my innermost sanctum

... On the eve of war, Tony Blair was equally specific that Saddam Hussein had the real thing: "Saddam has chemical and biological weapons." At the last minute, the title of the September dossier was changed from Saddam's Programme for Weapons of Mass Destruction to Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction to convince the reader that the weapons already existed...

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... When I asked him why we believed Saddam would not use these weapons against our troops on the battlefields, he surprised me by claiming that, in order to evade detection by the UN inspectors, Saddam had taken apart the shells and dispersed them -with the result that it would be difficult to deploy them under attack. Not only did Saddam have no weapons of mass destruction in the real meaning of that phrase, neither did he have usable battlefield weapons.

I put these points to the prime minister a couple of weeks later. The exchange is recorded in my diary on March 5 2003. Tony Blair gave me the same reply as John Scarlett, that the battlefield weapons had been disassembled and stored separately. I was therefore mystified a year later to hear him say he had never understood that the intelligence agencies did not believe Saddam had long-range weapons of mass destruction...