IRAQ WAR: The former UN chief weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix weighed into the controversy over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) yesterday when he accused British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair and President Bush of behaving like insincere salesmen who "exaggerated" intelligence in an attempt to win support for war.
In a carefully worded attack, Dr Blix said intelligence communities were too ready to believe the "tales" of defectors, and Mr Blair and Mr Bush, while not acting in bad faith, were too preoccupied with spin.
Referring to the government's controversial dossier - with its suggestion that WMDs could be deployed within 45 minutes - he insisted: "The intention was to dramatise it, just as the vendors of some merchandise are trying to exaggerate the importance of what they have. But from politicians or our leaders in the western word, I think we expect more than that. A bit more sincerity."
Dr Blix's intervention, on BBC TV, was rejected by the British government, with the leader of the House of Lords, Lady Amos, insisting that Lord Hutton had cleared the government of dramatising the 45-minute claim, and the Secretary for Constitutional Affairs, Lord Falconer, urging the country to wait for the Butler inquiry, which will report in the summer.
"We shouldn't go on and on and on discussing the precise detail of this. Instead, we should let the inquiry proceed, not monster it in advance," he said.
Meanwhile, Mr Robin Cook, the former leader of the House of Commons, ratcheted up his attack on the prime minister's credibility, and two other former ministers, the ex-defence minister Mr Doug Henderson and former health secretary Mr Frank Dobson, along with the Liberal Democrat leader, Mr Charles Kennedy, and the Conservative foreign affairs spokesman, Mr Michael Ancram, called for Mr Blair to make a statement clarifying why he believed the 45-minute claim referred to long-range weapons of mass destruction when he took Britain to war.
Mr Cook repeated his allegation that the prime minister knew the intelligence only pointed to battlefield weapons when the two discussed the issue on March 5th, 15 days before military action - a claim denied by Downing Street.
"I made it quite plain . . . that it was obvious from the briefings that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and had only battlefield weapons . . . I could not have been more blunt," he said. Speaking on ITV television, Mr Cook added that "heads should roll" on the joint intelligence committee because of their apparent failure to adequately brief the prime minister.
President Bush yesterday defended the decision to go to war, arguing that although weapons of mass destruction had not been found, Saddam Hussein "had the capacity to have a weapon, make a weapon. We thought he had weapons."