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The Report of the Iraq Inquiry
“So we have to re-order our story and message. Increasingly I think it should
be about the nature of the regime. We do intervene – as per the Chicago
speech. We have no inhibitions – where we reasonably can – about nation-
building ie we must come to our conclusion on Saddam from our own position,
not the US position.
“(3) Oil prices. This is my big domestic worry. We must concert with the US to get
action from others to push the price back down. Higher petrol prices really might
put the public off.”153
430.  Asked to explain his thinking in the minute Mr Blair told the Inquiry:
The first sentence was asking: “How we would either get Saddam to cease
being a threat peacefully or to get him out by force.” He had been very open
in public about that. The minute was “more about the politics”.
The WMD question was about the changed assessment of the risk and the
difficulty of making the case that Saddam Hussein posed a threat.
The message had to address the nature of the regime and the security threat
to command the support of both the right and the left of the political debate.
The change in the security risk after 11 September was the basis for changing
the regime but the nature of the regime was why “we should be proud of having
got rid of him [Saddam Hussein]”.154
431.  Mr Blair added:
“So if September 11 hadn’t happened, we would have carried on in the same way
frankly that George Bush and I first discussed … in February 2001.”
The threat to the UK
432.  From March 2002, the Security Service advised that, in the event of a US
attempt to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime, the threat to the UK and UK interests
from Iraq would be limited and containable.
433.  Consideration of Iraq’s capability effectively to threaten the UK had begun in
early 2002.
434.  On 22 March 2002, Ms Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Deputy Director General of
the Security Service, wrote to Mr John Gieve, the Permanent Secretary of the Home
Office, about the “possible terrorist consequences should the US, possibly with UK
support, seek to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq”.155
153  Minute Blair to Powell, 17 March 2002, ‘Iraq’.
154  Public hearing, 21 January 2011, pages 43-45.
155  Letter Manningham-Buller to Gieve, 22 March 2002, ‘Iraq: Possible Terrorist Response to a US Attack’.
464
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