LONDON, July 14: Britain's pre-war intelligence on Iraq's armaments had "serious flaws" but Prime Minister Tony Blair was not personally responsible, an inquiry found on Wednesday.
"No single individual was to blame. This was a collective operation," Lord Butler told reporters after releasing a report that also said Saddam Hussein had no significant banned weapons ready for use prior to the US-UK invasion.
His findings mirrored last week's Senate committee report that lambasted US intelligence services for exaggerating the threat from Iraq, but found no sign President George Bush had pressured analysts to reach pre-set conclusions.
Responding to the report in parliament, Prime Minister Tony Blair said he accepted "full personal responsibility for the way the issue was presented and therefore for any errors made", but he insisted the decision to invade Iraq last year had been correct.
In a confident mood, he challenged opposition Conservative leader Michael Howard to acknowledge that he too had backed the war. "I cannot honestly say I believe getting rid of Saddam was a mistake at all. Iraq, the region, the wider world is a better and safer place without Saddam," he said.
Wednesday's long-awaited report by former top British civil servant Lord Butler concluded that Iraq "did not have significant - if any - stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment nor developed plans for using them".
The government's Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) strove to put together a dossier on Iraq's weaponry in 2002 reflecting available intelligence but was under "strain" in a politically charged climate as they sought to be objective, it added.
Lord Butler said in future there should be clearer lines dividing those assessing intelligence and those advocating policy. But there was "no deliberate attempt on the part of the government to mislead," he added.
In the now notorious Sept 2002 dossier compiled by the JIC, Tony Blair stated that Iraq could deploy some weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to do so. No such weapons have been found more than a year after former president Saddam Hussein was overthrown.
The report said Prime Minister Blair's address to parliament at the time gave the impression of "fuller and firmer" intelligence than was in fact the case. "More weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear," it said.
Lord Butler described as a "serious failing" that the dossier did not contain warnings regarding the raw intelligence on which it was based. "We conclude that it was a serious weakness that the JIC's warnings on the limitations of intelligence underlying its judgments were not made sufficiently clear in the dossier," said the report. "Our view, having reviewed all of the material, is that judgments in the dossier went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available. -Agencies
