name of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), as Mr Blair did, said Sir Malcolm Rifkind.

He branded Blair's refusal to hold a full inquiry into the decision to join military action "perverse". In yesterday's Independent on Sunday, Mr Rifkind wrote: "It is now clear that he took Britain into war on a false prospectus."

Tory attacks should focus on key points, he argued. The first must be "the gross misuse of the intelligence agencies to provide a character reference for the prime minister". The content of the September 2002 dossier was a secondary issue compared with the unprecedented decision "to use the agencies and the JIC to try to enhance the credibility of the Government's case for war," he said.