FORMER BRITISH foreign secretary Jack Straw has strongly defended the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, given Saddam Hussein’s conduct and years of lies to the United Nations.
“I made my choice. I have never backed away from it, and I do not intend to do so, and fully accept the responsibilities which flow from that,” he told the Iraq Inquiry. “I believed at the time, and I still believe, that we made the best judgments we could have done in the circumstances; we did so assiduously and on the best evidence we had available at the time.”
However, Mr Straw, who replaced the late Robin Cook in the foreign office when the latter quit over the invasion plans, acknowledged he could have prevented Britain from taking part.
“If I had refused that, the UK’s participation in the military action would not in practice have been possible. There almost certainly would have been no majority either in cabinet or in the Commons,” he said.
The British would never have gone to war if Saddam had complied with the UN weapons inspection demand. He said he long believed that Saddam would, though brutal, act “with rationality”. “If Iraq had complied with them, the UK could not and would not have been involved in any military action. Whether the United States would have gone ahead in these circumstances is a matter of conjecture. But the American domestic climate for war would have been much more hostile,” said Mr Straw, who now serves as secretary of state for justice.
Defending the intelligence the UK had on Iraq, he said Libya, Iran and North Korea’s possession of such weapons had all been unearthed by intelligence that proved “highly accurate” – even though all three states had denied having the the armaments.
He rejected charges that preparations for war in 2002 meant that the US and the UK had acted in bad faith, noting that the then UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, had said diplomacy had to be backed up by military might.
“From the early months of 2002 there was no secret whatever that military action by the US against Iraq, and our participation in this if it happened, was a possibility. It was the subject of significant debate throughout 2002 including in the weeks before [the 2002 meeting in Crawford, Texas, between then prime minister Tony Blair and president George Bush].
“Military preparations by the United States for a possible invasion of Iraq were a fact of life. Whilst I never ruled out the possibility that the United Kingdom might be involved too, if this were lawful and justified, my overriding interest was that, through the success of the UN route, UK involvement in military action, and if possible any such action at all, would be avoided,” he told the inquiry in a written statement.
He went on: “But intelligence alone was never the basis for my judgment about the nature of the threat which Iraq posed. My starting point on the assessment of the threat was what was publicly known about Iraq’s WMD programmes, and its behaviour . . . It was that judgment – not intelligence – which lay at the heart of the UK government’s strategy for disarming Iraq, by diplomacy backed by the potential use of force.”