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| Tony Blair Testifies About Iraq War to UK Inquiry Panel by isalegan2: 5:59pm On Jan 21, 2011 |
At Iraq Inquiry, Blair Offers Regrets for Loss of Life By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL Published: January 21, 2011 New York Times LONDON — A year after he first testified before Britain’s official inquiry into the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair, the former prime minister, returned on Friday to revisit his reasons for going to war and, he said, to do something he did not do the first time round — display regret for the loss of life. But the fleeting moment of contrition seemed to offer little solace to relatives of Britain’s Iraq war dead present in the committee room at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center near Parliament in central London where the 18-month-old inquiry is unfolding. “Too late, too late,” several relatives were heard to call out before the chairman of the inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, demanded silence. In more than four hours of testimony before a panel of four knights and a baroness, the former leader also sought to shift the debate from Iraq to Iran, accusing Tehran of supporting terrorist groups in the region and seeking to block Middle East peace efforts. When he first appeared before the inquiry in January 2010, Mr. Blair was asked after six hours of testimony whether he wished to express regret. “At the conclusion of the last hearing, you asked me whether I had any regrets,” he said on Friday. “I took that as a question about the decision to go to war, and I answered that I took responsibility.” “That was taken as my meaning that I had no regrets about the loss of life and that was never my meaning or my intention,” he said. “I wanted to make it clear that, of course, I regret deeply and profoundly the loss of life, whether from our own armed forces, those of other nations, the civilians who helped people in Iraq or the Iraqis themselves.” As he did a year ago, [b]Mr. Blair mounted a fluent, unwavering defense of his actions, saying he would do the same again [/b]to counter what he depicted as a far greater threat from Saddam Hussein after the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. On Friday, he again invoked those attacks as the source of his subsequent policies toward Iraq, terrorism and unconventional weapons. Tanned and wearing a navy blue suit, Mr. Blair said the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington made terrorism more threatening. “The single most difficult thing we have to face today — and we face it still — is the risk of this new type of terrorism and extremism based on an ideological perversion of the faith of Islam combined with technology that allows them to kill people on a large scale,” Mr. Blair said “Although this is a time where many people think this extremism can be managed, I personally don’t think that is true,” he said. “I think it has to be confronted and changed.” Previous witnesses at the inquiry, which opened in July 2009, have insisted that British security services concluded that there was no evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and the possibility of terrorists obtaining unconventional weapons. Last July, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, a former head of MI5, the domestic intelligence service, said it had had no concerns “in either the short term or medium term” to support Mr. Blair’s frequent contention that he acted to prevent terrorists’ securing access to unconventional weapons in Iraq. Mr. Blair said on Friday that after Sept. 11, two views emerged internationally concerning terrorism, one of them that the threat could simply be managed. His own view, he said, was “that we have to confront it.” After the attacks, he said, “We always did make it clear that we were going to be shoulder to shoulder with the Americans.” He dwelt at some length on the domestic British politics that, he said, underpinned the concerns of some of his cabinet colleagues about an alliance with the United States. “Here we were. We had just been re-elected with another landslide, we were probably the most successful center-left government in the world and you are about to go into an alliance with a conservative, Republican president. That was the thing that worried them most,” Mr. Blair said. But he acknowledged that, while British policy did not speak specifically of regime change, the notion of ousting Saddam Hussein had long been an American priority and he had discussed it with President Bush in a telephone conversation in December 2001. cont. to page 2 here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/world/europe/22britain.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp |
| Re: Tony Blair Testifies About Iraq War to UK Inquiry Panel by isalegan2: 6:27pm On Jan 21, 2011 |
At Iraq Inquiry, Blair Offers Regrets for Loss of Life (page 2 of 2, NYTimes.com) “Regime change was their policy, so regime change was part of the discussion,” he said. “If it became the only way of dealing with this issue, we were going to be up for that.” For the Bush administration, “from Sept. 11 onwards, this was on their agenda,” he said. Mr. Blair also sought to explain what he depicted as difficulties he had with the debate in Britain over the legality of the war on the basis of a single United Nations resolution, number 1441. He did not want the discussion to be taken as a sign of weakening resolve, he said, either by Saddam Hussein or by Mr. Bush. “I was having to hold that line,” he said. “I was keeping maximum pressure on Saddam, and I was trying to keep this coalition together,” he said, referring to the grouping of countries whose support he sought for the invasion. In recent days, the former attorney general, Lord Peter Goldsmith, whose job was to scrutinize the legal basis for the effort to remove Saddam Hussein, has said that he was “uncomfortable” with some of Mr. Blair’s remarks at the time suggesting that the invasion had sufficient United Nations support to justify war. Although almost eight years have gone by since Mr. Blair committed Britain as the junior partner in the United States-led invasion of 2003, the war has become intertwined with Mr. Blair’s legacy for many Britons. Britain’s involvement in the conflict was deeply unpopular, stripping Mr. Blair of the immense backing that brought him to office in 1997. While the British authorities have refused to make public key documents about the transatlantic relationship at that time, many Britons remain concerned about both the legal justification for the war and the extent of Mr. Blair’s pledges to Mr. Bush as the preparations for the invasion got under way. The chairman of the panel has voiced disappointment at a decision by a senior civil servant, Sir Gus O’Donnell, to keep notes of those exchanges secret. Mr. Blair also faces scrutiny at a more personal level. Reg Keys, whose son was killed in southern Iraq in June, 2003, said this week he planned to be present when the former prime minister testifies. His son, Tom Keys, was among six British military police officers killed by an Iraqi crowd. “Had he been killed by weapons of mass destruction — had Iraq possessed them — I would accept that,” Mr. Keys said. “But I will not accept that a prime minister in the 21st century can mislead Parliament and get away with it.” Since late Thursday, antiwar demonstrators have been gathering outside the Queen Elizabeth II conference center here to protest Mr. Blair’s actions in Iraq. |
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