"If the people inspired by this religious fanaticism could have killed 30,000 they would have" Tony Blair has denied striking a "covert" deal with George Bush to invade Iraq at a private meeting in 2002 at the US president's ranch. He told the Iraq inquiry there was no secret about what was said - that Saddam Hussein had to be dealt with and "the method of doing that is open". The former prime minister was also quizzed about the claim Saddam could launch weapons at 45 minutes' notice. He said "it would have been better" if headlines about it had been corrected. Earlier witnesses have suggested that Mr Blair told Mr Bush at their April 2002 meeting at the ranch in Crawford, Texas, that the UK would join the Americans in a war with Iraq. But Mr Blair said: "What I was saying - I was not saying this privately incidentally, I was saying it in public - was 'we are going to be with you in confronting and dealing with this threat'. THE STORY SO FAR... In April 2002, with 9/11 still dominating the agenda, Tony Blair warns of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction Despite the biggest anti-war protest in British history, in March 2003 British forces join the US invasion of Iraq after efforts to get UN backing fail With no weapons of mass destruction found attention switches to the way intelligence was used to justify war The Hutton inquiry finds the government did not "sex up" dossier on Saddam's weapons But the Butler inquiry finds "serious flaws" in pre-war intelligence And with public feelings still running high, Gordon Brown announces Chilcot inquiry to "learn the lessons" of the Iraq conflict. Live: Video, and text commentary Q&A: Iraq inquiry explained Key issues: Blair's response Send us your comments "The one thing I was not doing was dissembling in that position. How we proceed in this is a matter that was open. The position was not a covert position, it was an open position." Pressed on what he thought Mr Bush took from the meeting, he went further, saying: "I think what he took from that was exactly what he should have taken, which was if it came to military action because there was no way of dealing with this diplomatically, we would be with him." Asked about the controversial claim in a September 2002 dossier that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes, he said it "assumed a vastly greater significance" afterwards than it did at the time. He said it "would have been better if (newspaper) headlines about the '45-minute claim' had been corrected" in light of the significance it later took on. He said he would have made it clear it referred to battlefield munitions, not missiles, and would have preferred to publish the intelligence assessments by themselves as they were "absolutely strong enough". But Mr Blair insisted that, on the basis of the intelligence available at the time, he stood by his claim at the time that it was "beyond doubt" Iraq was continuing to develop its weapons capability. However he … [Read more...]
