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Iraq war increased terror threat to UK, says former spy chief

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, July 20, IRNA -- The former head of Britain’s MI5 security services Tuesday gave a damning indictment of the Iraq war, saying it "substantially" increased the terrorist threat to the UK, while Saddam Hussein posed little threat.

Giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Baroness Manningham-Buller also undermined the case for the 2003 invasion presented by the former prime minister Tony Blair, when suggesting the intelligence was “not substantial enough” to go to war.

“By focusing on Iraq we ceased to focus on the al-Qaida threat, or we reduced the focus on the al-Qaida threat in Afghanistan. I think that was a long-term major strategic problem,” she also said.

It has already been revealed that the Joint Intelligence Committee, which advises ministers on the basis of intelligence from MI5 and MI6, warned Blair before the war started that invading Iraq would increase the threat to Britain from terrorism.

Manningham-Buller said the Iraq war "radicalised" a generation of Muslims and that she was not "surprised" that UK nationals were involved in the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005.

She told the inquiry that she had advised officials a year before the invasion that the threat posed by Iraq to the UK was "very limited" and believed that assessment "turned out to be the right judgement".

“If you are going to go to war, you need a pretty high threshold, it seems to me, to decide on that. And I think there are very few who would argue that the intelligence was not substantial enough on which to make that decision,” she stressed in her final reflections.

"What Iraq did was produce fresh impetus on people prepared to engage in terrorism," she said, also revealing that 70 to 80 Britons went to Iraq to join the anti-coalition insurgency having been radicalised by the war.

In a newly declassified document, published by the inquiry, the former MI5 chief told the senior civil servant at the Home Office in March 2002 that there was no evidence that Iraq had any involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

While there were reports of claimed links between the regime of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, there was no intelligence to suggest meaningful co-operation between the two, she said.

The inquiry into the Iraq war launched last autumn and is expected to complete its report by the end of the year. Blair is among other ministers who are expected to face further questioning, but it is not yet known of this will be in private.

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End News / IRNA / News Code 1237767