Blair echoes Bush no regrets over Iraq war
( 2003-09-29 09:01) (Agencies)
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, echoing his comrade in arms President Bush, said on Sunday he had no regrets about launching the war that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Despite plummeting popularity and trust ratings due to the war, Blair said: "I don't apologize for Iraq. I am proud of what we have done."
Blair, like Bush in a radio address on Saturday, said he had no doubt Saddam had been "a serious threat to his region and to the wider world."
Both leaders said the world was a safer place without Saddam and Bush again accused the ousted leader of cultivating "ties to terror" and building weapons of mass destruction.
Bush sought to reassure Americans the invasion of Iraq was appropriate, despite the failure so far to find banned weapons and with U.S. occupation troops under daily guerrilla attack.
"The world is safer today," Bush said.
The leaders of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee in Washington said in a letter dated Thursday to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet that much of the information relied upon was fragmentary or dated back to when U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998.
White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice dismissed this on Sunday, saying new information was obtained before the war was launched in March about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
"The president believes that he had very good intelligence going into the war," Rice said on the "Fox News Sunday" program.
UNREST DOGS IRAQ
Unrest dogged Iraq over the weekend, with a guerrilla rocket attack on a Baghdad hotel housing officials of the U.S.-led occupation and Iraqi police saying American soldiers had killed four more Iraqi civilians.
U.S. troops said they found 23 SA-7 surface-to-air missiles and hundreds of weapons, including plastic explosives, buried in an orchard near Saddam's home town of Tikrit on Saturday.
Both Bush and Blair have had a tough week, with criticism mounting over the occupation and the failure to find the banned weapons that they cited to justify waging war.
Bush got a cool reception on Tuesday when he appealed to the United Nations for foreign troops and cash to bolster security and reconstruction in Iraq.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington had given up hope that India might contribute soldiers.
But Washington still hopes to win a new U.N. resolution that would provide other countries the political cover they need to provide troops.
"The Turks are looking at it, Bangladesh is looking at it, Pakistan is looking at it, other nations are looking at the possibility of contributing troops. But none has made a firm commitment," Powell said in an interview with CNN.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin told French radio Europe1 the United States might get a new resolution through the Security Council, but he stressed it needed to transfer sovereignty to Iraqis to improve conditions in the country.
Britain's special representative to Iraq and former ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said on Sunday the United States and Britain could bring peace to Iraq without international help.
"It would be a very good development if we had a wider international involvement, but that does not mean to say we cannot do what needs to be done with the forces we have deployed already," Greenstock told BBC radio.
BLAIR IN CRISIS TIMES
Both Blair and Bush face further challenges this week, with U.S. officials noting an interim report on Iraq could say no conclusive evidence has been found on banned weapons.
Blair, who has scored two landslide election wins, is going through the worst crisis in his leadership, both of his party and the country.
His government has been savaged in recent weeks by an official inquiry that has spotlighted the debate surrounding the prime minister's justification for attacking Iraq.
But Blair urged people to wait for the U.S. arms report and dismissed remarks by former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix that Saddam had probably destroyed most of his weapons in 1991.
Both Blair and Bush faced renewed anti-war, and anti-occupation, protests at the weekend, although the demonstrations around the world were only a shadow of the huge pre-war peace rallies.
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