Straw acknowledges errors but claims war was justified

The Foreign Secretary has told the Commons today that, while he accepted the UK had been duped into war by Saddam Hussein's duplicitous behaviour and by its own false intelligence, the government was right to commit itself to removing the Iraqi dictator.

The statement followed on from the recent Iraq Survey Group report which found that Saddam's weapons, far from being a clear and present threat to British interests, simply did not exist by the mid-1990s.

Today, Jack Straw acknowledged that "some of the information" which the government based its judgements on "was wrong".

He also noted the Butler Committee report which concluded that the 45-minute claim was questionable and that Iraqi production of biological agent was "seriously flawed". He went on to confirm that the head of MI6 had now withdrawn this claim.

However, Mr Straw said: "But, Mr Speaker, I do not accept, even with hindsight, that we were wrong to act as we did in the circumstances which we faced at the time. Even after reading all the evidence detailed by the ISG, it is still hard to believe that any regime could behave in so self-destructive a manner as to pretend it had forbidden weaponry, when in fact it hadn't."

He added: "Instead, we made the judgement that it would not be safe to turn away and leave Saddam re-empowered and re-emboldened. Although we can now see that some of the intelligence was wrong, I continue to believe the judgements we made and the actions we took were right."

Last week, trade secretary Patricia Hewitt told a Question Time audience that, speaking on behalf of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, she was sorry for the intelligence errors that edged Britain toward war.

(gmcg/mb)