On the first day of public hearings, senior officials told the Iraq war inquiry that Britain had no plans to oust Saddam Hussein in 2001, although there had been some support for regime change from influential quarters in Washington.

Four senior diplomats and advisers addressed the inquiry on Tuesday.

The officials said that the then British government under Tony Blair knew that members of the Bush administration had long been interested in toppling Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein but had initially considered regime change to be illegitimate.

"We were aware of those drum beats from Washington," said William Patey, head of the Middle East department at the Foreign Office in 2001. "Our policy was to stay away from that end of the spectrum. We didn't have an explicit policy for trying to get rid of [Saddam Hussein]."

Patey said that following the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington he asked Foreign Office officials to draw up a list of options for dealing with Iraq. The list included the possibility of regime change.

No legal basis for regime change

"We dismissed it at the time because it had no basis in law," Patey said. "I am not aware right up to March 2002 of any increased appetite by UK ministers for military action in Iraq," he added.

However, Simon Webb, then policy director at the Ministry of Defense, said the mood in Washington was different. Thinking shifted after the September 11 attacks "to say that we cannot afford to wait for these threats to materialize," Webb said.

The then chairman of the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee, and now head of the diplomatic service, Sir Peter Ricketts, told the inquiry that Britain had no evidence that Iraq was in any way linked to the September 11 attacks.

"We heard people in Washington thought there might be some link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden - undocumented. I don't think we saw any evidence of it," Ricketts said.

He also described Iraq as a threat to national security at the time but by no means a dominant one. He said that other crisis zones where UK forces were stationed, including Afghanistan, the Balkans and Sierra Leone, warranted more concern at the time.

A chance for full disclosure

The former civil servant John Chilcot, who is heading the five-member inquiry team, promised to conduct a thorough investigation of Britain's entry into the war, which began in March 2003.

"I make a commitment here that once we get to our final report, we will not shy away from making criticisms where they are warranted," Chilcot said.

The investigation will take over a year to complete and will include testimony from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is expected to face the panel early next year. It is the third official probe into the Iraq war.

The two previous examinations were widely condemned as whitewashes. They include a 2004 report on the intelligence surrounding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and a report on the death of an Iraq weapons expert and whistleblower, who killed himself after he was exposed by the British government as the source behind a leak to the media.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had sought to make the current investigation a closed door affair, but John Chilcot has succeeded in ensuring that as much of the inquiry as possible will be publicly aired.

Up to the task

There has been some criticism of the makeup of the panel because of the lack of military or legal specialists. Critics fear the panel will lack the expertise to ask the appropriate questions. Michael Mates, a Conservative Member of Parliament who supported the war, told Deutsche Welle that it also had other deficiencies.

"There are no politicians on it and of course the decisions were at the heart of Britain's politics," Mates said. "To have someone who has experience of politics on that, I think would have been a great help."

Although the inquiry has no legal powers, and will not convict anyone, Liberal Democrat politician Menzies Campbell, who opposed the war, told Deutsche Welle that the inquiry still had teeth.

"It has said that if there is fault, and it believes there to have been fault, it will say so, so I think you may well find quite a lot of blame attaching to those who are directly concerned," Campbell said.

Outside the inquiry in London, activists, together with bereaved families of the 179 British soldiers killed in Iraq, protested the government's official version of events. The government has always denied harboring any motives for joining the US-led invasion, beyond seeking a decisive end to what they said they believed to be Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program.

Britons turned out in record numbers to protest the war ahead of the invasion and many are yet to be convinced that this latest investigation will not amount to another whitewash of the government's knowledge and intentions.

nw/Reuters/AP/AFP/dpa
Editor: Clare Atkinson