The media, how they do keep us all informed. Speaking to the BBC, Tony Blair was asked whether he would have gone ahead and joined the invasion of Iraq had he known there were no WMD. He replied:
I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam]. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat.
Here is how the Guardian reports that on its front page and under the headline 'Tony Blair admits: I would have invaded Iraq anyway':
Tony Blair has said he would have invaded Iraq even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction and would have found a way to justify the war to parliament and the public.
The former prime minister made the confession during an interview with Fern Britton, to be broadcast on Sunday on BBC1, in which he said he would still have thought it right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Hang on for just a moment to 'would have found a way to justify the war', to which I'll return shortly. But the report treats Blair as either a dictator or a magician, someone capable of having others do his bidding come what may; because there's the obvious question of whether parliament would have gone along with Blair in those circumstances and whether Britain would have been part of the war had parliament not gone along with him. The Guardian can't know that Blair would have found a way to justify the war adequately in the eyes of a majority of MPs. All he has said is that he would have sought another way to justify it. The Times report isn't much better. And the Telegraph also has that Blair 'would have invaded Iraq'. Unless he said something more that has not yet been reported, these newspapers are misleading their readers.