GULF WAR:SADDAM HUSSEIN did not have weapons of mass destruction when the US and Britain invaded in 2003, Tony Blair accepts, but he says Saddam would have done once he had been allowed to escape United Nations sanctions.
Saddam’s decision to put his WMD programme “into abeyance” was a tactical manoeuvre to bring about an end to sanctions, not a “decision to abandon” chemical, biological and nuclear armaments, Mr Blair writes.
“The danger, had we backed off in 2003, is very clear: the UN inspectors led by [Hans] Blix were never going to get those interviews [with Iraqi scientists]. They may well have concluded (wrongly) that Saddam had give up his WMD ambitions.
“Sanctions would have been dropped; and it would have been impossibly hard to reapply pressure to a regime that would have been ‘cleared’: Saddam would then have had the intent, the know-how, and, with a rising oil price, enormous purchasing power,” he writes.
The Iraqi dictator “retained completely” his belief in the importance of WMDs to his survival, believing that they had been vital in “repelling” Iranian soldiers who “had thrown themselves in waves” against Iraq in the early 1980s war.
Chemical weapons used against the Kurds had “delivered not just a military, but a psychological blow” against them; while he was also aware that the Israelis had nuclear weapons and that the Iranians wanted them.
While Mr Blair accepts responsibility for the mistakes made in the invasion and afterwards, he says those who disagree must accept the suffering that would have occurred in Iraq under Saddam and his sons’ continued rule.
“Look at the twenty-five year history of his reign and tell me the next five, ten, 15, or 20 years would have been better,” writes Mr Blair in the memoir, the proceeds of which are going to the British Legion.
Since the invasion, the numbers of children dying from preventable diseases has fallen dramatically, while gross domestic product is now three times what it was then: money from oil production is being used for schools and hospitals, not weaponry, he argues.
The Iraqi invasion and the war in Afghanistan offered lessons for the West: “The trouble is that the enemy we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan [has] discovered one very important facet of the modern western psyche: we want our battles short and successful.
“If they turn out to be bloody, protracted and uncertain, our will weakens. In particular, the loss of our soldiers demoralises and depresses us. Instead of provoking feelings of anger, determination or even revenge, it arouses a sense of the pain not being worth it, of a battle that is too much, too heavy, too laden with grief.”