Iraq Inquiry Recap Service

To respond to all the recent elaborations of the anti-war conspiracy theory by Chris Ames at Iraq Inquiry Digest would take time. Ames is scrupulously well-versed in the textual detail, which makes it hard work to rebut his one-track interpretation.

As the Chilcot inquiry prepares to send letters to some of the people to whom it intends to refer critically in its report, though, it is worth trying to sum up some of the new material published by the Inquiry, and by the Cabinet Office in response to Ames’s Freedom of Information requests.

On 25 June, Ames reported that the Cabinet Office had published drafts from February and March 2002 of what eventually became the September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Ames thinks these documents are “very significant”, mainly because they show that the Government was concerned about the WMD ambitions of four states, including Iraq, until “regime change in Iraq became the secret policy of the Blair government” in March 2002, when “it was decided to focus the dossier on Iraq”. He also thinks it is sinister that they have not been published by Chilcot.

On planet Earth, meanwhile, President George Bush had said publicly in January 2002 that the US needed to “deal with” Saddam Hussein “before it is too late”, and it was well understood that a ground invasion was likely. As Tony Blair had promised publicly in February to play “a full part” in the fight to stop countries such as Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction, it was not a secret that the focus of attention was Iraq; nor was regime change British policy.

Indeed, regime change, a mantra of the anti-war obsession, was not really American policy either, although Bush said it was at Crawford in April 2002, to Blair’s embarrassment. Bush had decided, around January 2002, that Saddam’s record of non-compliance with UN disarmament resolutions, and of deception, meant that he had to go. The aim was disarmament, and Bush had decided that regime change was the only way to achieve it. Blair, more sensitive to the niceties, continued to insist that if Saddam complied fully, he could stay.

Ames thought one document in this batch important enough for a separate article for The Observer about it. It was a memo from John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, to Sir David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, in March 2002 saying that a paper on Iraq alone would have

the benefit of obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional.

As with the antis’ fixation on the idea that the September dossier “made the case for war“, their reading of this depends on their prior view that Scarlett, Alastair Campbell and Blair were engaged in a conspiracy to mislead the British people. The idea that they were seeking in good faith to explain why they were so concerned about Iraq is simply not considered.

One problem in Government from March to September 2002 was to answer the questions that came up again and again: Why Iraq? Why now? It had been clear for a long time to the intelligence agencies that Saddam was a danger; now the Government was having to make that case to the British people. An intelligence paper concerned solely with Iraq had a “benefit” in answering the Why Iraq? question, compared with the four-country paper that the spies had prepared earlier.

Scarlett’s memo shows that the intelligence services were keen to make that case. MI6’s Iraq expert thought the erosion of sanctions meant his job was

like having tea with some very proper people in the drawing room and noticing that there was a python getting out of a box in one corner.

Scarlett’s memo suggests that the spies were getting involved in presentation (again), as much as presentation people such as Alastair Campbell getting involved in intelligence. That is because they, including David Kelly (see his sister’s testimony here, search for “brother’s attitude”), were convinced that Saddam was a threat and believed that military action was the only way to deal with him.

There are more important documents that have been made public recently, and many more postings at Iraq Inquiry Digest that need to be rebutted. I will return to them later.

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