The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
•
He
genuinely believed “that those stockpiles of weapons were there; I
think
that most
people did, and that is why the whole of the international
community
came
together and passed the United Nations resolution it did [1441
adopted in
November
2002], but that is a very different thing from saying that Saddam
was
not a
threat; the truth is he was a threat, to the region and to the
wider world,
and the
world is a safer place without him.”
•
He “would
not accept” that Saddam Hussein “was not a threat and a threat
in
WMD
terms”.
•
He did “not
believe we would have got the progress on Libya, on AQ Khan,
on
Iran and on
North Korea” without Iraq.
•
In his view,
“the reason … it was important that we took a stand on the
WMD
issue, and
the place … to take that stand was Iraq because of the history
of
breaches of
UN resolutions and the fact that they used WMD … is that if
you
carry on
with this proliferation of WMD with these highly repressive
states
developing
it … at some point you would have this new form of global
terrorism
and those
states with WMD coming together.”
822.
On
9 July, the Senate Committee on Intelligence published its
report on the
U.S.
Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on
Iraq.459
The
main
conclusions
included:
•
Most of the
key judgements in the October 2002 US National
Intelligence
Estimate
(NIE), ‘Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass
Destruction’,
either
overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying
intelligence
reporting.
A series of failures, particularly in analytic tradecraft, led to
the
mischaracterisation
of the intelligence.
•
The
intelligence community did not accurately or adequately explain to
policy-
makers the
uncertainties behind the judgements in the October 2002
NIE.
•
The
intelligence community suffered from a collective presumption that
Iraq
had an
active and growing WMD programme. This “group think” led
intelligence
community
analysts, collectors and managers both to interpret
ambiguous
evidence as
conclusively indicative of a WMD programme and to ignore
or
minimise
evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons
of
mass
destruction programmes. This presumption was so strong that
formal
mechanisms
established to challenge assumptions and group think
were
not used.
459
Select
Committee on Intelligence, 9 July 2004, Report of
the Select Committee on Intelligence on the
U.S.
Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on
Iraq.
584