Iraq

Ex-official: Blair knew arms absent

LONDON - Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said in diary excerpts published Sunday that he believes Prime Minister Tony Blair knew two weeks before the war that Iraq probably didn't possess usable weapons of mass destruction.

The claim by Cook, who resigned from the government over the U.S.-led war, renewed calls for an investigation into why Britain joined the invasion despite questions about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Blair's office shrugged off Cook's assertions, calling them absurd and saying Blair's views have remained consistent.

In excerpts from his diaries published in the Sunday Times newspaper, Cook said he was most concerned with a conversation he had with Blair on March 5, two weeks before Britain went to war. At the time, the government was still trying to get a fresh U.N. resolution to approve the conflict and Cook was still leader of the House of Commons. He resigned March 17.

Cook said he told Blair that briefings he had received made it clear Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction "that could strike at strategic cities" and asked the prime minister if he was concerned that the Iraqi leader would use chemical munitions against British troops.

Cook said Blair's response was: "Yes, but all the effort he has had to put into concealment makes it difficult for him to assemble them quickly for use."

The former minister writes in his diary, to be published in book form as Point of Departure, that he was deeply troubled by two elements of the exchange.

"The first was that the timetable to war was plainly not driven by the progress of the UN weapons inspections. Tony made no attempt to pretend that what (former chief UN weapons inspector) Hans Blix might report would make any difference to the countdown to invasion," he writes in a March 5 entry.

"The second troubling element to our conversation was that Tony did not try to argue me out of the view that Saddam did not have real weapons of mass destruction that were designed for strategic use against city populations and capable of being delivered with reliability over long distances."

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