Iraq Posed a Danger, Blair Insists

Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday that ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s illicit weapons might never be found, but he insisted that the dictator had posed a threat to the world.

Hussein’s alleged chemical and biological weapons programs served as London and Washington’s chief stated reasons for going to war. However, the Iraq Survey Group’s hunt for evidence has been largely fruitless.

“I have to accept that we have not found them, that we may not find them,” Blair told a committee of lawmakers. “We do not know what has happened to them. They could have been removed, they could have been hidden, they could have been destroyed.”

Blair rejected any suggestion that the stockpiles never existed.

“To go to the opposite extreme and say therefore no threat existed from Saddam Hussein would be a mistake,” he told the House of Commons Liaison Committee.

He said the survey group had shown that Hussein had the “strategic capability, the intent and was in multiple breaches of the United Nations resolutions.”

In September 2002, Blair’s government published a dossier of intelligence about Iraq. At the time, he told the House of Commons that Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction program is active, detailed and growing.”