330. Intelligence and assessments were used to prepare material to be used to support Government statements in a way which conveyed certainty without acknowledging the limitations of the intelligence.
331. Mr Blair’s statement to the House of Commons on 18 March was the culmination of a series of public statements and interviews setting out the urgent need for the international community to act to bring about Iraq’s disarmament in accordance with those resolutions, dating back to February 2002, before his meeting with President Bush at Crawford on 5 and 6 April.
332. As Mr Cook’s resignation statement on 17 March made clear, it was possible for a Minister to draw different conclusions from the same information.
333. Mr Cook set out his doubts about Saddam Hussein’s ability to deliver a strategic attack and the degree to which Iraq posed a “clear and present danger” to the UK. The points Mr Cook made included:
- “... neither the international community nor the British public is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for this military action in Iraq.”
- “Over the past decade that strategy [of containment] had destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf War, dismantled Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam’s medium and long range missile programmes.”
- “Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term – namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably ... has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for twenty years, and which we helped to create? Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam’s ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors?”[1]
334. On 12 October 2004, announcing the withdrawal of two lines of intelligence reporting which had contributed to the pre‑conflict judgements on mobile biological production facilities and the regime’s intentions, Mr Straw stated that he did:
“... not accept, even with hindsight, that we were wrong to act as we did in the circumstances that we faced at the time. Even after reading all the evidence detailed by the Iraq Survey Group, it is still hard to believe that any regime could behave in so self‑destructive a manner as to pretend that it had forbidden weaponry, when in fact it had not.” [2]
