From the outset, though, the five-member panel was hamstrung. Cabinet officials refused to release details of key correspondence and phone calls between Blair and then President George W. Bush in the run-up to the invasion.

The panel had to ask Blair for his version. The former prime minister testified that he promised President Bush that he could count on Britain. “We’re going to be with you in tackling this, but here are the difficulties,” Blair said he told Bush. “I was having to persuade him to take a view radically different from any of the people in his administration. So what I was saying to him was, I am going to be with you in handling it this way, I’m not going to push you down this path and then back out when it gets too hot politically, because it is going to get hot politically, for me — very, very much so.”

The problem was the reluctance of other nations to go to war without explicit authorization from the United Nations Security Council. President Bush apparently saw no need for the new resolution that other leaders were demanding.

Blair was assuring Bush of his solidarity, even though he didn’t have the solid backing of his own cabinet ministers, a fact he kept hidden in the months before the invasion. “If I had through that period in January and February, gone out and said anything that indicated there was a breach in the British position, that there was a chink of light that had opened up, it would have been a political catastrophe for us,” Blair testified.

Blair defended his actions for four hours today, then he took a moment to try to make amends for an oversight during his last appearance before the Iraq inquiry.

A year ago, he said he had no regrets. Today, with the relatives of fallen soldiers sitting right behind him, Blair tried again. “I want to make it clear that, of course, I regret deeply and profoundly the loss of life,” he said, his voice catching with emotion, “whether from our own armed forces, those of other nations, the civilians who helped people in Iraq or the Iraqis themselves.”

But Blair was interrupted by members of the audience who shouted, “Too late! Too late!” Two women turned their backs on Blair, and then walked out.

Outside the hearing, Sarah Chapman, who lost her brother, said Blair’s statement sounded insincere. “It wasn’t an act of contrition, it wasn’t heartfelt,” she said. “He didn’t turn to look at us.”

The invasion of Iraq and all the controversy it caused will always be a troublesome part of Tony Blair’s legacy. That may be why he took pains today try to refocus the debate on Iran, suggesting it was time for world leaders to consider another confrontation against another regime.

• FAQ British Iraq war inquiry
• Blair denies covert deal with Bush on Iraq
• Britain’s inquiry into the Iraq war

• BBC coverage
• Marco Werman speaks with former Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi
• Timeline: Tony Blair on Iraqi WMD
• Tony Blair’s closest aide defends choices on Iraq

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  Tony Blair remains unrepentant nearly seven years after ordering British troops to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  The former Prime Minister testified for six hours today at an inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq war.  Blair stated that knowing what he knows today he would still have gone to war to remove Saddam Hussein.  That decision is still deeply unpopular in Britain as some outside the courtroom made clear today.  The World’s Laura Lynch reports from London.

LAURA LYNCH: Protesters gathered in the pre-dawn gloom with their verdict.  Tony Blair they shouted is a war criminal.  Among them was American Jennifer Bromlick.  She focused her anger on both Blair and George W. Bush.

JENNIFER BROMLICK: They should do something like this with Bush.  I mean, Bush is ultimately answerable for this, for the Iraq war.

LAURA LYNCH: Blair never saw the demonstration.  He arrived early going in through a side door.  Two hours later he took his seat.  Behind him were relatives of British soldiers who had died in Iraq.  Well rehearsed in defending an unpopular war, Blair’s hands trembled slightly as he readied himself for this round.  Within minutes he was on familiar ground repeating his view that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were reason enough to take a hard look at Saddam Hussein.

TONY BLAIR: That completely changed our assessment of where the risks for security lay.  Just so that we make this absolutely clear, this was not an American position.  This was my position and the British position.  Very, very clearly.

LAURA LYNCH: It’s no surprise Blair wanted to be so clear.  He’s long been accused of doing the bidding of George W. Bush in Iraq.  Today Blair was asked time and again about the former U.S. President, how he reacted to Blair’s promises, what he expected from Britain.  Blair denied any secret deals, but he did tell Bush that he would stand with him.

TONY BLAIR: I think what he took from that was exactly what he should have taken which is that if it came to military action because there was no way of dealing with this diplomatically, we would be with him.  That was absolutely clear because as I had set out publicly, not privately, we had to confront this issue.  It could be confronted by sanctions, framework that’s effective.  For the reasons I’ve given we didn’t have one.  It could be confronted by U.N. inspections framework, we’ll come to that.  Or, alternatively, it would have to be confronted by force.  I was going earlier, but I won’t do it, but I’m very happy to make available.

LAURA LYNCH: The questioning wore on about whether Blair exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam and about whether he had a strong legal case to go to war without explicit U.N. support.  Blair stood firm.  He made the right decision, he said, for the right reasons.

TONY BLAIR: As I sometimes say to people, this isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception, it’s a decision.  The decision I had to take was given Saddam’s history, given his use of chemical weapons; given the over one million people whose deaths he caused, given ten years of breaking U.N. resolutions, could we take the risk?

