Britain's Tony Blair will bow to growing pressure on Tuesday and call an inquiry into apparent intelligence failings over Iraqi weapons after Washington agreed to its own probe into the justification given for war.  

A government source said the prime minister would make the formal announcement on Tuesday when he testifies to a committee of senior parliamentarians.

Until now, Blair has firmly resisted calls for an inquiry although no banned weapons have been found months after Saddam Hussein was toppled.

But pressure has been mounting to explain apparent flaws in intelligence that led Blair to state, prior to the war, that Iraq was a "serious and current" threat and that it had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons.

A move by President Bush to appoint an independent commission on US intelligence -- confirmed on Monday -- turned up the heat on Blair to do the same.

"I think it's humiliating that we are just being an echo of the US again," former Cabinet minister Clare Short said.

The official government line that evidence of weapons could yet be found has been increasingly hard to sustain since chief US weapons hunter David Kay quit his post last month and blew a hole in the Anglo-American argument on Iraq.

Kay said he believed Iraq had no stockpiles of illicit weapons and said "we were almost all wrong" in assuming it did.

Blair will appear before parliament's Liaison Committee at 0900 GMT.

Torrid times continue

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has dealt a major blow to Blair's credibility, sending his public trust ratings plummeting in the wake of the US-led invasion.

His Conservative opponents have already filed a motion urging an inquiry, a demand backed by most of the public.

Two weekend opinion polls showed 61 percent and 54 percent respectively wanted an investigation into London's evidence.

Critics say the government may now attempt to load the blame on its intelligence services.

"It would be grotesque if the intelligence agencies were made to carry the can for what was ultimately a political decision," former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said.

"We know there are no weapons of mass destruction, we know there was no threat, we know we got it wrong," he said.

The new inquiry will frustrate Blair's attempts to draw a line under what has been the most torrid period of his six-and-a-half-year tenure.

He just averted a first major defeat in parliament last week and a day later was cleared over a weapons expert's death.

Judge Lord Hutton exonerated the prime minister of blame over the suicide of government scientist David Kelly, who killed himself after being named as the source of a BBC report that Blair's team had "sexed up" the threat from Iraq.

In a further blow, parliament's Foreign Affairs Select Committee concluded on Monday that the failure to find Iraqi weapons was undermining Britain and America in their "war on terror" and that the war had made terror attacks on British nationals and interests more likely.

(China Daily February 3, 2004)