Blair accused of ‘duping’ cabinet on war

A FORMER member of British prime minister Tony Blair’s Cabinet reportedly accused him yesterday of spinning intelligence to justify the war on Iraq and said he had “duped” his colleagues about alleged weapons of mass destruction.

“I have concluded that the prime minister had decided to go to war in August sometime and he duped us all along,” The Sunday Telegraph newspaper quoted former International Development Secretary Clare Short as saying. “He had decided for reasons that he alone knows to go to war over Iraq and to create this sense of urgency and drive it. The way the intelligence was spun was part of that drive.”

Short resigned last month, angrily accusing Blair of breaking his promise to give the United Nations a central role in the post-war reconstruction and administration of Iraq. She had called his handling of the crisis “deeply reckless” before the war began and threatened to quit, but stayed in her Cabinet job through the conflict.

The failure of American and British troops to find evidence that Saddam Hussein had banned weapons is creating a serious political problem for Blair, who said the threat posed by the arms justified war. He reiterated yesterday the search for illegal munitions would eventually prove him right: “I have always said to people to wait for the conclusion of this process and there are still masses of sites due to be investigated but, rather than give a running commentary on it, we will accumulate the evidence and give it to people,” he told journalists travelling with him to a Group of Eight nations summit in Evian, France.

The prime minister told Sky News he had seen some evidence that was gathered through interviews in Iraq.

Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest at the war, told BBC radio it looked as if the government had made “a monumental blunder” in going to war: “The government should admit it was wrong and they need to set up then a thorough, independent inquiry into how they got it wrong so that it never happens again, we never again send British troops into action on the basis of a mistake.”

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, speaking to the BBC, echoed recent suggestions by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that Saddam may have destroyed some of his arms before the war started. He said he was confident evidence of the illegal weapons would be discovered and said Short’s criticism was off base: “The intelligence certainly wasn’t wrong. The evidence is there, it is published. They had those weapons systems and they had been building them up. We didn’t take the military decision on the basis of some contingency as to what we might find later on. We took it on the basis of fully declared and disclosed evidence.”