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Blair took war decision before parliament vote

British PM rejects claims of misleading country

AFP, London
Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday he decided war against Iraq was unavoidable "a few days" before the British parliament on March 18 gave the green light for military action on Baghdad.
But Blair added that it would not have been "sustainable" for Britain to join the campaign against Saddam Hussein led by the United States if the parliament in London voted against it.
"I decided that we couldn't avoid conflict in the few days before the vote on the 18th of March, because it was then that it was obvious we couldn't get a second UN resolution that delivered an ultimatum to Saddam," Blair told a committee of senior British deputies.
"Once other countries had made it clear they were not prepared to support a resolution with an ultimatum in it, all we were going to get was a further condemnation of Saddam and an agreement to have another discussion. That wasn't enough."
March 18 was the date when Blair won backing from the British parliament for a military campaign. Two days later the war on Iraq was launched.
Blair told deputies: "I have never thought it was realistic for British troops to go to war if parliament voted against it. I don't think it would have been sustainable.
"We had to persuade the Cabinet, then we had to persuade parliament. If at any one of those stages opposite decisions had been
taken, it wouldn't have happened."
The prime minister insisted he had always wanted to resolve the Iraq crisis peacefully.
"Up until that point (March 18) I was still working to avoid the conflict. I very nearly had and believed I would have secured the necessary votes in the UN to have got effectively an ultimatum to Saddam and that could still have avoided the conflict. "All the way through I had in my mind an attempt, if at all possible, to do this peacefully."
Blair added: "We made an agreement under (UN resolution) 1441 that disarmament had to happen one way or another, that the inspectors had to have the full co-operation of Saddam and he never gave that."
Reuters adds: Prime Minister Tony Blair, fighting for his political reputation, on Tuesday rejected claims he misled Britain over the case for war in Iraq despite the non-appearance of weapons of mass destruction.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a parliamentary committee. "I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time," he added.
Britain and America waged war on Iraq on the basis that former leader Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction posed a serious threat, but the failure so far to unearth those weapons has caused a furor over the case made for war.
The credibility of Blair's govern-
ment has come under attack and the weapons row has dented his standing in opinion polls.
AFP adds: Prime Minister Tony Blair faces a grilling Tuesday from the House of Commons' committee of committees after a parliamentary report rapped the manner in which he took Britain into war with Iraq.
Blair goes before the liaison committee -- made up of the chairmen of all the Commons' watchdog select committees -- at 10 am (0900 GMT) just 24 hours after the release of the report from the foreign affairs committee.
It had investigated two dossiers
published by Blair's government in the run-up to war -- one of which included a headline-grabbing claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in 45 minutes.
The committee also probed a BBC report in late May quoting an intelligence source who claimed that the dossier published in September was "sexed up" with the 45-minute claim despite doubts among intelligence chiefs.
"We conclude that the 45-minute claim did not warrant the prominence given to it in the dossier, because it was based on intelligence from a single, uncorroborated source," the report said.