Bliar: more evidence

The evidence that Carne Ross (a former First Secretary at the UK Mission to the UN) gave to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee is now in the public domain. According to yesterday's Guardian, he claims that the British Government's private assessment was that Iraq "possessed no significant quantities of weapons of mass destruction". He also argues that UN security council resolution 1441 was lobbied for by the UK "explicitly on the grounds that it did not represent authorisation for war". Further, he claims that when the US raised the subject of "regime change" that "we would frequently argue...(that) was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos".

There is nothing here that is not already known. It is simply an additional piece of evidence showing the duplicity with which the decision to go to war was taken. It suggests that Iraq was invaded not because it had WMD's, but because it did not have them, and was powerless to prevent invasion.