Gordon Brown on Iraq: We were all misled by the Americans over WMD

So it was. Commissioned by Rumsfeld to identify gaps in the US intelligence picture, it is now clear how forcibly this report challenged the official view: “We’ve struggled to estimate the unknowns . . . We range from 0 per cent to about 75 per cent knowledge on various aspects of their [Iraq’s WMD] program”, the report stated.

It conceded that US knowledge of the Iraqi nuclear weapons programme was based largely – perhaps 90 per cent of it – on analysis of imprecise intelligence. These assessments, the report said, relied ‘heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence. The evidentiary base is particularly sparse for Iraqi nuclear programs.’

The Americans thought Saddam possessed a viable weapon design, though this was qualified with the statement: “We do not know the status of enrichment capabilities . . . We do not know with confidence the location of any nuclear-weapon-related facilities”.

The same lack of intelligence was true of biological weapons – “We cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi facilities that produce, test, fill, or store biological weapons” – and chemical weapons: “The specific agent and facility knowledge is 60- 70 per cent incomplete . . . We do not know if all the processes required to produce a weapon are in place”.

“The Iraqis, it was reported, “lack the precursors for sustained nerve-agent production”, confirming that US intelligence could not identify any Iraqi sites producing the final chemical agent. And as for missiles and the Iraqis’ ability to target countries such as the UK with them, which was to be the subject of dramatic claims only a few weeks later, Rumsfeld was informed: “We doubt all processes are in place to produce longer-range missiles.”

While the British paper I had been given at my request in September, 2002 – which turned out to be the same evidence Tony had reviewed over the summer – suggested a capability if not a production programme, this highly-confidential US evidence was a refutation not only of the claim that Iraq was producing WMDs but also of their current capability to do so.

It is astonishing that none of us in the British government ever saw this American report.

As we were later to discover, the intelligence had not established beyond doubt either that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons or that efforts to develop nuclear weapons continued.

Christopher Meyer, the UK ambassador to Washington at the time, who had meetings with US officials on 12 September, said that “US interlocutors all pointed more generally to the need not to get trapped into juridical standards of proof. The bulk of the case should rest on history and common-sense argument, rather than specific new intelligence. When it came to Saddam’s WMD, absence of evidence was not the same as evidence of absence. We should not be afraid to argue that, just as in 1991, Iraq’s programmes were probably much further advanced than we knew.”

Because there has been no Chilcot-style inquiry in the USA, we do not know to this day who in the US administration saw the Rumsfeld dossiers…

Some in the US had evidence which doubted even Iraq’s capabilities. In public, the administration said something different. In October, 2002, one month after the report to Rumsfeld, President Bush went on record for the first time with the assertion that Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and was “seeking nuclear weapons”.

Instead of investigating further the evidence held by the Joint Chiefs, the American administration produced a 92-page National

Intelligence Estimate, which made no mention of any counter-evidence and instead focused on what it called Key Judgements.

The key judgements were that Iraq had continued its WMD programmes in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions, had chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions, and that, if left unchecked, it probably would have a nuclear weapon within the next 10 years.

While the US Defence Department report to Rumsfeld -that was not , it appears, circulated outside the Pentagon- concluded “we cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi facilities that produce, test, fill, or store biological weapons” and that “we do not know with confidence the location of any nuclear-weapon-related facilities”, the dossier published by the British Government in September, 2002, entitled Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government, said that “Iraq continued to produce chemical and biological agents” and that Saddam “continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons”.

We had moved from the UK papers in the summer which warned of Iraq’s capability to produce weapons, to claims around the autumn dossier that there were major weapons programmes underway.

I am convinced that if resolutions of the United Nations are approved unanimously and repeatedly they have to be upheld if we are to have a safe and stable world order. On this basis, Saddam Hussein’s continuing failure to comply with them justified international action against him.

The question is whether it required war in March, 2003. If I am right that somewhere 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.

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.

Brown goes on to describe how as PM he ensured British troops left Iraq. While the Americans finally left in December, 2011, Britain had left in April, 2009 – two years and eight months earlier. The British decision to leave was made in 2007

When I became prime minister, I was of the view that we should end our four-year military presence in Iraq. Privately, I thought we should do so as soon as possible and set myself the task of leaving by the end of 2008.

In my Camp David meeting with George Bush in July, 2007 he pressed me to stay longer and raise troop levels. I told him I was not willing to see an endless British occupation and I was clear that while we would not leave until security was improved, our deployments would have to be made in the British interest. Our plan was to scale down and withdraw. In the end, we left only 16 weeks later than I had planned – on 30 April, 2009.

In fact, for some time in Basra, we had started to do things differently from the Americans.

In essence, we tended to favour a more rapid transition to Iraqi control than the US did, not least as a means of forcing the Iraqis to step up to the plate. ‘Iraqification’, an ugly term, best explained our objective: while the US led their surge, we planned to transfer control back to the Iraqis, province by province.

General Petraeus thought our position should be “in together, out together”, but I told him that autumn that the British task would be limited to creating enough stability to allow us to depart.Nevertheless, I would not explicitly position our departure as a break with the US and refused to convey the impression that we were distancing ourselves from America even at a time when the Iraq intervention was becoming more and more unpopular. There was never, I told my colleagues, going to be any public or private self-satisfaction in our leaving Iraq.

At this time I made another decision: not to use our future departure from Iraq as an occasion to draw a contrast with Tony or score points against him either.

We know that even a just war does not necessarily deliver a just peace. When we left Iraq in 2009 it was still one country, with one government and one Parliament 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. Nation-building from the outside is fine in theory but hard in practice.

Not every world problem can be solved by America or, for that matter, the West. It was a lesson that was to be impressed upon us with equal force in Afghanistan.