As a top diplomat in Britain’s UN mission, Carne Ross was responsible for liaising with UN weapons inspectors. In an interview with the Guardian, he describes his own government’s claims about Iraqi weapons programs as “totally implausible.”
“I’d read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there’s no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too”.
Note, he’s not saying the claims were implausible in hindsight, he’s saying he and his colleagues knew they were implausible at the time. And his criticisms don’t stop there.
“There was a very good alternative to war that was never properly pursued, which was to close down Saddam’s sources of illegal revenue”, he says.
Mr Ross also says sanctions imposed against Iraq were wrong. “They did immeasurable damage to the Iraqi civilian population. We were conscious of that but we did too little to address it”, he says.
Whether the Blair government was lying or stupid, doesn’t matter… the point is, they misled the British public in making the case for war. Can anyone really argue that the Bush administration didn’t mislead the American people as well?