Big Rugs: Iraq ‘no threat’ and what that means

29/08/11

Iraq was not a threat, and the invasion in 2003 was a distraction from the pursuit of Al Qaeda.

That’s the verdict of Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was head of MI5 from 2002-2007. It’s old news now that Tony Blair took us into war on a second front on grounds which were shaky at best. All the same, this bald statement from the former Director General of MI5 should be headline news, not for what it tells us about Tony Blair’s government or the ridiculous contortions of law and intelligence required to get us to war, but for the rugs it pulls from beneath some very large feet.

Back in pre-history, a journalist named Andrew Gilligan asserted that the government had ‘sexed up’ the dossier of published intelligence about Iraq. The government expressed its horror at the very notion, and Gilligan and the BBC were hauled across hot coals. The Hutton Inquiry found that the dossier had not been ‘sexed up’. Gilligan, the chairman, and the director general of the BBC all lost their jobs. The government used the incident as a stick with which to beat the corporation for years. The attempt to cut the BBC’s disobedient news arm down to a more manageable and biddable form continues to this day. (In the past, one prime minister was able to require that the BBC reorder the sequence of footage in the reporting of a riot to make it seem that rioters attacked police, rather than the other way around. Downing Street must long for the good old days.)

But the point isn’t the endless, tedious whinging of affronted politicians at a news organisation which is, in general, pretty solid.

The point is how we conduct inquiries.

Hutton found that the dossier had not been politically influenced. Butler found, in contrast, that more weight had been placed on the intelligence than it could bear. And here is Eliza Manningham-Buller saying:

“Iraq did not present a threat to the UK.

The service advised that [an invasion] was likely to increase the domestic threat and that it was a distraction from the pursuit of al-Qaeda. I understood the need to focus on Afghanistan. Iraq was a distraction.”

And you have Major General Michael Laurie, who was instrumental in drawing up the September dossier, who wrote to the Chilcot inquiry to say that the dossier had been compiled to make the case for war. Sir John Scarlett, in charge of the September dossier, wrote to Downing Street that there was an advantage in “obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional.”

If you accept these statements, the question is not whether the intelligence was manipulated for political ends, but how this manipulation was done and at what point. What Eliza Manningham-Buller says appears sets the whole issue on its head: the dossier was not ‘sexed up’; if I understand correctly, it must have been edited or drafted so that what the intelligence services actually believed – that Iraq was not a threat – was hard to find in its pages, leaving only alarming discussions of Iraq’s supposed (and as it turned out non-existent) WMD capacity.

And yet we’re left to piece all this together from scraps. Despite Hutton, Butler, and Chilcot, and a smattering of other reviews, the mechanism of deception has not been exposed. The persons involved in turning black into white – terrifying the British public and parliament into a war which was (whatever you think about the pros and cons of humanitarian military intervention) unnecessary in terms of immediate self-protection and which may have made our security situation worse, and which has proved a massively costly adventure in terms of human life and hard cash – have not been called to account. Ministers and officials have been politely quizzed, and their good faith has been assumed. They have been invited to appear before kindly panels, not subjected to serious questioning on what is arguably the most serious question of our political era.

Our inquiries are toothless and ineffectual, and for as long as that remains the case our democracy is significantly weakened.

One Comment to “Big Rugs: Iraq ‘no threat’ and what that means”

Matt Keefe said on August 29th, 2011:

The inability and unwillingness of the British establishment to effectively police itself is probably the significant issue of our time. Drawing comparisons between sagas like the Iraq War (or more to the point its various inquiries), phone hacking, MPs’ expenses, and the deaths of Iain Tomlinson or Jean Charles de Menezes, say, is almost bound to invite accusations of conspiracy theorising – probably legitimately, if the comparisn is taken too far – but where I do think it is telling is in the seemingly universal unwillingness and inability of the better connected sections of our society to properly police their own actions, or even those of one another. The police are perenially mired in the fall-out from flawed investigations and inquiries pertaining to their own actions; the IPCC, does little better, and a similar state of affairs is now blatantly apparent in the media with the PCC, the reluctance of most media outlets to offer significant coverage to what was obviously a major story, with concomitant lack of interest from both the police and (initially or continuingly depending on your point of view) politicians. Nick Clegg’s torture inquiry has been watered down to the point that most of the interested parties are refusing to participate, and even Clegg himself doesn’t bother to mention it anymore. It’s pathetic.

What most of the worst responses to issues of legitimate and often very great public concern have in common is the thin veneer of independence used supposedly to clarify them. Announcing an independent inquiry is a sort of weird modern political half-act of contrition. It appears to be acceptable to brush things under the carpet if you wring you stand around wringing your hands while someone else does it for you. It’s all very popish. That the same failure appears to have occurred across the political, media and legal establishments is particularly catastrophic, as it seems to have created a sort of perfect storm of people not willing to push too hard at anything. I’m sure it’s origins lie in incompetence as much as in outright malice but I find the fact that what it has produced is a Closed Circle of Malicious Incompetence rather than an Iranian-style Closed Circle of Power not altogether comforting.

I agree with what I take to be your general point that improving the way we conduct inquiries in this country is probably the solution, however.