Is this an ADMISSION that Blair knew the WMD evidence was bunk?

[WilliamPitt]

From Tom "Screw Islam" Friedman in the Times:

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"History may one day record that maybe the most honest speech about why we invaded Iraq was given by Prime Minister Tony Blair, addressing the filing cabinets in an empty hallway just outside his office at No. 10 Downing Street.

"The moment is recounted in Peter Stothard's terrific book "30 Days." Mr. Stothard, the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, was allowed to follow Mr. Blair around in the 30 days immediately before and after the start of the Iraq war. His book is a daily diary. On March 13, six days before the British Parliament would be asked to vote for war, Mr. Blair was stewing in his office, worrying about whether he would win the vote.

"Mr. Blair knew the real and good reasons for ousting Saddam Hussein: First, he was a genocidal dictator, who aspired to acquire weapons of mass destruction — even if he did not have them yet. And second, removing Saddam and building a more decent Iraq would help tilt the Middle East onto a more progressive political track and send a message to all the neighboring regimes that Western governments were not going to just sit back and let them incubate suicide bombers and religious totalitarians, whose fanaticism threatened all open societies. These were the good reasons for the war, and Mr. Blair voiced some of them aloud that day."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/opinion/03FRIE.html

...I'd love to know the source of the attribution for that little nugget. A trial balloon, or a brain fart?

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P.S. I love this part:

"Unless real W.M.D.'s are found in Iraq, Gulf War II will for now and for years to come be known as "the controversial Gulf War II" — and the hyped reasons for the war will obscure the still good ones. Only future historians will be able to sort out this war's ultimate validity. It is too late or too early for the rest of us.

"It's too late, because no one will ever know what Saddam would've done had Messrs Blair and Bush not acted. And it's too early, because the good reasons for this war — to unleash a process of reform in the Arab-Muslim region that will help it embrace modernity and make it less angry and more at ease with the world — will take years to play out."

...yeah...Tommy's arguing that wars make nations and peoples "less angry" and "more at ease with the world." Halloooooo, PNAC. War is "modernity."