BRITAIN: A defiant Mr Tony Blair has mounted a fresh defence of the Iraq war and his alliance with President Bush, while signalling his readiness to accept the ultimate verdict of the British people.
Speaking in the House of Commons yesterday the British Prime Minister swept aside Liberal Democrat demands that he extend the remit for the Butler Committee inquiry into the pre-war intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, announced on Tuesday.
In heated exchanges with Liberal Democrat leader, Mr Charles Kennedy, during Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Blair said it would be "profoundly undemocratic" to "sub-contract" the decision on whether the war was right or wrong to a committee. "We are the elected politicians, we make the judgments. It is for us to choose and ultimately for the people to decide," he declared.
And Mr Blair used the ensuing debate on the Hutton Report - an event it was once thought might imperil his leadership - to state his unrepentant belief that the war was justified, whether or not actual weapons of mass destruction are eventually discovered.
Quoting from the evidence of Dr David Kay, who recently quit as head of the Iraq Survey Group, Mr Blair said the group's discoveries to date alone meant "we would have been irresponsible in the highest degree not to have acted against Saddam".
With the threatened Tory assault gone after Mr Michael Howard's acceptance of Lord Hutton's findings - and the remaining "teeth" of yesterday's parliamentary challenge effectively drawn by Tuesday's announcement of the Butler inquiry - the only real drama came when anti-war protesters shouting "no more whitewashes" from the public gallery forced a brief suspension of the Commons.
There was evidence of Mr Blair's relaxed state when he jokingly observed he was "not being entirely persuasive in certain quarters". And his mood was further lifted by the evident irritation of Labour MPs - including opponents of the war like Mr Dennis Skinner - that even this fourth inquiry headed by Lord Butler was unlikely to satisfy his critics.
Mr Donald Anderson, the Labour chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said the "real frustration" of those criticising Lord Hutton was that they "do not have the heads of the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary [Mr Geoff Hoon] on a platter." Mr Blair turned on the same target when he said: "The [Hutton] report itself - clear, forensic and utterly comprehensive in terms of the analysis of the evidence - is the best defence of the charges of government whitewash, often by the same people who just over a week ago were describing Lord Hutton as a model of impartiality, wisdom and insight."
Directing his fire on those still defending the former BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan - whose "unfounded" allegations provoked the government's war with the BBC - Mr Blair continued: "I read there are some who still say the broadcast by Mr Gilligan was 90 per cent right: actually it was 100 per cent wrong."