PM “knew” Iraq had no WMDs
Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has insisted that Tony Blair privately conceded before the outbreak of war against with Iraq that Saddam Hussein had no “usable” weapons of mass destruction that could be used “within 45 minutes.”
The PM told Mr Cook on March 5 two weeks before the conflict commenced that he did not believe Saddam’s weapons arsenal posed a “real and present danger” to the UK.
Mr Cook said he thought Mr Blair was willing to go to war regardless of the work by UN weapons inspector Hans Blix.
The startling revelations were penned in the forthcoming book “Point of Departure,” based on Mr Cook’s diaries. They have been serialised in the Sunday Times newspaper.
Mr Cook said a “large number of ministers” spoke out in Cabinet against Britain’s decision to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the US.
Their protestations culminated in a near “mutiny” over the issue.
Downing Street said the suggestion that the PM thought Saddam had no WMDs was “absurd.”
In the first memoir Mr Cook wrote that the PM was “far too clever” to allege there was a real link between Saddam and al-Qaida.
Instead, Mr Cook proffered in a Feb. 6 entry: “But he deliberately crafted a suggestive phrasing which in the minds of many views must have created an impression, and was designed to create the impression, that British troops were going to Iraq to fight a threat from al-Qaida,”
UN chief weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix said the Iraq Survey Group’s failure to find compelling evidence that Iraq had WMDs challenged the view that Saddam was a “clear and present danger.”
Mr Cook resigned from the British government to protest against the US-led war against Iraq.
In an attack on Mr Cook’s apparent betrayal, Deputy PM John Prescott in a speech at Labour party conference sarcastically said he too had been offered the chance to publish his autobiography in a ring-wing newspaper:
But the small print, he joked: “First it said I had to resign from the Cabinet. Second, no articles supporting Labour. To earn that kind of money I’ve got to do something else: I’ve got to slag off the government and my former colleagues.
“Then it says, ‘don’t worry if you take a different position now to the one you took in Cabinet – we’ll just say it shows what an independent thinker you are.”
