Holy Schnert! Tony Blair slips to the Bush defense on Iraq

For however many years, Tony Blair has held to the position that his reason for enthusiastically following Bush into Iraq was that he relied on the WMD intel.

Now, amidst a new round of revelations about the quality of the British intel, Tony Blair begins to walk back his position to a different version of the Bush admin rhetorical, "Do you want Saddam Hussein still in charge?"

"If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?" Blair was asked. He replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]".

Significantly, Blair added: "I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat." He continued: "I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons in charge, but it's incredibly difficult. That's why I sympathise with the people who were against it [the war] for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, in the end I had to take the decision."

This walk back, after so many years of doggedly holding the "intel was bad" position, really makes me wonder if we have more revelations coming.

(And don't miss the pandering to his critics, "I sympathise with the people who were against it [the war] for perfectly good reasons...")

I gotta wonder what made this part move.