Robin Cook

Robin Cook’s early death reminded me of his resignation speech. Some people did not believe him when he said “Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target”.

When politicians make fairly unambiguous statement, it means

1. they’re telling the truth
2. they’re lying and they think no one can find out

If Robin Cook had been lying, we would have found out very soon because the US and UK were going into Iraq. This means that he probably had good evidence for saying what he did. He had probably learnt this when he was Foreign Secretary.

It turned out that he knew more than we imagined. In his autobiography, he said that Tony Blair told him, before the war, that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.