July 9, 2003	Wednesday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 8,1424

LONDON, July 8: Prime Minister Tony Blair, battling for his political reputation, rejected claims on Tuesday that he misled Britain over the case for war in Iraq despite a failure to discover any weapons of mass destruction.

“I refute any suggestion that we misled parliament and the people,” a combative Blair told a parliamentary committee. “I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 per cent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct information at the time,” he added.

Britain backed the US-led conflict on the grounds Iraq had weapons that posed a serious threat, but the inability to find them more than two months after major combat was declared over has caused a furore over the war’s justification.

While the same questions have dogged US President George W. Bush, Blair has come under much more virulent attack.

The row has eroded Blair’s standing in the polls at a testing time for his Labour government, now half way through its second term. The opposition Conservatives recently led Labour in a poll for only the second time in 10 years.

Blair’s appearance on Tuesday before parliament’s Liaison Committee, which quizzes him twice-yearly on his track record, came one day after another committee cleared his government of a claim it “sexed up” evidence of Iraq’s weapons.

But the all-party Foreign Affairs Committee on Monday accused Blair of misrepresenting to parliament an Iraq weapons dossier, part of which had been lifted from a student thesis, and of giving undue prominence to questionable intelligence.

Members of parliament wanted a direct apology from Blair on the so-called “dodgy dossier” that contained the student thesis but he stopped short of that, saying his government had admitted to making a mistake when it came to light.

The weapons row has been exacerbated by a claim made by an unnamed intelligence source on the BBC that a Blair aide inserted questionable evidence into a weapons dossier to strengthen the case against Iraq.

The Foreign Affairs Committee only cleared Blair’s aide, Alastair Campbell, of that claim thanks to its Labour majority. Blair has demanded an apology from the BBC, but the public broadcaster defends its report.

Blair also rejected that committee’s conclusion that “the jury is still out” on the justification for war.

“For me, the jury is not out. I have absolutely no doubt at all that we will find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programmes,” he said.

But he refused to address the potential consequences for his leadership if they never emerged.

An opinion poll in the Times newspaper on Tuesday showed that over half of Britons did not trust the prime minister and most believed he was no more honest than other politicians.—Reuters