“There was no deliberate attempt on the part of the British government to mislead the country”, said Lord Butler in his report about the justification for waging war against Iraq.

Prime Minister Tony Blair was cleared yesterday of tricking Britain into invading Iraq but drew heat in a report for relying on pre-war intelligence ridden with flaws.

“We found no evidence to question the Prime Minister’s good faith,” Lord Butler said after releasing his report that damned Britain’s justification for waging war against Baghdad.

While Blair placed undue weight on thin intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weaponry, Butler told reporters there was “no deliberate attempt on the part of the government to mislead.”

Blair, whose ratings have tumbled over Iraq but who is still tipped to win re-election next year, reacted with relief. “No one lied, no one made up the intelligence”, he told Pparliament. But he added: “I accept full personal responsibility ... for any errors that were made.”

Political analysts said the Butler report was largely a win for Blair as it cleared him of cooking up intelligence to justify a US-led war that most voters opposed.

Blair conceded intelligence about Saddam’s banned arms – the key rationale for last year’s war – looked weaker now than when he defied widespread British opposition to join US President George W. Bush’s invasion.

“It seems increasingly clear that at the time of invasion Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy”, he added, a stark contrast to his confident pre-war assertions about the threat Saddam posed.

Butler’s findings mirrored last week’s Senate committee report that lambasted US intelligence services for exaggerating the threat from Iraq but found no sign Bush had pressured analysts to reach conclusions.

The former top civil servant concluded Iraq “did not have significant – if any – stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment nor developed plans for using them”. The government’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) strove to compile a dossier on Iraq’s weaponry in 2002 reflecting available intelligence but was under “strain” in a politically charged climate that compromised their objectivity, he added.

Butler accused the government of a “serious failing” in removing warnings in intelligence that he said was anyway thin. In future, he said, there should be clearer lines dividing those assessing intelligence and those advocating policy.

In the now notorious September 2002 dossier, Blair said Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes.

“Out of the circle of blame”

No such weapons have been found more than a year after Saddam’s overthrow. “Judgments in the dossier went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intel-ligence available,” the Butler report said.

The 45-minute claim should not have been included as it bred suspicions it was there for “its eye-catching character”, it added.

But Butler apportioned no blame for the quality of the intelligence or how it was used. He said John Scarlett, who headed the JIC and has now been promoted to run Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, should not be punished. Analysts said the Butler report would be a relief to Blair.

“This is the best that the Prime Minister and the government could have hoped for. It looks to be as if he has been more or less left out of the circle of blame,” John Benyon, politics professor at the University of Leicester, told Reuters.

But opposition leader Michael Howard said Blair’s reputation was now shot. “If this prime minister said war was necessary, would the country trust him?” he asked parliament.

“Does he have any credibility left?”

Mike Peacock</B>