LONDON — Only days after Tony Blair offered an impassioned defense of his decision to take Britain to war in Iraq, a cabinet minister who resigned over the war delivered a blistering condemnation of the former prime minister on Tuesday, accusing him of “conning” her and of deceiving his cabinet, the Parliament and the public in his resolve to have Britain join the United States in the invasion of 2003.
Appearing before an official inquiry into the conflict, Clare Short provided an electrifying counterpoint to Mr. Blair’s testimony on Friday… Ms. Short, who quit as international development minister two months after the invasion in 2003, repeatedly accused Mr. Blair of “misleading” her and other cabinet ministers about the advice he was getting from government lawyers who questioned the legality of invading Iraq.On that issue, and on her written warnings of a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the invasion’s wake, she said that Mr. Blair had effectively circumvented cabinet debate. Instead, she said, he had relied on an inner circle of “his mates” in government, having “little chats” with outsiders like herself and plying what she called a “poodle-like” relationship with the United States. She also accused Mr. Blair of deceit in his argument shortly before the invasion that France had said that it would veto a so-called “second resolution” in the United Nations Security Council approving military action against Iraq, and that it would not shift from that position under any circumstances. That allowed Mr. Blair to say he had exhausted the diplomatic possibilities for dealing with Mr. Hussein and cleared the way for fulfilling his pledge to fight at America’s side.
“That was, in my view, a deliberate lie,” Ms. Short said. “It was one of the big deceits.” She said the truth was that that the French president at the time, Jacques Chirac, could have been persuaded to back military action if London and Washington had been prepared to give United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq more time. “There was no emergency; no one had attacked anyone,” she said. “There wasn’t any new W.M.D,” she added, referring to weapons of mass destruction. “We could have taken the time and got it right”…
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