TONY BLAIR AND IRAQ
- Session: 2009-10
- Date tabled: 14.12.2009
- Primary sponsor:
- Sponsors:
That this House notes that in a television interview on the Fern Britten programme broadcast by the BBC on 13 December 2009, Tony Blair, when asked whether he would still have gone on with plans to join the US-led invasion of Iraq had he known at the time that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, said `I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat'; contrasts this statement with his comments to the House on 25 February 2003 in the run up to invasion, that `Saddam can.....voluntarily disarm. He can even leave the country peacefully. But he cannot avoid disarmament'; recalls that in making the case for war less than a month later, Tony Blair revealed he was conversant with an extraordinary interview conducted by United Nations inspection agency UNSCOM in August 1995 with General Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, who had defected to Jordan, in which the General revealed at page 13 of the transcript, later posted on the BBC Radio Four Today programme website, and reported in the 3 March 2003 edition of Newsweek that `All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed'; believes that the former Prime Minister was not candid with the House in making the case for war; and calls for appropriate legal action to be taken to rectify this deeply disturbing situation.