Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted to the official Iraq war inquiry Friday that the British government’s post-war planning was “perfectly adequate,” dismissing claims it had not conducted sufficient risk assessments in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.
He told the Chilcot inquiry, “There was an immense amount of planning … We didn’t end up with a humanitarian disaster.”
Blair reiterated that he believed the invasion of Iraq was legal, stressing that UN resolution 1441 made it clear Saddam Hussein was offered “one last chance” to cooperate. When he failed to do a military solution was legitimized.
However he admitted a second resolution would have resolved the question of the legality of war “beyond any dispute.”
The former prime minister accepted the inquiry’s accusation that the then Attorney General Lord Goldsmith changed his mind over the legality of the Iraq war after visiting Washington, but insisted it was “not just because of the Americans.”
“Let me make it absolutely clear that if Peter (Goldsmith) was going to say it’s not legal then we would not have been able to take military action,” Blair said.
Goldsmith, told the inquiry on Jan. 27 he only gave legal approval for the war after he followed advice from U.S. government lawyers, and reinterpreted “two or three” words in resolution 1441. Previously he feared the resolution did not authorize war.
Blair admitted to the inquiry that disagreement within the UN over the invasion of Iraq was a “difficult situation,” but his ultimate judgment was that Saddam Hussein posed a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat.
Earlier Blair told the inquiry he believed that Hussein was a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat, and that this led to his decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
He stressed that Saddam had used chemical weapons on his own people, with horrific consequences, and that he believed the Iraqi president to be a “wicked, almost psychopathic man.”
“The nature of the regime did make a difference to the nature of the WMD threat … My assessment of the security threat was intimately connected with the nature of the regime.”
Blair played down a claim, made in a crucial Sept. 2002 dossier, that Saddam could deploy WMD within 45 minutes, saying it had no real significant effect on his decision to go to war.
The former prime minister told the British parliament on Sept. 24 2002, prior to the Iraq invasion, that it was “beyond doubt” Saddam possessed WMD. No such weapons were ever found.
Blair said it was the terror attacks of Sept. 11 that “changed dramatically” Britain’s and the United States’ views on Saddam, even though he had no known links to Al Qaeda.
“Up to Sept. 11 we thought he was a risk but we thought it was worth trying to contain it … The crucial thing that happened, after Sept. 11, is that the calculus of risk changed,” Blair said.
Blair also refuted accusations that he had made a secret deal to go to war in Iraq at a key strategy meeting in Crawford, Texas with former U.S. president George Bush in April 2002.