JOHN MAJOR has painted a doomsday scenario of the risks of a war with Iraq, suggesting that President Saddam Hussein may hand his biological and chemical weapons to terrorists as a deadly legacy.

The hazards of military intervention are far greater than they were during the Gulf War of 1991, he said: then the aim was to force Iraq out of Kuwait, whereas now Saddam faces being overthrown and could therefore be a desperate and reckless opponent.

Saddam may use biological or chemical weapons against invading American and British troops, attack Saudi Arabia, or contaminate or set alight its oil fields and those in Kuwait and Iraq.

“He might also leave as his legacy a gift of weapons of mass destruction to terror groups so that they might strike against the US and her allies for years to come,” the former Prime Minister writes in The House Magazine, the parliamentary weekly.

In a rare political intervention, Mr Major gave warning that military victory over Iraq would be assured but carried stark risks, and its aftermath might be a “cocktail of chaos”.

Mr Major, who took office during the mobilisation against Iraq in 1990 and whose first months as Prime Minister were dominated by the Gulf War, supported the case for disarming Iraq, saying that it has ignored the UN for 12 years and action “is not precipitate”. However, he said that this time Saddam faces the near certainty of being deposed and will thus be an unstable and threatened man at bay. At worst, believing that he has nothing to lose, he may use his arsenal of weapons against the invading army, attack Saudi Arabia for being an ally of the US and a financier of the last Gulf War, or again attack Israel to try to win Arab support.

“He will be likely to use conventional weapons to set alight the Iraqi oil wells in an attempt to maximise economic chaos,” Mr Major added. “He would justify this latter act of destruction by deploying the populist but misguided view that the aim of the US is to control Iraqi oil. He may also seek to contaminate or set alight oil wells in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.”

After a war, the country could be split between Shia Muslims and Kurds. Western-style democracy would not work, he said, because voting by clan would pass power from Sunnis, who are less than a fifth of the population, to the Shia majority, allowing a Shia-dominated Iraq to join Shia Iran in dominating the Gulf.

He urged Tony Blair to work with President Bush to overcome Arab resentment by planning the postwar reconstruction of Iraq and making clear that its oil industry should remain in Iraqi hands.

Mr Major writes: “The advocates of war cite the need for Churchillian resolve for their enterprise, and they are right.But when the fighting is done, they will need another Churchillian virtue — magnanimity — or Iraq will sink into despair and the Muslim world will grow still further in hostility to the West.”

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