We always suspected it and now we have it confirmed from Tony Blair himself:
BBC1: "If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?"
Tony Blair: "I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]".
My own support for the Iraq war was always based on regime change. Saddam was a genocidal leader. He had massacred many of his own people. He had a history of using evil and banned chemical weaponry. He funded terrorist organisations overseas. He had invaded Iran and Kuwait. He had launched missile attacks on Israel. He had constantly subverted UN resolutions, notably the oil-for-food programme. He was the primary source of an arms race in the region as neighbours sought to defend themselves from him.
The existence of WMD was always a device to get the agreement of the United Nations and was, of course, supported by the intelligence services of France and Germany as well as Britain and America. There was no way that the UN would have signed up to a war based on the idea of regime change. Many UN nations, including members of the Security Council, are undemocratic and oppressive regimes and they would never have voted to make their own status more vulnerable in international law. Faith in the UN has always been a mystery to me. Why have we ever believed that a war becomes morally justifiable if it is endorsed by Russia, China and other questionable UN members?
The actual existence of WMD was always a red herring. It would have been easy for Saddam to have dumped his WMD in order to get the UN off his back. He could have won his face off with the US, seen Bush stand down the troops, seen UN inspectors leave and then over a matter of months rebuild his weapons capacity. He had the technology, the scientific personnel and the will.
Blair was guilty of sending our troops to war on a peacetime budget and not finishing the job in southern Iraq. Bush was guilty of following the Rumsfeldian strategy of inadequate boots-on-the-ground. McCain, Lieberman and others (including IDS here) were urging much larger troop deployments long before the surge.
The great defeat in Iraq was the idea of a strong and resolute America. In the aftermath of the successful toppling of Saddam Hussein the world became a much safer place. Libya gave up its WMD. Syria withdrew from Lebanon. The secret Pakistan-supported nuclear technology transfers were exposed. Other gains would have followed if the world's policeman had not become bogged down and on the back foot in Iraq. Once America looked defeatable and exhausted the world's dictators and terrorists knew that their lives weren't going to change so much after all.
