Tony Blair Quotes


His WMD program is active, detailed and growing ...Iraq has chemical and biological weapons ... Saddam has continued to produce them...


Context

This information was proven false after the invasion of Iraq. The British were persuaded it was true because the US intelligence had reached the same conclusions. And the Americans were much more confident that Saddam was actively producing WMDs because British intelligence said so. In reality, both intelligence agencies relied on the same set of false information to reach this conclusion. There was no Iraq nuclear program and no chemical or biological weapons production either. The major British-American reason for initiating the Iraq war was without foundation. It is still debated whether it was a deliberate strategy on the part of the Bush administration and the American neo conservatives or just bad intelligence on both sides of the Atlantic.


Citations

Tony Blair, British Prime Minister (Labour), Statement to the House of Commons about the Iraq WMD program, September 24, 2002

Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations

Related Quotes

As a member of NATO, the Prime Minister was given the same faulty intelligence that the Bush Administration gave to Congress, our allies and gave to Colin Powell to brief the United Nations. All were similarly misled. There were no WMDs in Iraq and Iraq did not even have an active program to develop them.


It is with this certainty that the Vice President led the effort to invade Iraq in a preemptory war. After the invasion it was discovered that Iraq did not have any nuclear weapons or any other WMDs. Further, Iraq had no WMD development program of any kind. The rationale for the Iraq War was nill.


Powell's Performance was a great boost for U. S. foreign policy because he was so respected for his integrity. Powell persuaded much of the diplomatic community that the United States was justified in invading Iraq. Tragically, what Powell said was not true. He had been given false and doctored information by the CIA, the Vice President, and others at the White House. Powell lost the great respect that much of the diplomatic world had for him, and the affect on him was personally devastating. He took no more public positions. The change in American public opinion about Powell that resulted was dramatic even though Powell himself was deceived.


A little over a decade later, it was the conservative President who was condemning Saddam Hussein for gassing his own people and justified the Iraq War in part over that. And in 2007 Saddam having been toppled from power, he was tried for this crimes against humanity with the major charge being his gassing of the Iraqi Kurds. He was hanged for the “liberal hate speech” which had turned into conservative hate speech, but was a correct accusation regardless of which political pole was making it. There were few issues where most Americans were as unanimous as Saddam’s guilt in the gassing of the Kurds with Limbaugh and Saddam’s relatives being about the only people who saw it as propaganda.


Tony Blair
Tony Blair
  • Born: May 6, 1953
  • Nationality: English
  • Profession: Statesman

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. On his resignation he was appointed Special Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East, a diplomatic post which he held until 2015. He currently serves as the executive chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, established in 2016. As prime minister, many of his policies reflected a centrist "Third Way" political philosophy. He is the only living former Labour leader to have led the party to a general election victory and the only one in history to form three majority governments.