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Tony Blair Releases Secret Memo on Iraq War
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LONDON - In an about-face, Prime Minister Tony Blair has published the full text of the advice he received on the legitimacy of the Iraq war, as he tried to defuse a dispute that has derailed his re-election strategyjust one week before British elections.
Parts of the 13-page document, written by Lord Goldsmith, Britain's attorney general, on March 7, 2003, were made public on April 2 7 by the BBC and Channel 4, prompting a new furor about whether Blair misled the nation by depicting the war as unequivocally lawful.
The full document showed that while Lord Goldsmith said in public on March 17, 2003, that the imminent invasion of Iraq was unambiguously legal, the private advice he gave to Tony Blair 10 days earlier showed far greater concerns about the legal consequences of going to war.
"There are a number of ways in which the opponents of military action might seek to bring a legal case, internationally or domestically, against the United Kingdom, members of the Government or U.K. military personnel," the document said, as it laid out the legal landscape. It concluded with a discussion of the level of force permitted by United Nations resolutions concerning Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
"But regime change cannot be the objective of military action," it concluded. "This should be borne in mind in considering the list of military targets and making public
TONY BLAIR
statements about any campaign."
Blair portrayed the war's objective as disarming Hussein of chemical and biological weapons, an argument that brought him severe criticism when no banned weapons were found in Iraq after the invasion.
Before the revelation, Blair had refused to make Lord Goldsmith's advice public, saying it was covered by legal confidentiality conventions.
Even as the document, still marked "Secret," was released by his office, Blair sought to minimize its impact, saying, "this smoking gun has turned out to be a damp squib" - a British term for a small firecracker that fails to ignite - because it showed that Lord Goldsmith had established a legal basis for the invasion.
But Blair's adversaries, who were trailing the prime minister's Labour Party in the latest polls, turned on him with renewed vigor.
Michael Howard, the Conservative Party leader, said, "If you can't trust Mr. Blair on the decision to take the country to war - the most important decision a prime minister can take -
how can you trust Mr. Blair on anything else ever again?"
And Charles Kennedy, the head of the Liberal Democrats - the only one of the three mainstream parties to oppose the invasion - declared, "This is not a damp squib for those who have lost loved ones in the service of the British armed forces or for the families of thousands of Iraqi innocents who have been killed."
The recurrent focus on Iraq has stymied Blair's re-election campaign since the first leaks of Lord Goldsmith's advice appeared in The Mail on Sunday newspaper. Blair and his political allies had wanted to steer the campaign's closing week onto domestic issues - particularly the economy, where the Labour Party sees its main strength.
The invasion of Iraq was deeply unpopular with many Britons and Blair's detractors have argued that he took the nation to war on false premises.
But Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, supported the invasion as well, and is remembered by many voters as a member of an unpopular Conservative government that was rejected in 1997 when Blair first won power.
In a live television appearance in which the three candidates took questions from a largely youthful audience Tony Blair faced hostile questioning about his decision to go to war, but repeated the argument that he faced a difficult decision in March 2003, and was prepared to be judged on it.
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