ARAB-EUROPEAN RELATIONS - July 6 - Blair Admits Saddam's WMD May Never Be Found.

Appearing before the Commons liaison committee, UK PM Blair concedes for the first time that WMD may never be found in Iraq, but continues to insist that Saddam had posed a grave threat. As Blair awaits the outcome of Lord Butler's report into the use of intelligence in the lead-up to war next week, he staged the most significant retreat from his firm conviction after the fall of Saddam that the US-led coalition would find and publish evidence of WMD in Iraq. Blair expressed his confidence WMD would be found in Iraq saying: "I was very confident when I spoke to you this time last year that the Iraq Survey Group would find them. I have to accept that we have not found them - that we may not find them. [Saddam Hussein] may have removed or hidden or even destroyed those weapons. We don't know". Blair said war had been justified because Saddam had been in breach of UN resolutions and was a "proven threat to his region and the wider world". (One year ago, Blair told the Commons that the search for WMD was continuing and its results would be published. "I think that when we do so, the honourable gentleman and others will be eating some of their words", he told MPs at the time). Lord Butler's report is keeping the verdict a closely guarded secret, it may well criticise the process by which the government's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's WMD was compiled. Lord Butler may also judge that the dossier spelled out the threat from Iraq's WMD in terms that gave too much credit to the underlying intelligence. Blair's concession comes on the eve of a long-awaited report by the US Senate intelligence committee that is expected to criticise the work of the CIA before the war. The CIA's assessment that Iraq was seeking to import aluminium tubes for its uranium enrichment programme was central to the US case that Saddam was reviving his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons - though some US government analysts thought the tubes were destined for artillery rockets. The Senate committee's investigation has discovered that tests commissioned by the CIA from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory showed the tubes failing some of the high-velocity stress tests that nuclear parts should have passed.