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UK's Straw insists Iraq war was justified

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that Thursday's findings of the Iraq Survey Group, which reported that no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have yet been found but that significant amounts of equipment have been discovered, confirmed that military action against Iraq was justified.

In a statement issued after the release of an interim report by chief weapons searcher David Kay in Washington, Straw said that it produced "further conclusive and incontrovertible evidence" that Saddam Hussein was in breach of UN Security Council resolutions.

"Kay's report confirms how dangerous and deceitful the regime was, and how the military action was indeed both justified and essential to remove the dangers," Straw said.

Kay said that his team has found no WMD in Iraq so far, but cautioned that they were still in the middle of an intensive hunt.

On the issue of whether Saddam had been in the process of reviving efforts to develop a nuclear weapons program, Kay said investigators had found no evidence beyond a possible tentative restart "at the very most rudimentary level. It clearly does not look like a massive resurgent program."

Kay said his team had, however, found "dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the UN during the inspections that began in late 2002."

Straw said that the report also contained compelling evidence of concealment. One scientist hid a vial containing botulinum and has identified a cache of biological agents he refused to conceal, Straw said.

Bernard Jenkin, defense spokesman for the main opposition Conservative Party, agreed that the report backed up the case for war but he said it also appeared to suggest the British government had overstated the immediacy of the threat posed by Saddam.

"Certainly, his defiance of the UN resolution meant there was a good legal pretext for going to war with Iraq but this report does beg the question ... as to why the government clearly overstated the immediacy of the threat to weapons of mass destruction," Jenkin told BBC television.

"The idea that there was an immediate, imminent threat, 45-minutes, that strategic weapons could be deployed -- that is not matched by what has been found. That raises questions about whether the intelligence itself was wrong or whether the intelligence was over-interpreted by the intelligence services or whether the government misused what they were told by the intelligence services," he added.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's government had made the threat of Iraqi weapons the heart of its case for military action, and Blair has been on the defensive because coalition forces have not found such weapons.

The suggestion -- contained in a September last year government dossier to bolster support for war -- that Iraq could deploy some chemical or biological weapons on 45 minutes' notice became one of the most contentious claims.

In a dossier of intelligence material, Blair wrote: "I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current, that he has made progress on WMD and that he has to be stopped."

Earlier Thursday, Straw said that Blair had never claimed that Iraq posed an "imminent" threat.

"We did more broadly talk about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and the prime minister said very clearly he couldn't say whether the threat would arise this week, next week or in five years, but the threat was very clearly there," he said.

"The judgments we made in the run-up to military action were partly based on intelligence but overwhelmingly based on public information that was available to all," Straw said, citing reports by UN weapons inspectors.
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