Did Tony Blair know the information going into the September 2002 dossier was wrong? Did he lie? These questions are difficult to answer as they rest on personal motive. They raise the bar too high. And yet the answers fit in to a pattern of other deceptions that began a year before the war and have continued to this day.
Back in April 2002, the prime minister committed himself in principle to backing George Bush's plans to remove Saddam Hussein, come what may. Recently leaked documents have confirmed this, and should be set against repeated statements by Blair and his ministers in the run-up to war that military conflict was "not inevitable". Five key deceptions followed Blair's commitment.
1) Saddam could be peacefully disarmed
This focuses on Iraq's 12,000-page declaration handed to Hans Blix and his UN weapons inspections team in December 2002. The idea publicly encouraged by Blair in advance of the declaration was that if only Saddam would "come clean" on weapons of mass destruction, war would be avoided. As the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) has confirmed, Saddam did comply in large measure, if not in all detail, and had, up to a decade before, rid himself of WMD. Therefore the declaration was not the act of defiance and breach of UN resolutions portrayed by Blair and Bush.
2) Foreign governments agreed on the intelligence
This has been one of the UK government's favourite themes but it is simply not true. Many of the primary sources in Iraq were pooled, and much of the raw intelligence - which we now know to have been of dubious quality - was shared. But analysts from foreign intelligence services drew different assessments. The French and Germans had no evidence to show that any of the alleged munitions were even close to being weaponised and they told the British.
3) The war was waged to protect the authority of the UN
This is the new fallback position, the last remaining attempt at a casus belli: that Saddam was in breach of UN resolutions and was thereby bringing the organisation into disrepute. Most UN members preferred Blix to be the judge of that. And in any case, which resolutions was Saddam actually in breach of if he did not have the WMD? Certainly not 1441, which was passed in November 2002. Indeed the non-existence for a decade of WMD raises questions about the lawfulness not just of this war, but also of Blair's first military venture, the Operation Desert Fox air strikes on Iraq in December 1998.
4) The French scuppered the second UN resolution
This arose from a television interview given by President Chirac a week before the war, in which he said: "Whatever the circumstances, France will vote 'no' because she considers this evening that there are no grounds for waging war in order to achieve the goal we have set ourselves, that is to disarm Iraq."
Chirac's position was wilfully misconstrued by Blair and by Jack Straw, who had been informed by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's then ambassador to the UN, that attempts to secure a majority on the security council for a second resolution had foundered. Blair needed a scapegoat for his diplomatic failure, even though he knew France's position was no longer pivotal. When the French ambassador confronted the political secretary of the Foreign Office, Peter Ricketts, he was told: "It's such a gift, we won't stop there." They didn't stop there. Britain went on to assert, as we now know again falsely, that if France and one other permanent member of the security council had come on board, the pressure would have been unsustainable and Saddam would have to have "disarmed".
5) The threat posed by Saddam's WMD was growing
In his address to the nation at the start of the war, Blair stated that the threat posed by Saddam "is real, growing and of an entirely different nature to any conventional threat to our security that Britain has faced before". Blair might have been excused for overstating the intelligence in September 2002, but by the eve of war, as one official told me at the time, the evidence was "going away". The briefing given to Robin Cook in late February by John Scarlett, then head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, confirmed this.
The last formal JIC assessment of WMD had been in December 2002. Blair was happy to make a categorical statement even though he had declined to order a fresh analysis for three months. Lord Butler, in one of the most damaging passages of his report in July, recorded his surprise "that policy makers and the intelligence community did not, as the generally negative results of UNMOVIC inspections became increasingly apparent, re-evaluate in early 2003 the quality of the intelligence."
The British and the Americans knew that Blix's "failure" to find WMD was not the result of lack of effort. They were increasingly concerned that the weapons might after all not exist. In public they did not say so, knowing the damage that would cause politically and legally.
Within a couple of months of war ending, Straw was already admitting that stockpiles would not be found. Blair held out with the line: wait until the ISG has reported. For all the apologies, non-apologies and semi-apologies about the intelligence on WMD, the ISG's report, the Butler findings and other evidence show that the falsehoods in the September 2002 dossier were anything but an aberration.
