Re: who's the bigger liar?
It was Bliar who said Iraq had WMDs. He also said Iraq had rockets that could reach the UK in 45 minutes.
If you'd actually bothered to read the report that the government published at the time (which I did), you'd see that they said Iraq had missiles which could reach Cyprus - they even had a map showing the range circles of Iraqi Scuds and extended range Scuds - with Cyprus marked up on there. This was true, Iraq fired some of those Scuds at Israel during the 2002 war, and they were holding them in breach of the ceasefire agreement (and UN security council resolution) that ended the war in 1991 - where they agreed to destroy all their chemical weapons and long-range missiles.
Secondly the report's evidence for Iraq's stockpiles of chemical weapons was the massive amounts of chemical weapons that the UN inspectors had destroyed, before Iraq finally kicked them out in 1998 - minus the total amount of chemical weapons produced according to the Iraqi Ministry of Supply's own documents - which the inspectors had got hold of - and that was the assumed remaining stockpile.
I have no reason to believe that Blair didn't think that was the case - because almost everybody at the time did. Which means, by definition, he wasn't lying he was mistaken. To believe a thing for which you have good evidence and be wrong about it, is not a lie. It is an error.
I was amazed how little information was in that dossier. It was mostly info straight out of UN reports. At the same time, I was reading 'The Secret State' a brilliant book by Peter Hennessey on the early days of the Cold War. And what was fascinating was how little intelligence information we had from the inside of the regime - and how similar that was to the position 1950s politicians found themselves in when dealing with Stalin. Most of their information was technical. One of Hennessey's research students came across an accidentally declassified draft document on plans in case of nuclear war. And this assumed that there was a high chance we'd have no prior intelligence warning from political or communications intelligence - unless the Soviets chose to mobilise their forces, in which case we were observing those and would see changes in their behaviour. By the 60s we had some intel coming from senior levels, people like Oleg Penkovsky (a colonel in the Strategic Rocket Forces). But the parallels were interesting.
The 45 minute claim came from a source passed on by German intelligence - and Campbell was accused of sexing it up by changing the wording in the JIC report from "some sources indicate" they may be able to launch weapons in 45 minutes to - to something like we have intelligence that. So slightly firming it up. That was the real crux of the matter, many people thought they had WMDs, but ones that weren't easily deployable and usable - as opposed to in 1991 where chemical weapons were deployed (and some captured) and with the Corps headquarters in Southern Iraq and Kuwait.
