Most people would take: 'However your anti-Americanism was never questioned', to mean that my anti-Americanism was never in doubt. Now if you had written that my pro-Americanism was never questioned, then that would have been fine.
Yes "obviously." You gloss over the "why" here. Why did Howard do that? Was it ok to undermine the war and jump on the lefty bandwagon for political gain?
Howard wanted to win a general election, therefore, he needed an angle to attack Blair from. He always supported the war and, as I said before, he maintained throughout the election campaign that if he were PM he would have been part of the US coalition against Iraq even if he had known that there were no WMD there. (Because he agreed that Saddam was a menace and he wanted regime change). His criticism of Blair was based on the government's presentation of the intelligence data in the Iraq weapons dossier published in September, 2002. Clearly, his attack was rather opportunistic, but you could argue that it was also principled because misleading Parliament about your premise for a war is not a good thing to do in most cases. At the end of the day, Howard was trying to win an election and so exploiting chinks in his opponent's armour is what he had to do, but there was no anti-Americanism there.
While I am at it, where do you personally stand on this? Did PM Blair lie?
I have always supported the invasion of Iraq and the elimination of Saddam's regime, even in the absence of a realistic Iraqi WMD capability. However, most British people only supported the war because they had been led to believe that Saddam had a serious ongoing WMD development program and it was mainly Blair's dossier that led them to believe that. In that dossier there were extracts from Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) advice about Saddam's WMD capability, but the caveats which had been in that advice had been removed. The dossier also claimed that Saddam 'had' chemical and biological weapons, and the foreword - signed by Blair - used the phrase 'continued to produce chemical and biological weapons'. The JIC later complained that this passage could give the impression that Saddam was actively producing such weapons when they did not know what had been produced. The Government was criticised for failing to make clear that its assessment of Saddam’s arsenal was based on limited intelligence and that its 45 minute claim was based on intelligence from only one source. Also, analysis from a student postgraduate thesis was used in the dossier and it was not attributed, so anyone would assume it had been provided by MI6 or the JIC.
Hence Blair was certainly economical with the truth and so he should not have been surprised to be called out by the opposition when the faults in this dossier came to light. However, I still believe the Iraq war was just, given Saddam's repression of his people, his belligerence towards Kuwait and Israel and his violations of numerous UN resolutions.
Your analysis of the WMD situation in Iraq and PM Blair's (and Pres Bush's) disclosure does not resemble the Conservative view in the US. It resembles the left. For starters, the accusation is of deliberate misleading, lying, not a case of error.
Having read the last two UN reports prior to the war, I do not feel complacent that there was no WMD threat from Iraq and that we were mistaken, let alone lied to. The absence of stockpiles does not make me secure that no threat existed.
Further digressing for a minute here, when it came to Iraq and the dearth of humint and intel from within, and there was practically none, how many sources could one realistically count on to document the 45 minute claim?
The Conservative Party did the right thing in supporting PM Blair in going to war. It is unfortunate that they could not restrain themselves from making political capital of his troubles from the left on WMD "lies," and being the US's "poodle." As I said before, the alliance of the Conservatives and Left over "Blair lied," resembles the Buchanan faction in the US.