Iraq: Future Strategic Relationship

If the hon. Gentleman goes back and reads the words of Dr. Hans Blix very carefully, he will see that Dr. Blix made it clear that there were unanswered questions as a result of his investigations which Saddam Hussein was unwilling to answer. I was a junior Minister at the Foreign Office in the run-up to the Iraq war and I was looking at the raw intelligence, not at a dossier. My biggest fear was that chemical weapons would be used against our troops going into combat. I would not have had that genuine fear had I not believed the intelligence in front of me. There is a myth, which has been going round for years, that we misled people and deliberately manipulated the evidence. That is simply not the case.