No need to wait for Chilcot: The Iraq Inquiry report has been leaked

TWO WEEKS ago I found myself in conversation with Dr Hans Blix, head of the United Nations weapons inspection team ahead of the Iraq invasion in 2003.

Dr Blix told me that Tony Blair’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were simply not an accurate reflection of the intelligence provided to the British government.

“The big difference in the British dossier,” Dr Blix told me, “was that they simply asserted that these items are there. But when Mr Blair asserts that there were weapons, well that’s an assertion and it was not supported by evidence. Both the UK and the US replaced question marks by exclamation marks. I certainly think it was a misrepresentation.”

He was talking about how cautious assessments were turned into bold statements by Blair and the UK government. For example, intelligence chiefs gave this assessment on March 15 2002: “Intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles programmes is sporadic and patchy.”

Three weeks later, the prime minister stridently claimed: “We know that he [Saddam Hussein] has stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weapons.”

Shaken by the force of his testimony I eventually said to Dr Blix: “That’s devastating. And so basically you are telling me that Mr Blair misrepresented the truth, lied indeed to the British parliament in order to make the case for an illegal war?”

He paused. Then he said: “Well, I’m a diplomat, so I’m not using such… such words. But in substance, yes. They misrepresented what we did and they did so in order to get the authorisation that they shouldn’t have had”.

Lies, delays and a national embarrassment

Dr Blix’s comments were made before Tony Blair claimed to CNN earlier this week that the information he had received was “wrong”. As far as Hans Blix is concerned, Tony Blair misled the British public and parliament about the intelligence he was given.

My conversation with Dr Blix was the culminating moment of my search for the truth about how Britain came to invade Iraq. It is now a matter of days before John Chilcot will write to David Cameron setting out the timetable for publication for his long delayed inquiry into the Iraq war.

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