LAURA LYNCH: Blair tried to deflect several questions by focusing on the Iraq of today.  Iraqi’s he said, are better off now than they were in 2003.  That prompted inquiry commissioner Lawrence Friedman to recite what he called tragic statistics, Iraqi’s who have died in recent years.

LAWRENCE FRIEDMAN: 1,042 in January 2005; 1,433 in January 2006; 2,807 in January 2007; these are monthly figures.  These are the documented deaths.  They are not the, goodness knows how many undocumented – - the deaths from the deterioration in services, poverty, poor health and so on.  The striking is they are getting worse each year.

LAURA LYNCH: In the final minutes Blair said he was sorry for the deep divisions the Iraq war caused in Britain, but that seemed to be about as far as he would go with apologies to the evident frustration of those sitting just feet away.

TONY BLAIR: I’ve no regrets.  Responsibility, but not a regret for removing Saddam Hussein.  I think he was a monster.  I believed he threatened not just the region, but the world.  His defense complete, Blair left quickly.  His bodyguards close behind.  The families, too, made their way outside.  Many like Reg Keys, upset by what they had just seen and heard.

REG KEYS:  He had an opportunity there to apply some soothing balm to some of the open wounds of grief that are in that room.  I saw a couple of mothers in there break down at the end in tears because the man, all he had to say was to assuage the grief was I do regret the loss of life, but he’s quite remorseless, no regret at all.

LAURA LYNCH: No one really expected Blair to back down, to admit mistakes or reconsider.  Today he said he would do it all again in the name of making Britain safer.  But in the same week British officials raised the country’s threat level to severe, many still believe Blair sent his troops into an illegal war with questionable results.  For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in London.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• BBC coverage
• Timeline: Tony Blair on Iraqi WMD
• Tony Blair’s closest aide defends choices on Iraq

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Britain’s investigation into it’s involvement in the war in Iraq is heating up.  In two days former British Prime Minister Tony Blair faces a public grilling at the Iraq inquiry.  And today, there was new evidence suggesting Washington played a key role in convincing Blair’s government that the Iraq invasion was legal.  The World’s Laura Lynch reports.

LAURA LYNCH: It’s the question that goes to the heart of the inquiry; was the 2003 invasion of Iraq illegal?  A Dutch inquiry concluded two weeks that it was.  But it’s still a matter of intense debate here in Britain.  Yesterday the Foreign Office’s two top lawyers at the time of the invasion were unequivocal in their testimony.  They said the invasion wasn’t legal without explicit UN support.  Elizabeth Wilmshurst told the inquiry her Minister, Jack Straw, simply swept aside that advice.

ELIZABETH WILMHURST: Well, it’s rather uncomfortable when the Secretary of State of the Department doesn’t agree with the legal advice given to him or her.  So in that sense it was a challenge.

MALE VOICE 1:  Was it unusual in your experience?

ELIZABETH WILMHURST: Yes.

MALE VOICE 2:  Did it make a difference that Jack Straw is himself a qualified lawyer?

ELIZABETH WILMHURST: He is not an international lawyer.

LAURA LYNCH: The uncomfortable laughter was a nod to the tensions simmering throughout government in the months before the war.  Tensions that lead to sharp disagreements among ministers.  Today Tony Blair’s Attorney General took his turn on the stand.  Lord Peter Goldsmith said he, too, got a cool reception when he tried to warn Blair the summer before the invasion not to rush into anything with George W. Bush.

LORD PETER GOLDSMITH: I knew that the Prime Minister was going to see President Bush.  I knew that one of the topics of conversation, at least, was going to be the Iraq issue because that was obviously very much on the international agenda at that stage.  And I didn’t want there to be any doubt that in my view the Prime Minister could not have the view that he could agree with President Bush somehow, well let’s go without going back to the United Nations.  I wasn’t asked for it.  I don’t, frankly, think it was terribly welcome.

LAURA LYNCH: Goldsmith didn’t waiver in his view until February of 2003, just weeks before the troops rolled into Iraq.  For the first time today, Goldsmith admitted it was a trip to the United States that changed his mind.  He visited the White House, met with attorneys and Condoleeza Rice among others.  Goldsmith came back and gave Blair the go ahead.

LORD PETER GOLDSMITH: I was of the view that a reasonable case could be made.  I’m sorry, there was a reasonable case that a second resolution was not necessary and that that was on past precedence, sufficient to constitute a green light.

LAURA LYNCH: Watching all this today was Clare Short.  She was in Blair’s cabinet at the time, but resigned over the decision to invade.  She finds Goldsmith’s conversion on the road back from the White House troubling.

CLARE SHORT: And to say he was influenced by the Americans, we know that the Bush administration had no respect of any kind for the UN or for international law, didn’t think there was any need to go to the Security Council, did so because Britain couldn’t do it without that.  So to say that American opinion influenced him is really not impressive.

