Why Did Tony Blair Ignore MI5's Advice?

In his statement to the Commons on September 24, 2002, Tony Blair was unequivocal about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. He told MPs that the Joint Intelligence Committee had concluded:

…that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population, and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.

Chilling stuff. How does it measure up against today’s testimony from Baroness Manningham-Buller at the Chilcot inquiry? The former MI5 chief has revealed that she advised officials a year before the war that the threat posed by Iraq to the UK was “very limited” and that the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons threat was “fragmentary”. And she added: “If you are going to go to war, you need to have a pretty high threshold to decide on that.”

So how did the Joint Intelligence Committee have – according to Blair – a clear and settled conviction that Saddam was a threat yet MI5 did not? Even more damning for Blair is Manningham-Buller’s assessment of the impact of the invasion of Iraq. She said MI5 was “swamped” with terrorist plots in the aftermath of the invasion in 2003.

“Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – not a whole generation, a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam…Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before.” It’s hard to conceive of a more comprehensive foreign policy disaster yet the man responsible is now the Middle East peace envoy. It’s beyond parody.

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