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| Sunday, 25 January 2004 |
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British opposition demands probe after Iraq weapons advisor resigns LONDON, Jan 24 (AFP) Britain's opposition Conservatives called on Saturday for a public inquiry about the British decision to join the war on Iraq following the resignation of the top US official charged with tracking down Iraq's alleged wepaons of mass destruction. The resignation of David Kay "raises very serious questions about Prime Minister (Tony Blair) and indeed why he told us what he did last year, both before and after the war about weapons of mass destruction," said Michael Ancram, the Conservative party's spokesman for foreign affairs. "It is why ever since last May I have been calling for a public judicial inquiry because I think it is absolutely essential to know on what basis he made those claims," he told BBC radio. David Kay stepped down as head of the Iraq Survey Group on Friday, officially for personal reasons. He will be replaced by former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer. The group's failure to find any weapons of mass destruction has sparked a raging controversy over pre-war US intelligence estimates and whether Washington and its allies had exaggerated intelligence findings to make the case for war. Kay was widely quoted in the British press on Saturday as saying he doubted such weapons would ever be found. "I don't think they existed. What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf war and I don't think there was a large scale production programme in the nineties," he said. Also speaking on BBC radio, the former Labour foreign minister Robin Cook called on Blair to admit that Britain had been mistaken in its evaluation of Iraq's weapons capability. "I think it is very important that Tony Blair does concede that there were mistakes made, maybe in all good faith," said Cook, who resigned as leader of the House of Commons in protest at the government's decision to go to war without a United Nations mandate. "It is becoming really rather undignified for the Prime Minister to continue to insist that he was right all along when everybody can now see he was wrong, when even the head of the Iraq Survey Group has said he was wrong," Cook added. Cook charged that Blair was driven by a "missionary zeal" and "evangelical certainty" in his pro-war campaign. Blair's office was "keen to get in to impress President Bush that they were a reliable ally. That is not a good basis on which to run British foreign policy," charged Cook, who served as foreign minister under Blair from 1997 to 2001. |
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