Yesterday the former head of the intelligence service MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, gave her testimony to Chilcot. As usual, the British press collectively failed to report the evidence given to the Iraq Inquiry in an accurate and unbiased way.
The anti-war and anti-Blair brigades were filled with joy and schadenfreude by what the Baroness allegedly told Chilcot.
In fact, two of her most controversial claims given to the Inquiry were largely misquoted by the media with her allegedly saying that “our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam”. What has been omitted by many news outlets was that she immediately corrected herself saying that it was “not a whole generation” but only “a few among a generation”. Again, a small but important distinction.
Furthermore she was quoted saying that “we gave Osama Bin Laden his Iraqi jihad”. While she indeed said that, she started her sentence with the word “arguably”, indicating that it was her opinion rather than general wisdom.
Now, allow me to look at her evidence in a slightly different way.
First of all, the Baroness’s role in terms of Iraq was rather limited. It was not the responsibility of her agency to assess the threat Saddam posed but it was the responsibility of MI6. She acknowledged that in the beginning of her testimony when she made clear that her agents “were not directly involved in the decision-making to go to war in Iraq”.
She said that Britain was not under threat by Saddam’s regime, however she stressed that she was talking about “the direct threat from Iraq”, again an important distinction often ignored by the half-truthers.
Furthermore she declared when asked by Roderic Lyne if it “was necessary or right to remove Saddam’s regime in order to forestall a fusion of weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism” that the war against Iraq “eliminated the threat of terrorism from his direct regime”.
The Baroness also gave an interesting response when asked by Martin Gilbert if there was “some assessment of what this threat might be, should we support the United States but not militarily”? She replied that “even if we had supported the United States in sentiment but not militarily, we would still have been seen as supporters so it probably wouldn’t have altered it”.
Additionally she referred to the existence of a “single narrative, which is the view of some that everything the west was doing was part of a fundamental hostility to the Muslim world and to Islam”. While she declared that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were “manifestations” of this assumption it was hardly new and “pre-dated 9/11”.
The most significant remark however she made quite at the end of her testimony when she told the panel that “even if terrorism increases, that shouldn’t stop you doing what you believe, as the government believed, to be right”.
In other words, since Mr. Blair believed that it was right to remove Saddam, it was indeed the right decision for him to go to war, at least from his point of view, even if the invasion increased the terrorism threat on British soil.
Thank you Baroness Manningham-Buller.
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Related:
John Rentoul’s Rebuttal Service on Iraq and 7/7
Martin in the margins on Baroness and the bombers. The Chilcot Inquiry, aka The Mandarins’ Revenge On New Labour.
BlairSupporter on Eliza Doolittle-Manningham-Buller
Great post, Julie – and thanks for the link. Unlike me, you took the trouble to listen to the whole speech, and as you say, a very different picture emerges from that conveyed by the media coverage.
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2010/07/22/iraq-a-forewarned-fiasco/
I especially like, “That the Iraq war was the most profoundly effective recruiting tool imaginable for Al Qaeda and radical Islam more widely has been well known for a long time by those of us who have dedicated our energies over recent years to confronting and reversing radicalization wherever possible in our own communities.”
and
“After 7/7, Tony Blair did not occasion to visit a single victim of the atrocity in hospital, as would have been customary for a political leader at such times of national tragedy. Instead he preferred to stay away. As a psychiatrist, I don’t have to think too hard about why this is.”
Frankly I couldn’t care less what Russell Razzaque has to say. I rather read the brilliant John Rentoul or Oliver Kamm.
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Very Interesting!
Thank You