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Conservative Party withdraws from Iraq inquiry

Britain's main opposition party withdrew on Monday from an inquiry into the quality of prewar intelligence on Iraqi weapons, further eroding Prime Minister Tony Blair's hopes of ending criticism about his decision to join the US-led conflict.

Conservative Party leader Michael Howard said that the review was unjustifiably narrow since it would not focus on the actions and responsibilities of individual officials in the run-up to the war.

He criticized Lord Butler, a retired civil service chief heading the review, for focussing on the "structures, systems and processes" of how intelligence was gathered, rather than how the government presented the material.

"I consider it a quite unjustifiable restriction on the committee's approach," Howard added.

Blair's government said the inquiry -- the fourth since Britain joined the campaign to topple Saddam Hussein -- would continue and accused the Conservatives of political opportunism.

"This inquiry is made up of people whose integrity is not in question," said Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

"Its terms of reference are quite sufficiently wide to address the questions which the public wish to be answered," he said.

In a statement released by the government, the review committee rejected Howard's criticism.

It said that it would "follow the analysis wherever it led, including uncovering any faults by individuals."

Blair's primary rationale for joining the war was the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.

But the claims of an active and growing WMD program, made in two intelligence dossiers in the build-up to the conflict, have not been validated by evidence on the ground.

That has hurt Blair's popularity in opinion polls.

Pressure for an inquiry into the quality of that intelligence grew when David Kay, the former head of the US-led Iraq Survey Group, said that he believed Britain and America were wrong about the Iraqi threat.

The British inquiry will examine the discrepancies between the "intelligence gathered, evaluated and used by the government before the conflict ... and what has been discovered by the Iraq Survey Group."

The opposition Liberal Democrats, the third-largest party in the House of Commons, had refused from the outset to join the review.

The Conservative withdrawal will not actually change the make up of the five-member inquiry committee.

In apparent defiance of Howard, Conservative lawmaker Michael Mates, who has wide experience in security matters, said he would continue to sit on the committee but would not be officially representing the party.

Other members are a senior Labor lawmaker, a security and intelligence official and a former chief of Britain's defense staff.

The withdrawal is a further set back for the government since it ensures yet another day of headlines dominated by Iraq, as Blair struggles to focus public attention on his domestic agenda.

Two inquiries by parliamentary committees last year cleared the government of deliberately exaggerating the alleged threat posed by Iraqi weapons to justify the conflict.

In January, senior judge Lord Hutton cleared the government of wrongdoing in the death of weapons adviser David Kelly and in the preparation of one of the dossiers on Iraqi weapons.
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