The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, accepted "full personal responsibility" yesterday for a failure to reflect the "limited . . . sparse . . . and flawed" nature of intelligence in his government's controversial Iraqi weapons dossier. Frank Millar, London Editor reports
Mr Blair also used the publication of the Butler report to accept for the first time that "it seems increasingly clear that at the time of the invasion Saddam (Hussein) did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy".
In a major embarrassment for Mr Blair and his Labour government on the eve of two crucial by-elections in Leicester and Birmingham today, former cabinet secretary Lord Butler said that "judgments in the dossier went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available".
And his inquiry team concluded the mistaken decision to reveal that the Joint Intelligence Committee had "authorship" of the dossier "had the result that more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear".
At the same time Mr Blair claimed vindication as Lord Butler's eagerly awaited Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction cleared him and his ministers of any "deliberate distortion" or "culpable negligence".
In a powerful and confident statement to MPs, Mr Blair quoted Lord Butler, like Lord Hutton before him, in his defence. "No one lied. No one made up the intelligence. No one inserted things into the dossier against the advice of the intelligence services.
"Everyone genuinely tried to do their best in good faith for the country in circumstances of acute difficulty. That issue of good faith should now be at an end," he insisted.
However, in a biting intervention, the Conservative leader, Mr Michael Howard, told the prime minister the question now was one of "credibility" he no longer had.
Accusing Mr Blair of turning the "qualified judgments" of the intelligence agencies into "unqualified certainties" in an effort to make the case for military action, Mr Howard said he hoped Britain would not face another war in the foreseeable future. But he demanded: "If we did, and you identified the threat, would the country believe you?"
The cold ferocity of Mr Howard's attack appeared to strengthen support for the prime minister on the Labour benches. And Mr Blair, quoting a series of past and very recent statements from the Tory leader, ridiculed the suggestion that he had been "tricked" into supporting the war.
However, the Liberal Democrat leader, Mr Charles Kennedy, asked how Mr Blair could "square" his admission now that the Iraqi regime probably did not have stockpiles of weapons ready to deploy with his assertion in the dossier that "Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons".
The former leader of the Commons, Mr Robin Cook - who resigned from the cabinet before the invasion - said: "The unavoidable conclusion of the content of the Butler report is that we committed British troops to action on the basis of false intelligence, overheated analysis and unreliable sources."
The Butler inquiry team said: "It would be a rash person who asserted at this stage that evidence of Iraqi possession of stocks of biological or chemical agents, or even of banned missiles, does not exist or will never be found."
However, they also registered "surprise" that "policy makers and the intelligence community" did not conduct a fresh assessment of the intelligence as the generally negative results of UN inspections became increasingly apparent.
And, in an implicit rebuke to the Blair government, the report said: "We note that much of what was reliably known about Iraq's unconventional weapons programmes in the mid- and late 1990s was obtained through reports of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) and of the International Atomic Energy Agency. These international agencies now appear to have been more effective than was realised at the time in dismantling and inhibiting Iraq's prohibited weapons programme."