1 Boring Old Man

Former MI5 chief demolishes Blair’s defence of the Iraq war
The Independent
By Andy McSmith
21 July 2010

Tony Blair’s evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry that toppling Saddam Hussein helped make Britain safe from terrorists was dramatically undermined by the former head of MI5 yesterday. Giving evidence to the same inquiry, Eliza Manningham-Buller revealed that there was such a surge of warnings of home-grown terrorist threats after the invasion of Iraq that MI5 asked for – and got – a 100 per cent increase in its budget. Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was director general of MI5 in 2002-07, told the Chilcot panel that MI5 started receiving a "substantially" higher volume of reports that young British Muslims being drawn to al-Qa’ida.

She told the inquiry: "Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam." She added: "Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before."

Her words are in stark contrast to the claim that Mr Blair made in front of the same inquiry on 29 January. The former prime minister told Sir John Chilcot: "If I am asked whether I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better, that our own security is better, with Saddam and his two sons out of office and out of power, I believe indeed we are.

"It was better to deal with this threat, to remove him from office, and I do genuinely believe that the world is safer as a result." But the evidence presented by Lady Manningham-Buller does not just call Mr Blair’s credibility into question, it also throws down a challenge to the coalition Government, warned Lord Carlile of Berriew, a Liberal Democrat peer who has acted since 2005 as the independent reviewer of anti-terror laws. He told The Independent: "It’s certainly the case that the threat and number of home-grown terrorists – and ‘not home-grown’ terrorists coming into the UK – increased after the Iraq war. "This makes life difficult both for the old government, who have criticisms to answer, and for the current Government. It makes their review of current terrorism law a delicate exercise because there is no evidence of any significant reduction in the threat. We are where we were"…

Recall that al Qaeda arose when Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia after the Russian-Afghanistan War and the First Gulf War to find American Soldiers there. He was able to recruit his jihadists to drive the Infidels [that’s us] from the holy soil of Islam. So we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and geometrically escalated his capacity to recruit – his and others. And we gave the jihadists someone to fight with. Instead of going after al Qaeda, we went after the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s Baathists. It was a colossally bad idea. And it’s looking as if Tony Blair was an active part of the game.

In England, the Chilcot Inquiry has been criticized as too soft, but from this side of the ocean, it strikes one as hard-hitting, in that the story is being told from a number of perspectives and the details are increasingly clear. M15 is the British Intelligence Service. Lady Manningham-Buller was the head of M15, and her assessment damning – not only did invading Iraq not help, it made things a lot worse. That result was very predictable.

In the US, we’re so tangled up in the aftermath of the wars, other mismanaged government, and the current partisan rancor, that we haven’t taken a breath to look at what we’ve done. But it’s not going to go away…

Ex-Official Says Afghan and Iraq Wars Increased Threats to Britain
New York Times
By SARAH LYALL
July 20, 2010

Lady Manningham-Buller has said on a number of occasions that Mr. Blair’s government failed to heed MI5’s warning that attacking Saddam Hussein would make Britain more vulnerable to terrorism. But her remarks to the panel on Tuesday were particularly pointed and critical of the decisions leading to the American-led, British-supported invasion. Answering questions from the panel, she also said that Iraq had presented little threat to Britain before the invasion, and that there had been no reliable evidence linking the government of Saddam Hussein to the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

“There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection, and that was the judgment, I might say, of the C.I.A.,” she said. “Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11,” she added, “and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind.” But, she said, “it was not a judgment that found favor with some parts of the American machine” — namely Donald H. Rumsfeld, the United States secretary of defense at the time. That “is why Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment,” she said. Lady Manningham-Buller also said that Britain relied on “fragmentary” intelligence before invading Iraq, and that MI5 had not believed that Mr. Hussein was amassing unconventional weapons in Iraq, as the government contended.

The belief that Iraq might use such weapons “wasn’t a concern in either the short term or the medium term to my colleagues and myself,” she said. Not only was the invasion unnecessary based on what was known about Iraq, Lady Manningham-Buller said, but it diverted attention from the real threat, Al Qaeda.

“By focusing on Iraq, we ceased to focus on the Al Qaeda threat or we reduced the focus on the Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan,” she said. “I think that was a long-term, major and strategic problem.”

The invasion led to an “almost overwhelming” increase in homegrown terrorism, she said, so much so that MI5 had to have its budget doubled in the following months. And after the invasion, about 70 to 80 Britons traveled to Iraq to join the insurgency, she said, thus creating a threat where there had been none. “Arguably, we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad,” she said.