Blair tries to heal rift over Iraq

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has flatly acknowledged that his main argument for taking a reluctant country to war - Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction - has turned out to be wrong.

Blair yesterday offered Labour party members an apology for the error in a bid to heal deep divisions over the war before a general election expected next year. But he refused to apologize for taking part in the U.S.-led invasion, even as a heckler disrupted his speech by shouting: "You've got blood on your hands."

"The evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons ... has turned out to be wrong," Blair told delegates at the Labour party convention in Brighton, south of London.

"The problem is, I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong but I can't, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam," he said. "The world is a better place with Saddam in prison."

Blair delivered his speech on the day that two British soldiers were killed in an ambush in Basra, bringing the total number of British soldiers who have died in Iraq since the start of the conflict to 68.

Britain is also gripped with foreboding over the fate of Kenneth Bigley, a 62-year-old British engineer kidnapped along with two American colleagues 13 days ago in Baghdad. Both Americans have been beheaded.

Blair spent most of his hour-long speech to Labour delegates spelling out the domestic issues he believes will win the party an historic third consecutive term in office. He listed education and health reforms, and a revved-up economy, as achievements that should see Labour activists campaign for a third election win "with fire in our bellies."

But Blair acknowledged that his divisive decision to go to war has created "a problem of trust" between him and the electorate.

Before the invasion, Blair made the case for war by publishing British "intelligence" dossiers claiming ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be fired within 45 minutes.

His acknowledgement that such "intelligence" was wrong, the first time he's done so in a major speech, comes after he insisted for 18 months that those weapons would turn up. But his act of contrition stopped short of what critics in his party see as a logical conclusion: If the primary reason for war was wrong, then the war itself was wrong.

Blair insisted he did not knowingly mislead the British people with wrong "intelligence." He claimed "the whole international community" agreed with the information because Saddam Hussein had used such weapons in the past.

In trying to justify the war nonetheless, Blair described "global terrorism" based on a perversion of Islam as a new phenomenon. These extremists are in Iraq, not to fight for its liberation, but to prevent democracy from taking root, he argued. "They are not provoked by our actions, but by our existence," Blair said, referring to the democratic values of Western societies.

Extremists in every European city are preaching "hatred of the West," and defeating extremists in Iraq "means security here," he added.

Blair also addressed critics who accuse him, as he put it, of "pandering to George Bush" and being little more than the U.S. president's poodle.

He clearly distanced himself from the neo-conservative agenda of the Bush administration by insisting "the only lasting way to defeat this terrorism is through progressive politics."

"Salvation will not come solely from a gunship," Blair said, arguing that only by helping countries end oppression will "the conditions in which this terrorism breeds" be removed.

He also declared his "frustration at the lack of progress" in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and vowed to make its revival a "personal priority" after the U.S. presidential elections in November. Blair has been widely attacked within his party for failing to push Bush into making a Middle East peace deal a priority after the Iraq war.