Blair: US and UK will act on Iraq arms breach
Britain and the United States will not allow “unreasonable” opposition in the United Nations to block military action against Iraq if it has clearly breached its responsibility to disarm, Tony Blair said in an interview published today.
Allowing a breach to go unpunished would send a “very bad signal” to other rogue states considering developing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons capabilities, he told Reader’s Digest.
The interview was conducted on December 5, a week after Saddam Hussein agreed to readmit weapons inspectors to Iraq and two days before he released his 12,000-page arms dossier.
In return for the Anglo-American decision to deal with the problem of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction through the UN, Mr Blair said he and US President George Bush expected the UN to agree to act in the case of a breach of Security Council resolution 1441.
“The deal behind going down the UN route was that President Bush and myself were saying: ‘We’ll take the UN route, it’s a multilateral route, we’ll bring everyone to the same place, but the quid pro quo is that if there is a breach, we do act’,” he said.
“What we can’t have is a situation where, if there is a breach and an unreasonable block goes down in the UN, then we simply say to Saddam: ‘You can carry on doing it.’ Because that would send a very bad signal.”
Although there were concerns over weapons of mass destruction in other countries, like North Korea, Iraq was in a unique position, said Mr Blair.
“It is unique in that the international community has laid down a very specific command and, if we fail to implement it, every country round the world that’s been proliferating says: ‘Well, these guys aren’t serious’.”
He dismissed suggestions that Britain should not be involved in a crisis which many believe does not directly affect UK national interests.
“It’s not the British character to say there’s a fight on for freedom and democracy and we’re going to hide away,” he said.
If the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is allowed to continue, Britain will be affected, insisted Mr Blair.
“If you allow the trade of ballistic missile technology and nuclear material to carry on, at some point this threat will materialise, and it will materialise hand-in-hand with international terrorism,” he said.
“The more I learn about it from intelligence sources, the more worried I become.”
In a wide-ranging interview which will be published in Reader’s Digest’s international editions, Mr Blair said that sending British troops into conflict in Kosovo and Afghanistan was the most difficult decision he had had to make as premier.
On a more personal note, he named US rock star Bruce Springsteen as the celebrity he would most like to meet, and admitted he made “a frightful noise” playing his electric guitar in Downing Street, accompanied by one of his children on drums.
Recalling his time in student rock group Ugly Rumours, he said: “Everyone should be in a band if they can for a time. It’s great fun.”
