BRITAIN: Pressure is mounting on Mr Tony Blair to allow an inquiry into government claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, after his former cabinet colleague, Ms Clare Short, accused him of "duping" the public and misleading MPs. Andrew Woodcock reports from London.
The Prime Minister insisted there was "no doubt at all" that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD and urged the public to have patience on the issue.
He promised to produce a new dossier of evidence garnered from interviews with Iraqi scientists and searches of suspect sites and suggested that intelligence not yet publicly available would leave no doubt about the threat once posed by Saddam.
"What I have said to people is, over the coming weeks and months we will assemble this evidence and then we will give it to people," he told Sky News.
"And I have no doubt whatever that the evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction will be there. Absolutely."
But the former foreign secretary, Mr Robin Cook, who resigned from the cabinet in protest at the decision to commit British troops, called for an independent inquiry into what he termed a "monumental blunder" by Mr Blair.
It was now clear that there was no compelling need to go to war and that British troops were sent into battle "on the basis of a mistake", he told BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend.
Ms Short, who resigned as international development secretary after the war, effectively accused Mr Blair of turning the process of seeking UN approval for military action into a sham.
The Prime Minister had agreed with President George W. Bush in a meeting at Camp David as long ago as September last year that they would go to war in the spring, regardless of the outcome of the UN process, she claimed.
Ms Short accused Mr Blair of exaggerating genuine intelligence about laboratory experiments with chemical and biological warfare agents to suggest that Iraq had an arsenal of weapons ready for use.
"Where the spin came was the suggestion that it was all weaponised, ready to go immediately, likely to get in the hands of al-Qaeda and, therefore, things were very, very urgent," she said.
"Claiming that the stuff was weaponised and might be used in 45 minutes was part of the secret commitment to a date which meant everything had to be hurried along."
But a Downing Street spokeswoman said: "No one was duped by 12 years of Security Council resolutions specifically dealing with Saddam Hussein's programme of weapons of mass destruction. The Prime Minister has said that he remains confident that we will find evidence of WMD, but we will have to be patient."