Blair Tells Commons Results in Iraq Are More Important Than Faulty Intelligence

The New York Times ^ | 04 February 2004 | Patrick E. Tyler

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LONDON, Feb. 4 — Against a backdrop of spirited debate and boisterous dissent, Prime Minister Tony Blair on Wednesday defended his decision to go to war in Iraq, saying that he was ready to take responsibility for his actions before the country while asserting that freedom and democracy in Iraq were more important than any mistaken intelligence.

Mr. Blair's presentation in the House of Commons was interrupted by hecklers in the public gallery where shouts of "Murderer!" and "Liar!" prompted a suspension of the proceedings for about 15 minutes while the gallery was cleared. As he struggled to be heard, the prime minister quipped, "I somehow feel I'm not being entirely persuasive in certain quarters."

Other demonstrators dressed in white wigs and crimson judicial robes threw white paint on the wrought-iron gates of No. 10 Downing Street, the prime minister's office, protesting what they said was the "whitewash" of last week's Hutton report.

Lord Hutton's findings cleared Mr. Blair and his aides of any wrongdoing in the production of a September 2002 intelligence report on Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons and found that the BBC had erred in stating last year that the government had embellished the case for going to war.

The seven-hour debate on Wednesday was meant to be the full airing of issues in the wake of Lord Hutton's findings, but the intensity of the exchanges suggested that political recriminations within Mr. Blair's Labor Party and among opposition parties will continue and may not be resolved by a new inquiry under Lord Butler to examine any intelligence failures and how intelligence was used in the political process.

Even as Mr. Blair has sought to draw a line under the political furor, new issues were raised Wednesday regarding what Mr. Blair knew on the eve of war about questionable intelligence findings on which he and his aides had relied heavily in making the case against Mr. Hussein.

Mr. Blair started out the day on the defensive as a senior former British intelligence officer asserted that the country's top experts on chemical and biological weapons were uniformly critical of how intelligence was being used to galvanize public opinion before the conflict.

Writing in The Independent, Dr. Brian Jones, the former chief analyst for the Defense Intelligence Staff on biological and chemical weapons, said, "In my view, the expert intelligence analysts" of the defense staff "were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002, resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities."

According to Dr. Jones and the Hutton findings, although Dr. Jones and a colleague submitted a formal memorandum stating their concerns as Britain's "foremost experts in their field," senior British intelligence officials never sought to discuss their concerns or convey them to Mr. Blair and his aides. Some members of Parliament said they found that disturbing.

Robin Cook, the foreign secretary who resigned over the war, appeared to question Mr. Blair's statement on Wednesday that even as military operations were beginning in March 2003, the prime minister was still not aware that an intelligence report saying that Iraqi officials could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes referred to short-range battlefield weapons and not long-range weapons that could threaten the region.

Mr. Cook said he himself was aware of the distinction by March.

For his part, Mr. Blair said he believed it was "eccentric" to say that there were meaningful differences between battlefield and long-range unconventional weapons. And he asserted that the editing of intelligence documents that assert that the evidence "indicates" weapons were present to a harder formulation that the evidence "shows" they were present was "hardly of earth-shattering significance."

In making a detailed defense of decisions taken in tandem by Britain and the United States, Mr. Blair appeared once again to be taking the role of barrister for both governments, tying his strategic outlook and political fate to that of President Bush, and perhaps testing arguments that will echo in Washington.

"If any part of the intelligence turns out to be wrong," he said, "or if the threat from Saddam was different or changed from what we thought, I will accept this as I should, but let others accept that ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein has made the world not just better but safer."

The Conservative Party leader, Michael Howard, was far less trenchant in his criticism of Mr. Blair on Wednesday than in clashes prior to Lord Hutton's findings, in which he had frequently questioned the prime minister's veracity. But he again rejected Labor Party demands to apologize to Mr. Blair.

Instead, he criticized the prime minister for yielding to calls for a new inquiry only after Mr. Bush announced that such an inquiry was necessary after testimony from the American weapons specialist David A. Kay, who resigned from the weapons hunt in Iraq and conceded that much prewar intelligence was wrong, although he supported the aim of removing Mr. Hussein.

Mr. Howard asked Mr. Blair to declassify the intelligence relating to chemical and biological weapons and the report that suggested that such weapons could be activated in 45 minutes. With Mr. Hussein out of power, he said, the threat to sources was outweighed by the public demand to know the truth.