FORMER PRIME minister Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq left the United Kingdom seriously at risk of terrorist attacks involving British-born Muslims, former MI5 head Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller told the Iraq inquiry yesterday.
MI5, she said, had refused to offer contributions to the documents produced at 10 Downing Street’s orders to justify the case for war because the intelligence was not reliable. Most of the intelligence given by MI5’s sister intelligence agency, MI6, to the Joint Intelligence Committee had been “fragmentary” and did not justify the importance given to it by Mr Blair and closer advisers.
“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 is very few [sic] who would argue that the intelligence was not substantial enough on which to make that decision,” she told the inquiry.
Meanwhile, it emerged that in March 2002 Dame Eliza, then MI5 deputy director-general, had clearly told No 10 that Iraq did not pose a security risk to the UK and was not linked to al-Qaeda.
The letter was released by the chairman of the inquiry, Sir John Chilcot. Confirming the letter’s contents, Dame Eliza said MI5 had not believed that there was “a concern in the short or medium term” that terrorists would get weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein.
However, the invasion allowed Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to establish a base there which they had been unable to do before Saddam was overthrown: “ gave Osama bin Laden his jihad,” she said.
Equally, it led British-born Muslims to become involved in terrorism in the UK, culminating in the 7/7 attacks in London which left 52 dead and scores injured.
“Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – not a whole generation, a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam,” she said.
MI5, which she said had not anticipated the degree to which British citizens would become involved with al-Qaeda after the Iraq invasion, was subsequently “pretty well swamped” with intelligence about British-born Muslims.
“The focus was not foreigners, the rising and increasing threat was a threat from British citizens and that was a very different scenario to, as it were, stopping people coming . It was what has now become called ‘homegrown’,” she told the inquiry.
Her evidence contradicts the narrative offered by Mr Blair and other senior Labour figures who have long argued involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan was necessary to stop al-Qaeda attacks in the UK. Successive British government have repeatedly claimed the deployment of British forces to Iraq and Afghanistan is necessary to prevent al-Qaeda-linked terrorist attacks in Britain.
As to the direct connection between the invasion and subsequent terrorism, Dame Eliza said: “What Iraq did was to produce a fresh impetus of people prepared to engage in terrorism.”