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Blair must admit Iraq war was mistake, says Cook

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Jan. 24, IRNA -- Prime Minister Tony Blair must admit that it 
was a mistake to have launched the Iraq war on the false premises of 
the threat of Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction, according 
to former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. 
"It is becoming really rather undignified for the Prime Minister 
to continue to insist that he was right all along when everybody can 
now see he was wrong, when even the head of the Iraq Survey Group has 
said he was wrong," Cook said. 
"I think it is very important that Tony Blair does concede that 
there were mistakes made, maybe in all good faith, probably he 
believed them genuinely, but there were mistakes," he told BBC radio 
Saturday. 
On Friday, head of the US-led Iraq Survey Group David Kay resigned 
saying that he did not believe there had been large-scale production 
of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq since the end of the 1991 
war. 
Cook, who resigned from his cabinet post as leader of the House of 
Commons in protest against the war, said that he believed Blair`s aim 
in joining the invasion of Iraq was to demonstrate to US President 
George Bush that he was a reliable ally. 
But he did not think that the British prime minister should resign 
over the mistake, but instead should learn to ensure that it does not 
happen again. 
"I have always believed that the difficulty was not that Tony was 
behaving in a way which was deceiving the world. He was behaving in a 
way which had a missionary zeal, an evangelical certainty," the 
former Foreign Secretary said. 
He said that the British government must "drop this very dangerous 
doctrine under which we went to war of the pre-emptive strike." If 
there was no threat from Iraq, "we obviously had no right to carry 
out a pre-emptive strike to remove that threat," he said. 
Cook suggested that Blair should use this Wednesday`s publication 
of the inquiry into the death of former Iraq arms inspector David 
Kelly as an opportunity to set the record straight. 
It was "not a good basis on which to run British foreign policy" 
by exaggerating Saddam`s arms threat in order to impress the US 
president, he said. 
The Conservative`s shadow Foreign Secretary Michael Ancram told 
the BBC that a public inquiry was needed on the way intelligence was 
used to justify the war following Kay`s comments. 
"I think it raises very serious questions about the prime minister 
and indeed why he told us what he did last year... about weapons of 
mass destruction," he said. 
HC/212 
End