The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
764.
Asked whether
there had been a debate about different scenarios and
different
possible
courses, Lord Boateng, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury from
2002 to 2005,
replied:
“… there
was certainly a discussion around different scenarios that came up
in the
way in
which we addressed these issues in Cabinet …
“… in the
September meeting, where, as you know, we were about to publish
the
dossier,
there was about to be a report to Parliament and there was a
discussion
around that
and it was a full discussion and, in the course of that, colleagues
made
various
contributions and various scenarios surfaced …
“What we
did have was a full discussion around the issues as they were
reported
765.
Addressing the
September 2002 dossier on Iraq in his memoir, written
after
his
resignation from the Government, Mr Robin Cook, the Leader of
the House
Commons, wrote:
“At Cabinet
[on 24 September 2002] I described the dossier as ‘derivative’.
What I
was
expressing was the extraordinary degree to which the bulk of the
document was
derived
from what we know about Saddam’s arsenal … as it had been in 1991
…
What was
doubtful was whether the arsenal that Saddam possessed in 1991
was
any guide
whatsoever to the state of his capacity in 2002.
“For a
start most chemical and biological agents that Saddam had retained
for
a decade
would long ago have degenerated to the point that they were of
no
operational
use. This is a principle of science well known to those who wrote
the
dossier …
Government Ministers alarmed the public by claims that Saddam had
ten
thousand
litres of anthrax solution unaccounted for since 1991. They never
added
that the
standard life of liquid anthrax is three years …
“… Last
year the US Department of Defense … revealed, ‘When the Iraqis
produced
chemical
munitions they appeared to adhere to a ‘make and use’ regimen …
Their
conclusion
was that the shelf life of Iraqi chemical agents was numbered in
weeks,
not
decades.
“Half of
the text relating to Iraq’s weapons capacity is drawn from the
period before
1998. Much
of the remainder depends for its claims of present capacity on
historic
capabilities
… Stripped of the historical resume … the dossier is very thin on
new
evidence on
the current position.”426
425
Public
hearing, 14 July 2010, pages 4-5.
426
Cook
R. The Point
of Departure. Simon
& Schuster UK Ltd, 2003.
262