LAURA LYNCH: Short herself will testify at the inquiry in the coming weeks, but not before the former Prime Minister himself on Friday.  Tony Blair’s appearance is almost certain to generate protest outside and inside the hearing room.  Relatives of soldiers who died in Iraq will be sitting just feet away from Blair as he testifies.  For many of them, Blair was far too ready to follow Washington’s lead into a war they still believe wasn’t justified.  For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in London.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• BBC coverage
• Laura Lynch on day 2 of the inquiry
• FAQ Britain’s Iraq inquiry
• US investigation of Iraq war

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  This is the World.  I’m Marco Werman.  Americans still have questions about the decision to go to war in Iraq.  Some wonder what intelligence the Bush Administration had on the regime in Baghdad and whether it was entirely truthful in what it told the public about that information.  Still, there have been no high level government investigations of the process.  There have been in Britain though, including one that started this week.  Today’s star witness was Christopher Meyer, Britain’s Ambassador to the United States at the time.  The World’s Laura Lynch reports from London.

LAURA LYNCH:  In often colorful language, Meyer revisited the dramatic days between September 11, 2001 and the March, 2003 invasion of Iraq.  He told the inquiry former Prime Minister Tony Blair set the tone.  Within hours of the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, he vowed to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States.  Working the diplomatic circuit in the U.S. capitol, Meyer noticed an immediate impact.

CHRISTOPHER MEYER:  To be Ambassador to the United States of America was, make no bones about it, a heady and exhilarating experience because wherever you went, people would rise to their feet and give you a storming round of applause.  So you had to be careful not to be swept away by this stuff.

LYNCH:  Meyer was as close to the center of power in Washington as any foreign diplomat could be.  On the evening of September 11, he says he spoke to George W. Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleeza Rice.  Until that day, Iraq was low on the list of priorities for the White House.  But he says Rice’s comments showed the attacks had moved it and Saddam Hussein all the way up to the top.

MEYER:  And she said well there’s no doubt this has been an Al Quaida operation but at the end of the conversation, as we’re just looking to see whether there could possibly be any connection to Saddam Hussein.  And that was the very first time, on the day itself, that I heard the name of the Iraqi leader mentioned in the context of 9/11.

LYNCH:  Other British officials testified yesterday they weren’t convinced of any link but Bush and Blair were developing a close working relationship and Meyer says that he began to sense a change after Blair visited Bush at his ranch in Texas in April of 2002.

MEYER:  The two men were alone in the ranch until dinner on Saturday night where all the advisors, including myself, turned up.  So I’m not entirely clear, to this day, I know what the cabinet often says for what were the results of the meeting but to this day, I’m not entirely clear what degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford Ranch.

LYNCH:  The next day the former ambassador noticed that Blair spoke about regime change for the first time, in a key foreign policy speech that touched on terrorism and the situation in Iraq.

TONY BLAIR:  If necessary, the action should be military and again if necessary and justified, it should involve regime change.

LYNCH:  From then on, Meyer says the UK/US alliance was tighter and the march to war seemed inevitable.  In fact, he told the inquiry that the military timetable meant there wasn’t enough time to do a proper hunt for evidence of any stockpile of chemical or biological weapons.

MEYER:  We found ourselves scrambling for the smoking gun, which is another way of saying it’s not like Saddam now has to prove he’s innocent.   We’ve now bloody well got to try and prove he’s guilty.

LYNCH:  Meyer’s ringside seat in Washington gave him what he believes was a pretty good view of the in-fighting in the Bush Administration.  But over time, the drum beats of war grew ever louder and he criticizes his own government, saying Britain didn’t push the White House nearly enough to draw up post-invasion plans.  He says it was like a black hole.  Meyer recalled sitting with then-Vice President, Dick Cheney, on the day the British Parliament was debating whether to support the invasion.  Meyer says he tried to explain to Cheney the political difficulties Blair was facing.

MEYER:  And his reaction was quite dismissive.  Well, you know, once you get by your political problem and we get to Baghdad, then we’ll be greeted with cheers and flowers or whatever by the population and all this will be history.

LYNCH:  Blair himself isn’t saying anything about the revelations that have come out at the inquiry in the first three days.  But one of his closest allies in the cabinet back then, Lord Charles Falconer, is defending Blair.  He says there’s no chance he made a pact with Bush to remove Saddam as early as the spring of 2002.

LORD CHARLES FALCONER:  No, I didn’t and that’s right.  And I think the evidence that Christopher Meyer gave this morning made it clear that one of the things that the British government and Tony Blair had been influential in doing was ensuring that America did go down the United Nations route and indeed as a result of today’s persuasion, on the fourteenth of September, 2002, President Bush made a very impressive speech to the UN, making it clear that he was looking to the UN to deal with the issue.  So I think far from it being fixed in advance, it was clear the matter was to be decided by the UN.

LYNCH:  Tony Blair paid a heavy price back home for his support of both Bush and the war.  In three days of hearings, Blair’s decisions back then have come under fresh scrutiny, guaranteeing he’ll have much to answer to when he testifies early next year.  For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in London.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.