Not so good for John Rentoul: it’s WMD time and Blair’s body language spoke volumes. His movements were almost involuntary. The glasses were on and off, the brow furrowed, the head wagged and jagged in the manner of an amphetamine junky going cold turkey, and the hands were more intrusive than Andrew Marr’s. In round one, Blair was as languid as Dirk Bogarde; he was more like Daniel Day-Lewis second time round.
That said, the line holds. As Iain Martin notes, it is extraordinary that Blair “didn’t focus a great deal” on the intelligence he received. But he argued, I think fairly, that Hussein’s deliberate obstruction of Blix was suspicious, and that “it at least suggested that he had the potential to be a threat and the intent” to re-start his WMD programme. Hussein’s non-compliance with 1441 and the inspectorate gives Blair an escape route for the fact that much of the intelligence upon which his case was based was bogus, and he claims not to have scrutinised it.
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