Brown: US knew Iraq DIDN’T have chemical weapons before war but kept it secret so we’d back invasion Weapons of mass deception
PRESIDENT George W Bush knew there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and misled Tony Blair, his ex-Chancellor Gordon Brown sensationally reveals today.
Mr Brown, who went on to succeed Mr Blair as PM, claims the US withheld the findings of a secret intelligence report to drag the UK into the 2003 war that toppled Saddam Hussein.
He says he managed to obtain the report after he left No10 in 2010 – but he will not say when. And he adds that we would not have joined the invasion of Iraq had we known of its contents.
Writing in his new book My Life, Our Times, out on Tuesday, Mr Brown says: “We were all misled on the existence of WMDs. Given that Iraq had no usable chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that it could deploy and was not about to attack the coalition, then two tests of a just war were not met.
“War could not be justified as a last resort and invasion cannot now be seen as a proportionate response.”
Fateful
The war cost 33 British and 172 American lives, while 30,000 Iraqis perished and more died later. It also shattered Mr Blair’s legacy. Labour’s only three-term Prime Minister is now widely reviled.
Mr Brown says his job during the conflict was to find the funds for it. But he adds: “I ask myself if I could have made more of a difference before that fateful decision was taken.”
He says he was assured by then MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove that Saddam DID have WMDs. He writes: “I was told they knew where. I remember thinking it was as if they could give me the street name and number.”
What Mr Brown and Mr Blair did not know was that in September 2002, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was handed a report that said 90 per cent of the US’s data on Saddam’s WMDs was based on “imprecise intelligence” and lacked evidence.
Spooks admitted they had not been able to pinpoint any nuclear, chemical or biological facilities – and they did not believe Iraq had the chemicals for nerve gas.
The report also dashed Mr Blair’s “dodgy dossier” claim that Iraq could deploy biological weapons in 45 minutes and hit UK territory. Mr Brown writes: “I had no idea key decision-makers in America were aware the evidence on WMDs was weak, even negligible and i n key areas n non-existent.
“It is astonishing that n none of us in the British Government ever saw this American report. If I am right that somewhere w within the American system the truth about Iraq’s lack of weapons was known, then we were not just misinformed but misled on the critical issue of WMDs.”
Mr Brown quotes Sir Christopher Meyer, our ambassador in Washington at the time, as saying: “Absence of evidence was not the same as evidence of absence. We should not be afraid to argue Iraq’s programmes were probably much further advanced than we knew.”
But Sir Christopher told the Sunday People that he had no recollection of making the remark, adding: “It became imperative in Washington, which Blair latched on to, to find the smoking gun in time for a spring campaign.”
Mr Brown does not say whether he got the report in time for the seven-year Chilcot inquiry into the war. He adds that when he became PM in June 2007 he wanted to pull Britain out of Iraq quickly but Bush tried to persuade him to stay on. We left in April 2009.
Mr Brown writes: “We know even a just war does not necessarily deliver a just peace. When we left Iraq it was still one country but in the last few years Iraq has again been torn apart by deep sectarian divisions. There is a good reason why it was more difficult to sustain a peace than win a war. Nationbuilding from the outside is fine in theory but hard in practice.”