It has taken eight years, but Tony Blair has finally leveled with the British public and admitted that the WMD thing didn’t really matter: he wanted to depose Saddam Hussein anyway. That’s what he has said in a BBC interview, presumably to pre-empt his appearance before the Chilcot inquiry. His chosen confessor: Fern Britton. His medium: BBC1 on Sunday. It has been trailed to the newspapers, including tomorrow’s Times. As it says:
“He said it was the ‘threat’ that Saddam presented to the region that was uppermost in his mind. The development of weapons of mass destruction was one aspect of that threat.
Mr Blair said that there had been 12 years of the United Nations going ‘to and fro’ on the subject, and he noted that Saddam had used chemical weapons on his own people.
Asked by Britton if he would still have gone on had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction, he said: ‘I would still have thought it right to remove him.
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