As I've already said, media reports that transmute Tony Blair's 'I would still have thought it right...' into 'I would have invaded Iraq anyway' have been misinforming their readers. In an opinion piece in today's Guardian Jonathan Steele steers clear of explicitly doing the same, but only at the expense of an alternative elision. Here it is:
Perhaps he wants to bring his colleagues down with him, for the nub of Blair's new case is that he could have persuaded the cabinet to go to war even if there were no Iraqi WMD. "You would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat", as he put it with his customary arrogance. Could he have succeeded? Would the cabinet really have been so weak that they dared not resist?
Blair says he would have had to use different arguments; Steele attributes to him the non-identical claim that the different arguments would have succeeded in convincing those who needed to be convinced. And this wasn't, as Steele implies, only Blair's cabinet colleagues. Had parliament not been persuaded, it is most doubtful that Britain would have gone to war in Iraq.