There’s a whole bunch or talk flying around at the moment about Donald Rumsfeld admitting that Saddam might have destroyed his stocks of bacterial and chemical weapons before the war. Hang on a second, that’s exactly what they wanted them to do. Except that the US govt is now trying to back away from that and hide behind the Regime Change defence, that it was a regime change not a war over a clear and immanent threat to use WOMD. The party line was “We’re going to war with Iraq cause they’ve got weapons they can and will use against us.” Now it’s been reduced to “They might have had and might in the future do this.” So what happened to all the evidence that Rumsfeld, Powell and Blair produced to show that they knew where it all was? Was this just lies?
Now I believe that Saddam Hussein should have gone, and that some kind of military action was probably needed to do this, I just believe that it could have been done better and with universal world support. Not personally motivated and run by a coalition of the morally wanting. So should starting a war under false pretences be a war crime?
Guardian Unlimited | Blair faces revolt as US admits doubts.
The BBC view
And a claim by a senior official that the UK weapons dossier was rewritten to make it “sexier.”
