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British Prime Minister Tony Blair must admit defeat on the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook demanded on Saturday.
"It is becoming really rather undignified for the Prime Minister to continue to insist that he was right all along when everybody can now see he was wrong, when even the head of the Iraq Survey Group has said he was wrong," Cook, who resigned as Leader of the House of Commons last March before the Iraq war, told the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC).
"I think it is very important that Tony Blair does concede that there were mistakes made, maybe in all good faith, probably he believed them genuinely, but there were mistakes," Cook said.
Cook also called for the abandonment of the "very dangerous doctrine" under which Britain went to war for the preemptive strike.
"If there was no threat from Iraq, we obviously had no right to carry out a preemptive strike to remove that threat. And we better drop that doctrine before somebody else in the world uses it in their own back yard," Cook said.
Cook also told the BBC that he believed Blair entered the conflict in order to demonstrate to US President George W. Bush that he was a reliable ally.
Cook's comments came after US official David Kay quit as head of the organization searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
British media said on Saturday that Blair suffered a blow following Kay's assertion that he did not believe there were any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq and former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had no large-scale production program of such weapons in the 1990s.
Blair, who sent about 45,000 troops to join the Iraq war on the grounds that Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction poses threat to the world, is facing what local media said the most testing week of his premiership as Lord Hutton, a senior judge in charge of an independent inquiry into the death of weapons expert David Kelly, was due to publish his report on the inquiry next Wednesday.
Kelly apparently committed suicide after being named as the suspected source for a BBC story that claims the Downing Street "sexed up" the government's Iraq weapons dossier to make a stronger case for the Iraq war.
The dossier, published in September in 2002, includes a claim that Iraq could deploy biological and chemical weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so.
Blair, the staunchest US ally on Iraq, has been insisting that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and those banned weapons could be found in the country.
(Xinhua News Agency January 25, 2004)
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