blies

Personally I did not share some of the emphases of the press conferences. The use of the word "genocide", which came up very often, I thought was quite misplaced because I do not think Mr Milosevic, whatever else he was doing, was engaged in genocide, he was just trying to kick people out. He used very unpleasant methods to do it but he was not actually trying to exterminate them all. That was unfortunate.

On March 5 2003, Robin Cook met Blair: “The most revealing exchange came when we talked about Saddam’s arsenal. I told him, ‘It’s clear from the private briefing I have had that Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction in a sense of weapons that could strike at strategic cities. But he probably does have several thousand battlefield chemical munitions. Do you never worry that he might use them against British troops?’”

Blair replied, “Yes, but all the effort he has had to put into concealment makes it difficult for him to assemble them quickly for use.”

Carne Ross, a key Foreign Office diplomat responsible for monitoring UN arms inspections in Iraq, said in 2005 that British government claims about Iraq's weapons programme had been "totally implausible". Ross told the Guardian:

"I'd read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there's no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too." (Richard Norton-Taylor, 'WMD claims were "totally implausible",' The Guardian, June 20, 2005)

On 25 October, Dai Davies MP asked Gordon Brown about civilian deaths in Iraq. Brown passed the question to the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who passed it to his junior minister, Kim Howells, who replied: “We continue to believe that there are no comprehensive or reliable figures for deaths since March 2003.” This was a deception. In October 2006, the Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion. A Freedom of Information search revealed that the government, while publicly dismissing the study, secretly backed it as comprehensive and reliable. The chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Roy Anderson, called its methods “robust” and “close to best practice”. Other senior governments officials secretly acknowledged the survey’s “tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones”.

Has the Iraq war been an oil war from the outset?

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan evidently thought so or so he indicated in a single sentence in his recent memoir: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." When asked, Gen. John Abizaid, former CENTCOM commander who oversaw three and a half years of the American occupation of Iraq, agreed. "Of course it's about oil, we can't really deny that," he said during a roundtable discussion at Stanford University.