Blair, Foes Tussle Over Pre-Iraq War Legal Opinion

LONDON —  Trying to extinguish a controversy in the home stretch of his campaign for reelection, Prime Minister Tony Blair on Thursday made public the secret legal advice he received less than two weeks before ordering British troops into Iraq.

For more than a year, reports had circulated that Blair went to war in March 2003 even though he knew that an invasion would be questionable under international law. But the March 7, 2003, document he released showed that Lord Peter Goldsmith, Britain’s attorney general, had concluded that there was a “reasonable case” an invasion would be legal due to Iraq’s failure to comply with United Nations resolutions.

Blair’s opponents, meanwhile, seized on portions of the prewar legal analysis in which Goldsmith suggested that some might disagree with his conclusion. When Goldsmith told Parliament on March 17, 2003, that the war would be legal, he omitted such qualms.

The controversy has boiled up just a week before British voters go to the polls Thursday. Blair, prime minister since 1997, is attempting to win what would be an unprecedented third term for a leader from the Labor Party, and most polls show him having a comfortable margin. With time running out, both his main opponents have raised anew Blair’s unpopular decision to take Britain to war in Iraq more than two years ago.

Even Michael Howard’s Conservative Party, which supported the war, has taken to arguing that Blair went about building the case for the war dishonestly.

Blair had “said that the attorney general’s advice that was given was clear,” Michael Ancram, the Conservatives’ deputy leader, charged Thursday.

“We now know from the publication of today’s document that it was anything but clear,” he said.

At a heated morning news conference called to unveil Labor’s program for business growth, Blair maintained that the record being made public supported his previous statements.

The opposition’s long-sought “smoking gun,” Blair said, turned out to be nothing but a “damp squib,” or firecracker.

Blair said some opponents were being opportunistic in trying to frame the debate as a matter of character and integrity when the real issue was their continuing disagreement with his decision to join the United States in invading Iraq.

He said he respected critics of the war but still believed he had made the right choice.

In the March 7 document, Goldsmith said that obtaining a second U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein would be “the safest legal course” but was not an essential condition for going to war.

“I accept that a reasonable case can be made ... without a further resolution,” Goldsmith said.

Blair said repeatedly at his news conference that it was clear by March 17 that no such resolution would make it through the Security Council because France had said it would veto it.

Supporting Blair at the news conference were two Cabinet officials who denied charges that the body had been kept in the dark about Goldsmith’s initial reservations.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, often seen as a political rival of Blair’s within the Labor Party, was unequivocal in his support Thursday. He said Goldsmith was at the relevant Cabinet sessions when the decision to send troops was agreed on, and the Cabinet had every chance to question him.

He also said he fully supported Blair’s actions at the time.

After the release of the document, Howard, who in recent days has labeled Blair a liar, tempered his comments, stopping short of repeating to reporters that the prime minister had lied. He also defended his decision to inject the issue of integrity into the campaign.

“If people don’t trust Mr. Blair,” Howard said, “how can they trust him to keep the promises he is making in this general election?”

The criticism from the Liberal Democrats, who have consistently opposed the war, was more straightforward.

“Not only has the prime minister made the wrong political judgment, but he went about justifying that judgment in a misleading manner,” said party leader Charles Kennedy.

Repeating his opposition to the war during an evening meeting with voters televised by the BBC, Kennedy said characterizing the opinions released Thursday as a “damp squib” was an insult to families whose loved ones fought and died in Iraq.