“I have often thought whether my predecessor or I should have challenged more,” Baroness Manningham-Buller told the Iraq inquiry in the most haunting quotation of the day.
The testimony from the former head of MI5 was among the most damning the Iraq inquiry has heard, because it flatly contradicts much of what the Bush and Blair administrations told us about the Saddam threat in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Baroness Manningham-Buller says the intelligence services advised the government ahead of time that Saddam was “containable” – and that the al-Qaida threat to the UK would increase with the Iraq invasion.
“I have often thought whether my predecessor or I should have challenged more,” Baroness Manningham-Buller told the Chilcot inquiry in the most haunting quotation of the day, revealing that she did not have regular one-on-one meetings with Tony Blair and that the head of MI6 saw the prime minister more often.
By law, the head of MI5 has direct access to the prime minister. Why she did not seek that access with some urgency, and speak out more forcefully when it mattered, is something the baroness will have to live with for the rest of her days.
Though it is highly debatable and indeed doubtful whether she would have changed the PM’s mind about invading Iraq.
Manningham-Buller admitted that she had failed to anticipate the rise in home-grown terror plots Iraq would cause, or the 70 to 80 Britons who planned to go Iraq to fight against coalition forces.
“Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad,” she said. “So that he was able to move into Iraq in a way he wasn’t before.”
She was asked whether the Iraq conflict exacerbated the UK terror threat.
“Substantially” she mumbled. “We did not foresee the degree to which British citizens would be involved. By focusing on Iraq we reduced our focus on the al-Qaida threat in Afghanistan.”
Her MI5 budget doubled, she said, after 2003, at least in part because the invasion of Iraq had increased the risk to the UK. In other words, Britain created a massive anti-terrorist apparatus to deal with a threat caused not by Saddam Hussein, but by the British state.
Her testimony blamed MI6 for intelligence failures, not by name but by implication only, as her letter in March 2002 clearly shows that the Security Service did not share the concerns within the intelligence community over the threat Saddam posed. And she directly blames the Americans, for exaggerating “tiny scraps” of intelligence.
She revealed she’d been asked by the UK government to appeal to Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy US defence secretary, not to disband the Iraqi army or purge its Baathists, which contributed to the upsurge in violence.
Quite why this task of talking to Wolfowitz fell to the head of MI5, and not the Ministry of Defence, reveals how dysfunctional the lines of communication between London and Washington must have been in 2003.
Had her mission to Wolfowitz been successful? “Not a hope,” she replied simply. It didn’t sound much of an excuse for a massive failure of influence within the so-called “Special Relationship” .
Her conclusions?
“If you are going to war you need a pretty high threshold (of intelligence),” she said.
Better late than never, I suppose.