Blair feared marring relations with ally – and looked beyond legal warnings against invasion, Chilcot inquiry is told
Tony Blair today admitted to brushing aside warnings that invading Iraq would be unlawful and made clear his overriding priority, even at the expense of opposition and secrecy at home, was to maintain a close relationship with the US president.
In four hours of testimony to the Chilcot inquiry, ending with expressions of regret for lives lost that provoked jeers from relatives of the dead, Blair disclosed that he privately told George Bush he could "count on us" in helping get rid of Saddam Hussein, an aim, he said, for which his government should be "gung-ho".
A move from Britain to back off after the UN refused to support military action, would have had "disastrous consequences for a tough stance on WMD and its proliferation – and for our strategic relationship with the US, our key ally", Blair said.
He acknowledged the cabinet might not have seen official papers about plans for war, but said ministers would have been aware of the plans from the media.
The former prime minister came to the Chilcot inquiry early this morning, perhaps to avoid an anticipated large number of protesters. Barely 50 were there. More arrived later but were almost outnumbered by a large police presence.
Throughout the hearings, and only occasionally subjected to sharp questioning, Blair described how he told Bush during a phone conversation in December 2001, well over a year before the invasion, that "if [regime change] became the only way of dealing with this issue, we were going to be up for that".
Inquiry documents show how government lawyers, including Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, repeatedly warned that regime change as an objective of military action would be unlawful.
Asked about letters he wrote to Bush, which the inquiry has seen but is prevented by Whitehall from disclosing, Blair said: "What I was saying to President Bush was very clear and simple: 'You can count on us. We are going to be with you in tackling this but here are the difficulties.' As you see, the rest of the note is actually about all the issues and difficulties."
The difficulties were spelt out in a memo, declassified today, sent by Blair to Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, shortly before he met George Bush at the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002. "I do not have a proper worked-out strategy on how we would do it," Blair told Powell. After referring to the need for a "game plan", he added: "I will need a meeting on this with military folk."
Blair added: "The persuasion job on this seems very tough. My own side are worried. Public opinion is fragile ... Yet from a centre-left perspective, the case should be obvious. Saddam's regime is a brutal, oppressive military dictatorship."
He went on: "A political philosophy that does care about other nations – eg Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and is proud to change regimes on the merits, should be gung-ho on Saddam. So why isn't it? Because people believe we are only doing it to support the US, and they are only doing it to settle an old score. And the immediate WMD problems don't seem obviously worse than three years ago. So we have to reorder our story and message".
In a memo sent to Blair two months later and also released today, Powell wrote: "We need to establish a legal base ... We need to make the case ... We need to have the sort of Rolls-Royce information campaign we had at the end of Afghanistan before we start in Iraq." Blair wrote in the margin: "I agree with this entirely."
Blair, summoned back to the inquiry after apparent discrepancies in his evidence came to light, was questioned by Sir Roderic Lyne, a former ambassador and the most persistent member of Chilcot's five-member panel, about claims he made to the Commons about the legality of an invasion, and what he was told privately.
Goldsmith has told the inquiry that by telling MPs in January 2003 that a fresh UN resolution was not necessary before an invasion, the former prime minister was ignoring legal advice he had given. In exchanges yesterday, Blair told Lyne: "I was making basically a political point."
He continued: "I accept entirely that there was an inconsistency, but I was saying [that] not in a sense as a lawyer but politically." If he had revealed publicly that the government had doubts about whether fresh UN authority was needed before an invasion went ahead it would, he added, have been a "political catastrophe for us".
Blair made plain that in his view it was essential that no cracks should be seen in his alliance with Bush. He said that would have been the case had Goldsmith persisted in his view that an invasion without fresh UN approval would be unlawful.
However, when Goldsmith "saw the Americans it moved him over the line, to the position where he said, 'on balance it is lawful'," Blair told the inquiry, referring to the attorney general's visit a month before the invasion to see Bush's legal advisers.
Blair concluded by giving an impassioned warning about the threat from Iran: a threat, he said, that would have been compounded had Saddam survived.
Hostile murmurs in the hearing room met his warning that the west should end its "wretched posture of apology" towards Iran and, if necessary, use force to deal with the Tehran regime.
He called on western countries to deal with the "negative, destabilising" influence of Iranwith its support for terrorism and its nuclear programme. "This is a looming and coming challenge," he said.
"This is not because we have done something. At some point – and I say this to you with all the passion I possibly can – the west has got to get out of this wretched posture of apology for believing that we are responsible for what the Iranians are doing, or what these extremists are doing.
"We are not ... they are doing it because they disagree fundamentally with our way of life and they will carry on doing it unless they are met by the requisite determination and, if necessary, force."
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