LONDON: Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown regrets his failure to oppose Tony Blair\u2019s push for war with Iraq, a new biography has said.<\/p>\n
Brown told the author of \u201cGordon Brown: Power with Purpose,\u201d James Macintyre, that Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who opposed the war, had a \u201cclearer view\u201d than the rest of the government at the time.<\/p>\n
Cook quit the Cabinet in 2003 after protesting against the war, claiming that the push to topple Saddam Hussein was based on faulty information over a claimed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.<\/p>\n
That information served as the fundamental basis for the US-led war but was later discredited following the invasion of Iraq.<\/p>\n
Brown, chancellor at the time, publicly supported Blair\u2019s push for war, but now says he was \u201cmisled.\u201d<\/p>\n
If Brown had joined Cook\u2019s protest at the time, the campaign to avoid British involvement in the war may have succeeded, political observers have since said.<\/p>\n
The former prime minister said: \u201cRobin had been in front of us and Robin had a clearer view. He felt very strongly there were no weapons.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I did not have that evidence \u2026 I was being told that there were these weapons. But I was misled like everybody else.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I did ask lots of questions \u2026 and I didn\u2019t get the correct answers,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cGordon Brown: Power with Purpose,\u201d will be published by Bloomsbury next month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON: Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown regrets his failure to oppose Tony Blair\u2019s push for war with Iraq, a new biography has said. Brown told the author of \u201cGordon Brown: Power with Purpose,\u201d James Macintyre, that Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who opposed the war, had a \u201cclearer view\u201d than the rest of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":92427,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92429,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92412\/revisions\/92429"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}