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More weapons pressure on Blair
LONDON, England -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair came under further pressure over the lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction -- the reason Blair gave for Britain's decision to go to war in Iraq. Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook warned that weapons would have to be found to justify Blair's decision to back the U.S.-led war amid media reports that senior government figures had accepted that no actual weapons would be found. CNN's Robin Oakley said the affair was "hurting Blair politically" and pressure was building for an independent judicial inquiry into Britain's decision to go to war. Inquiries so far have been confined to members of Parliament with limited powers to call evidence. The row in Britain continued as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the U.S. went to war in Iraq not because of new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons but because the events of September 11 "changed our appreciation of our vulnerability" to WMD attacks. (Full story) In the U.S., Democrats are calling for an investigation into President George W. Bush's claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq tried to buy large amounts of uranium in Africa -- an allegation that has since been proven to be false. (Bush defends decision to go to war) Oakley said Blair had appeared to soften his line earlier this week when, answering questions before a House of Commons committee, he said he was convinced that "evidence of WMD programs" would be found -- he did not say the weapons themselves . When he unveiled his "dossier" on Iraq in September, Blair had said the threat from Saddam's weapons of mass destruction was "active, detailed and growing" and said that the former Iraqi leader had plans to use chemical and biological weapons "which could be activated within 45 minutes." The BBC, meanwhile, reported that "senior sources" in the British administration no longer believed that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq. Blair's spokesman said Thursday: "The prime minister believes and is absolutely confident that we will find material that, had (U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector) Hans Blix found it, would have justified him going back to the Security Council and having a further U.N. resolution issued. "The Prime Minister is also absolutely confident that we will find evidence not only of his WMD programmes but concrete evidence of the product of those programs as well. "He is absolutely confident that we will find not only evidence of the programs but the concrete product of those programs." Cook, who quit the British Cabinet over Iraq, told BBC Radio: "They said quite explicitly that there were weapons, indeed famously they said there were weapons that would be ready within 45 minutes. "They also said that Saddam had rebuilt the factories to make more chemical weapons. "To establish that that is correct, you do have to produce the weapons. You do have to actually produce the factories. You cannot now say 'Well, there were some scientists around who might at some time have had a capacity to develop it.' "That is not what Parliament was being told in March when it voted for war. "If that was what Parliament had been told in March, it is not at all clear that Parliament would have voted for war. "We didn't go to war in order that some months down the line the Government could write an even better dossier on the programs. We went to war because we were told there were weapons." Blair was challenged by Liberal Democrat MP Alan Reid at Prime Minister's Questions Wednesday to resign if no weapons had been found by the end of the summer. He responded: "I have no doubt at all that the intelligence we received was accurate. "The view of some people that this whole issue of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction is some invention of the CIA or British intelligence is absurd. "The fact of the matter is that we know that when the inspectors left at the end of 1998 there was a huge amount of weaponry unaccounted for." Both Conservative opposition leader Iain Duncan Smith and Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell renewed their calls Thursday for an independent inquiry headed by a judge into Britain's decision to go to war.
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