Blair tells investigative panel that Iraq war was justified

LONDON — In an eagerly anticipated appearance, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Friday told a British panel investigating the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein had become too dangerous a threat to ignore in a post-9-11 world and that the decision to invade in 2003 was justified.

“If there was any possibility that he could develop
weapons of mass destruction, we should stop him,” Blair said. “That was
my view then; that’s my view now.”

Blair added that he had tried until “the last
moment” to achieve a diplomatic solution to the standoff between Saddam
and United Nations weapons inspectors, but that the Iraqi leader’s
continued stalling and resistance eventually demanded military
intervention.

“We had to resolve this through the U.N. If we
couldn’t resolve it through U.N. inspectors, we had to resolve it by
removing Saddam,” Blair told an independent inquiry commissioned by the
current British government. “There was a judgment being made, and I
honestly in retrospect can’t disagree with this judgment, that … more
time was not going to solve this.”

Feisty and at times sounding rehearsed, Blair rejected accusations that he and President George W. Bush had determined between them to go to war months before the actual
invasion and that he had exaggerated the threat from Hussein to
persuade an ambivalent British public.

Blair said that intelligence reports he had received
clearly pointed to efforts by Saddam to develop weapons of mass
destruction. The former British leader, Bush’s staunchest ally in the
war effort, noted several times that Saddam had used chemical weapons
against Iraqi Kurds, demonstrating that he was “a profoundly wicked, I
would say almost psychopathic, man.”

No new weapons of mass destruction were found after the war.

“This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit
or a deception; it’s a decision,” Blair said. “And the decision I had
to take was, given Saddam’s history, given his use of chemical weapons,
given the over 1 million people whose deaths he caused, given 10 years
of breaking U.N. resolutions, could we take the risk?”

Blair’s comments came in a three-hour session Friday morning before the so-called Chilcot inquiry being held in central London. His testimony has been widely anticipated for weeks as the commission delves into what brought Britain to the war, how the war and its aftermath were managed, and what lessons can be learned from the experience.

For many Britons, the highly controversial war
remains a raw wound and a stain on their country’s reputation. More
than 200 demonstrators protested outside the hearing venue, toting
placards calling Blair a liar and demanding that he be tried for war
crimes. Security was tightened for his appearance.

Blair’s testimony was to continue in a second three-hour session this afternoon.

—

(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.

Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.