Syria has accused the United States and Britain of telling lies about its supposed use of chemical weapons. Syria says it has not used the weapons and does not possess them.

“Everything that the American minister and British government have said lack credibility,” Syrian Information Minister Omran Al-Zoub told Russian TV on Friday. “It’s baseless, and it’s a new tactic to put political and economic pressure on Syria.”

They “want to manipulate the issue, to let whoever used the chemical weapons … get away (with it), and to repeat the Iraq example,” Al-Zoubi said.

Russia’s foreign minister has warned against repeating the “Iraqi scenario” where Bush neocons installed in the Pentagon fabricated evidence concluding Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix found no stockpiles of WMD despite claims made by the Bush administration and the corporate media.

“The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq,” Bush told ABC News prior to his departure from the White House. A 2008 Senate Intelligence Committee report stated that the Bush administration had “misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq.”