London – The Iraq war, until now a slumbering issue in Britain’s election campaign, came to life Thursday after Prime Minister Tony Blair gave in to pressure and released a confidential memo from his chief legal adviser raising questions about the legality of the invasion.
Coming a week before the May 5 contest, the disclosure of the 2-year-old opinion was seized upon by the two main opposition political parties, which leveled fresh accusations that Blair had misled Parliament and the public in making the case for war.
They argued that Blair had withheld the 13-page opinion and had pressured its author, Attorney General Peter Goldsmith, to switch course and produce the one-page endorsement of the war that Goldsmith presented to Parliament the day before it voted for military action.
Blair’s main opponent, Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, accused the prime minister of lying and said it proved he could no longer be trusted.
But Blair and Goldsmith each denied that the attorney general had been pressured to change his view, and Blair contemptuously accused Howard, who said he still supports the war, of character assassination and political opportunism.
Blair’s ruling Labor Party has held a steady lead in the polls during an increasingly bitter campaign. But the polls also indicate a majority of British citizens oppose the war and believe that to justify launching it, their government hyped intelligence claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
In the original opinion, which Blair released Thursday after key portions were leaked to Channel Four News here, Goldsmith told Blair that the language of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, passed in November 2002 to bring new pressure on Iraq, was ambiguous on the question of war.
“I remain of the opinion that the safest legal course would be to secure the adoption of a further resolution to authorize the use of force,” he wrote.
