THE prime minister faces growing pressure today over his justification for war with Iraq after an opinion poll showed nearly two-thirds of people believe he misled the public over weapons of mass destruction.

Tony Blair has also come under renewed attack from Clare Short, the former international development secretary who resigned last month over Iraq. She accused him of adding “political spin” to intelligence information to “drive” Britain into war.

In an extraordinary intervention at the international summit in St Petersburg, Russia, yesterday, Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, added his voice to the criticism. He warned that Blair must not “mislead” the world over evidence that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons.

Speaking after a meeting of world leaders, Fischer said: “I made it very clear that if there were no weapons of mass destruction then he, Tony Blair, should admit that he has misused intelligence reports and has misled world opinion.”

Growing worries in America over the quality of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction are also adding to the concerns of Fischer, Short and the British public.

In the YouGov poll published today, 63% of respondents said they believed Blair had misled them over whether Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, with 27% saying he deliberately lied. Only

29% of people believe Blair did not mislead the country over the weapons.

More than a quarter of those questioned for the survey — and 13% of Labour voters — believe the main reason for Britain’s role in the war against Iraq was to please President George W Bush.

So far British and American forces in Iraq have found no concrete evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime continued to develop or possess chemical or biological weapons in defiance of the United Nations following the 1991 Gulf war.

However, only a third of those questioned in the poll published in The Mail on Sunday thought Saddam did not have a banned weapons programme and half still believe America and Britain were justified in attacking Iraq.

When she resigned Short claimed Blair had led her to believe the United Nations would be given a bigger role in rebuilding Iraq than turned out to be the case.

Last night Short claimed he had deceived the nation over the risk from weapons of mass destruction.

“I have concluded that the PM had decided to go to war in August sometime and he duped us all along,” she said. “There was political spin put on the intelligence information to create a sense of urgency. It was a political decision that came from the prime minister. We were misled: I think we were deceived in the way it was done.”

Her most damaging allegation was that Blair deliberately misled the cabinet, parliament and the nation when he insisted he had intelligence evidence that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be deployed against coalition forces. Short claimed she had seen all intelligence reports relating to the situation in Iraq.

“The suggestion that there was a risk of chemical and biological weapons being weaponised and threatening us in a short time was spin,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “That didn’t come from the security services.”

Downing Street is bracing itself for attacks both from its own back benches and from the opposition when the prime minister makes a statement in the Commons on Tuesday. There will also be demands from MPs for a full select committee inquiry into the intelligence information made available to Blair.

Yesterday Vince Cannistraro, former chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism operations, said serving officers blamed the Pentagon for playing up “fradulent” intelligence, “a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress”. The anti-Saddam INC is headed by Ahmed Chalabi, favoured by many in Washington as the next leader of Iraq.

Last night, it was reported that unreliable information had been passed to London as part of intelligence-sharing by American officials who had interviewed a defector recruited by the INC.

However, some British intelligence officers considered the claim to be unreliable and uncorroborated.

There has been growing concern in America about the accuracy of security information presented by Bush.

Lieutenant-General James Conway, the senior US Marines officer during the war, said last Friday that American intelligence was “simply wrong” in leading commanders to fear troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons.

Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said his organisation had been “exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of weapons of mass destruction”.

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