Financial Times-Europe must look beyond Blair for a credible president
Financial Times, posted 8 October 2009
From Mr Carne Ross.
Sir, So Tony Blair is being considered for the job of European Union president (October 6).
I was the British diplomat responsible for Iraq, including weapons inspections, on the United Nations Security Council from 1998 to 2002. I have testified (to the Butler inquiry) that the British government, under Mr Blair's command, exaggerated the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, thus sending young men and women to their deaths on a falsehood.
More seriously, it did not consider available alternatives to war, an aspect often ignored in the obsession over whether the government "lied".
After my former colleague David Kelly called a journalist's attention to this deception, Mr Blair's press staff publicly belittled this decent and honourable man. Mr Blair's staff continued to attack him even after his death.
If the new, improved, post-Lisbon EU is to have any credibility or integrity, it needs a different leader.
Carne Ross,
New York, NY, US