British and American leaders likened to Nazi war criminals

Tony Blair and George Bush were compared to Nazi war criminals yesterday by Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector.

"Both these men could be pulled up as war criminals for engaging in actions that we condemned Germany in 1946 for doing," he said.

He said the Prime Minister and the US President were "guilty of the crime of planning and committing aggressive warfare". Speaking in London at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Mr Ritter said the two leaders would have been in a much stronger position if they had got a UN resolution explicitly authorising the invasion.

He also said Britain gained very little from the "special relationship". "Britain gets nothing, other than to say they are America's closest ally in Europe," he said.

Mr Ritter, who was a UN weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998, said intelligence services had been correct to say that Iraq's missile programme had been destroyed soon after the first Gulf conflict of 1991.

He recalled how he delivered a report in 1992 stating that the programme had been eliminated. It was met with "stony silence" and he was told that Iraq still possessed 200 missiles.

The inspectors returned to track down the weapons, which never materialised.