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MPs plan to impeach Blair over Iraq war

AFP, London
Eleven members of the British parliament plan to invoke a parliamentary procedure last used more than 150 years ago to impeach Prime Minister Tony Blair over the war in Iraq, newspapers say.
Led by Adam Price of the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru party, the MPs allege that Blair was less than honest when he insisted that the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was needed to halt Saddam Hussein's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. No hard evidence of such weapons have been uncovered since Saddam's regime collapsed.
Details of the MPs' impeachment
bid were to be announced at a press conference in London later Thursday.
With Blair's own Labour party enjoying a healthy majority in the Commons, the motion is unlikely to pass, but it would force the prime minister to submit to a fresh debate on why he joined the US-led offensive on Iraq.
One of the MPs behind the motion, Boris Johnson of the main opposition Conservative party, said it would "at least force Blair to come clean and say why he felt it was necessary to be so reckless with the truth".
"It is not so much that he lied; it is rather that he used all his lawyerly SEE FROM PAGE 12
arts, and the trust that is naturally reposed in his office, to communicate to the public a vast untruth," wrote Johnson in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Unlike US President George W. Bush, who pressed the case for "regime change" in Baghdad, Blair pitched the Iraq war to skeptical Britons as essential to stop Saddam from possessing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
Blair also argued that, in the wake of the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001, there was a real danger of the likes of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network acquiring such weapons from rogue states.
The proposed motion of impeachment would be put before the Commons after it comes back from summer recess on September 7.
It could upset Blair's own plan to play down Iraq and play up domestic issues in what many regard as the run-up to a British general election in the first half of next year.
Underpinning the impeachment motion is a 99-page report, prepared for Price by two academics, comparing statements made by Blair "with what the prime minister was actu-
ally being told" by intelligence services, Johnson said.
"We are guided by that most ancient of parliamentary doctrines: the principle of ministerial accountability, that those who lead us cannot mislead us and remain in office," wrote Price in the report's foreword.
"It is simply unprecedented for a minister to refuse to resign in the face of such compelling evidence."
Motions of impeachment can be put forward by no more than a single MP, obliging the speaker of the Commons to call a debate.
But the procedure has been dormant since a failed attempt in 1848 to impeach then prime minister Lord Palmerston over an alleged secret treaty with Russia, the Guardian newspaper reported.
Nine of the 11 MPs behind the impeachment motion are Welsh and Scottish nationalists; the others are Johnson, who supported the war on grounds of regime change, and fellow Tory Nigel Evans.
The Guardian said a number of backbench Labour MPs who opposed the Iraq war were considering whether to back the motion, even though doing so might put them at risk of being thrown out of the party.