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Wizdom
25-09-03, 23:39
UK: War justified despite no WMD
Thursday, September 25, 2003 Posted: 6:52 AM EDT (1052 GMT)



Straw: The fact evidence "difficult to obtain" does not mean it does not exist

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LONDON, England -- Military action was justified in Iraq despite the U.S.-led coalition's failure to find weapons of mass destruction, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has said.

He was responding to U.S. and UK media reports that the Iraq Survey Group will publish an interim report next month acknowledging that after five months, its 1,500 experts have found no WMD, delivery systems or laboratories involved in developing them.

Straw told British radio on Thursday the failure to take action would have weakened the U.N. and prolonged the suffering of the Iraqi people. Iraq's failure to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors prompted the U.S.-led invasion, he said.

"What we're dealing with here is hindsight," Straw said. "What we have to make is judgments about future events. That's what we did ... I think that it (military action) was justified then and it is justified now.

"Just think for a moment what position the world would have been in and the Iraqi people would have been in if we had failed to take action at that critical moment," he added. "The authority of the United Nations would have been gravely weakened.

"The Iraqi people would have suffered grievously because Saddam would have re-established his reign of terror worse ever than before."

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's office said leaks about the ISG's interim report were "speculation" but that it was unlikely to reach firm conclusions about Iraq's alleged WMD, which Blair made the central plank of his case for war.

Blair, whose poll ratings have slumped amid an inquiry into the death of a government scientist named as the source of a BBC report alleging the government exaggerated the threat of Iraqi WMD, has told his critics to wait for the report, led by CIA official David Kay.

U.S. officials outside the intelligence community have told CNN the ISG has so failed to find "smoking gun" evidence, such as biological or chemical weapons.

But, they say the team has found dual-use facilities it believes were designed to produce weapons at fairly short notice, and has discovered an elaborate effort to conceal such weapons-related work and facilities from U.N. inspectors.

U.S. intelligence officials declined comment on those assertions, which have been widely reported.

One source said Kay's team has made "real progress" but added "if we'd actually found weapons, does anyone doubt we'd have trotted them out?"

The U.S. and British governments have consistently said the search for WMD will take time and that they are confident evidence will eventually be uncovered.

"The fact that so far it's been difficult to obtain physical evidence ... does not mean that the evidence is not there," Straw said in the interview, recorded in New York.



Het was hoofdargument nummer 1 en nu wordt het afgedaan als irrelevant. Wat een hufters.... Moet iemand deze criminelen nog serieus nemen... :hihi: