Asked about the legal advice he commented that if he had known the uncertainty pertaining to Lord Goldsmith's legal advice then that he did now ... it would not have changed his view unless Lord Goldsmith was prepared to say that his unequivocal advice was that this was not lawful. A cunning argument that no one else seemed to have thought of. He always has an alibi, or one or two to spare. He also attempted to put some distance between himself and President Bush's antics commenting that "I never subscribed to what you might call the neo-Conservative position that somehow, at the barrel of a gun, overnight, liberty and democracy could be conjured up."
He went onto say that if you look the question of expenditure in Iraq, you have got to start from this one fundamental truth -- that every request that the military commanders made to us for equipment was answered. No request was ever turned down. Unfortunately there is a difference, of course, between being turned down and being ignored. So clearly no one requested any UAVs and if they did they were not turned down ... the requests simply proceeded very slowly. Of course it could be that some things were turned down but if they were then they were turned down for good reason by someone lower down the command chain than Gordon himself who was, as he puts it, purely incharge of the finance of the war (not conducting it). He was forced to later retract his claims that defence spending had always risen.
