It's clear. The case for war was cooked up

The vast majority of Labour MPs failed Parliament when they didn't back a fresh inquiry into Blair's manipulation of the case for the invasion of Iraq
Henry Porter
The Observer
Nov. 06, 2006

Last Wednesday's melancholy defeat of the vote to hold a parliamentary inquiry into the Iraq war produced a brief roll of honour from the Labour benches. They are Harry Cohen, Jeremy Corbyn, Mark Fisher, Glenda Jackson, Roger Godsiff, John McDonnell, Alan Simpson, Peter Soulsby, Bob Marshall Andrews, Gavin Strang, Robert Wareing and Mike Wood.

They are the few. They voted against their party, but for parliament and democracy.

A mere dozen among 356 Labour members, they were the only ones on the government side not to fall for the phony argument that a parliamentary inquiry would undermine our troops in southern Iraq. They also knew that not one of the inquiries into Iraq so often cited by the government has got anywhere close to the facts of how Tony Blair deployed the government machine to take us to war.

This subject is not just a legitimate issue for Parliament to investigate but, as Fisher said, it is imperative for MPs to scrutinise the executive and hold it to account. 'If we fail to fulfil those responsibilities in relation to the Iraq war,' he said during the debate, 'we shall further deepen the growing and worrying imbalance between Parliament and the executive.'

The point about the inquiries held so far is that they have been narrow and flawed in their remits. The information leaked subsequent to their reports prove that they have missed the point or purposefully ignored or obscured it.

Take the Butler Review of Intelligence on WMD. Two weeks ago, I reminded readers of the contents of the Downing Street memo, which, in effect, was a minute of a meeting held at Downing Street on 23 July 2002. It described a visit to Washington by Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, and his conclusion that George W Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD and that the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

A report of that meeting appears in Butler, but nowhere is the memo mentioned, even though I now understand that Lord Butler's committee of four privy councillors saw the memo and understood its significance. How was such damning evidence put to one side? The answer seems to be that the head of MI6's report on the thinking in Washington was not regarded as relevant to a review of British intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

In the light of all we know now, that decision becomes increasingly hard to understand. The American case for war was replicated in Britain. Sir Richard Dearlove's report to that meeting is a key to the mood of, and influences working on, the Prime Minister at that time. For many, it is still surprising that as early as 23 July 2002, nine months before the invasion, the planning for war was so advanced in both countries

New information passed to this paper suggests that the construction of the intelligence case for war may be pushed right back to the winter of 2002, when, in February, members of the Joint Intelligence Committee were tasked to find out if there was evidence of a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam's regime in Iraq. No one can dispute that in the months following 9/11, this was an entirely proper area of inquiry for the new head of the JIC, John Scarlett. However, even though no evidence had been found, the JIC instructed the intelligence services to go back and find some. This is crucial because it defied what has been described to me as the article of faith in the JIC: that policy should be driven by analysis, not the other way round.

So in Britain, it appears that at a very early stage - 14 months before the war - we were trying to fit intelligence and facts around the policy, just as they were in America. This will not be news to people working with the JIC that year. In the spring of 2002, one individual I have interviewed recalls that he was asked about WMD and Iraq. His interlocutor said: 'There's not much intelligence on that, is there?' He replied that no, there wasn't. 'Oh, they're not going to like that,' said the man at the JIC.

Though one always thinks of Lord Butler as being honest and diligent, the exclusion of the information concerning Saddam and al-Qaeda is very difficult to understand. His report covers assessments by the JIC from before 2002. The possibility that the JIC was tasking agencies to find intelligence to fit policy is surely relevant, even central, to the purpose of his inquiry.

It could be argued that in February, the JIC was simply seeking evidence of Saddam's relationship with al-Qaeda (which, by the way, was always extremely unlikely) and that this was not strictly relevant to the narrow subject of Butler's inquiry into WMD. But you would be hard-pressed to maintain that line in front of a committee of our more astute MPs.

Even if you give Butler the benefit of the doubt on this, it is impossible to do so on the Iraq Options paper, a document produced by the Overseas and Defence Secretariat at the cabinet office on 8 March 2002. Again, the Butler committee adheres to the convenient limitations of its brief. So, no mention of the different war options elaborated in the paper, no mention of the passage on regime change and, crucially, nothing on the legal considerations of going to war which are so clearly laid out. Butler says that he covers this in another section of the report, but this isn't true. Nowhere will you find the following bald assessment that appears in the Iraq Options paper.

'In the judgment of the JIC, there is no recent evidence of Iraq complicity with international terrorism. There is, therefore, no justification for action against Iraq based on self-defence to combat imminent threats of terrorism as in Afghanistan.'

This is important because it confirms that the JIC had been trawling to make a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. MI6 could not find the evidence after repeated requests and was not prepared to make up intelligence to fit policy. So the government had to put all its effort into making the case for war solely on the basis of Saddam's stockpile of WMD, where it was much easier to make the intelligence and facts fit around policy.

Read the Iraq Options paper alongside Butler's version and you see how much has been left out. The paper has been diluted into inconsequence, yet the original version is a potent description of official activity and thinking. If you had read it in March 2002, you would have had no doubt about where we were heading.

Butler has said privately that his report was either misread or not properly understood by the media; that it was a much more potent criticism of the government than we believed. That is not tenable. Too much has been left out or defanged for that to be true. We only know this now because of leaks of documents and the people who have contacted me in response to my first column on this subject two weeks ago. Think how many more lies are waiting to be discovered by committee MPs charged with looking into every aspect of the path to war. Owing to the mass of Labour backbenchers, we are not going to get that inquiry any time soon. But we cannot leave it at that. The forthcoming issue of Vanity Fair reveals that now, even America's neocons, who were among the architects of the Iraq project, are reconsidering the events that led to war. We should do the same - and for that we need the evidence. My mail boxes of both kinds remain open.