Tony Blair gave strong support to US President George W. Bush's
invasion of Iraq in 2003. He soon became the face of international
support for the war, often clashing with French President Jacques
Chirac, who became the face of international opposition. Widely
regarded as a more persuasive speaker than Bush, Blair gave many
speeches arguing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in the days
leading up to the invasion.
Blair's case for war was based on Iraq's alleged possession of weapons
of mass destruction and consequent violation of UN resolutions. He was
wary of making direct appeals for regime change, since international
law does not recognise this as a ground for war. A memorandum from a
July 2002 meeting that was leaked in April 2005 showed that Blair
believed that the British public would support regime change in the
right political context; the document, however, stated that legal
grounds for such action were weak. On 24 September 2002 the Government
published a dossier based on the intelligence agencies' assessments of
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Among the items in the dossier was
a recently received intelligence report that "the Iraqi military are
able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an
order to do so". A further briefing paper on Iraq's alleged WMDs was
issued to journalists in February 2003. This document was discovered to
have taken a large part of its text without attribution from a PhD
thesis available on the internet. Where the thesis hypothesised about
possible WMDs, the Downing Street version presented the ideas as fact.
The document subsequently became known as the "Dodgy Dossier".
Forty-six thousand British troops, one-third of the total strength of
the British Army (land forces), were deployed to assist with the
invasion of Iraq. When, after the war, it was established that Iraq had
not possessed any WMDs, the two dossiers, together with Blair's other
pre-war statements, became an issue of considerable controversy. Many
Labour Party members, including a number who had supported the war,
were among the critics. Successive independent inquiries (including
those by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons,
the senior judge Lord Hutton, and the former senior civil servant Lord
Butler of Brockwell) have found that Blair honestly stated what he
believed to be true at the time, though Lord Butler's report did imply
that the Government's presentation of the intelligence evidence had
been subject to some degree of exaggeration. These findings have not
prevented frequent accusations that Blair was deliberately deceitful,
and, during the 2005 election campaign, Conservative leader Michael
Howard made political capital out of the issue.
Several anti-war pressure groups want to try Blair for war crimes in
Iraq at the International Criminal Court. The Secretary General of the
United Nations, Kofi Annan, stated in September 2004 that the invasion
was "illegal", but did not state the legal basis for this assertion.
Prior to the war, the UK Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, who acts as
the Government's legal adviser, had advised Blair that the war was
legal.
British armed forces were active in southern Iraq to stabilise the
country in the run-up to the Iraqi elections of January 2005. In
October 2004, the UK government agreed to a request from US forces to
send a battalion of the Black Watch regiment to the American sector in
order to free up US troops for an assault on Fallujah. The subsequent
deployment of the Black Watch was criticised by some in Britain on the
grounds that its alleged ultimate purpose was to assist George Bush's
re-election in the 2004 US presidential election. As of September 2006,
seven thousand and five hundred British forces remain in Southern Iraq,
around the city of Basra. After the presidential election, Blair tried
to use his relationship with President Bush to persuade the US to
devote efforts to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In an interview with David Frost on Al Jazeera in November 2006, Blair
appeared to agree with Frost's assessment that the war had been "pretty
much of a disaster", although a Downing Street spokesperson denied that
this was an accurate reflection of Blair's view.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_blair