[lbo-talk] David Wearing on Blair & The Connection

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Wed Jul 27 07:45:37 PDT 2005


[Wearing is a blogger <http://www.democratsdiary.co.uk/>, but this was a letter to Juan Cole]

http://www.juancole.com/2005/07/former-british-pm-john-major-ties-iraq.html

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

<letter snipped from longer post>

David Wearing writes from the UK to say that Blair and Straw had

earlier acknowledged liberally that the Iraq War raised the risks of

terrorism.

'In the abovementioned post, you say: "I don't know what was in

Straw's mind, but the connection [between Iraq and the London

bombings] is clear as day"

Here's what we know - with absolute certainty - was at least

somewhere in the mind of Jack Straw, and in the mind of Tony Blair,

as they categorically denied any connection between Iraq and the

recent incidents here in London.

Five weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Britain's intelligence

chiefs warned the government in strong terms that military action

would increase the risk of terrorist attacks against Britain by

groups such as al-Qaeda. As the UK Parliament's Intelligence and

Security Committee noted in 2003: "The JIC assessed that al-Qa'eda

and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest

terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be

heightened by military action against Iraq".

Later, in 2004, a joint Home Office and Foreign Office dossier,

ordered by Tony Blair following the train bombings in Madrid,

identified Iraq as a "recruiting sergeant" for extremism. The

analysis was that the Iraq war was acting as a key cause of young

Britons turning to terrorism.

In 2005, the government was warned yet again, just weeks before the

London bombings. The Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre - including

officials from MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the police - explicitly linked

the Iraq war with an increased risk of terrorist activity in

Britain. The report said that "Events in Iraq are continuing to act

as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity

in the UK".

Ironic that the analysis of MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the police and advisers

from the Home and Foreign Offices should now be so forcefully

contradicted by Blair's government. During an interview with the

BBC around 18 months ago, when it was becoming obvious that banned

WMD would never be found in Iraq, Blair said, "You can only imagine

what would have happened if I'd ignored the intelligence and then

something terrible had happened". No comment required.

If Blair really does believe there's no connection between Iraq and

the terror attacks, then he's changed his mind about that quite

recently. In 2003, speaking to the Intelligence and Security

Committee, Blair said that, "there was obviously a danger that in

attacking Iraq you ended up provoking the very thing you were

trying to avoid". But the risk was worth taking, he went on to say,

to deal with the threat posed by WMD. Again, no comment required.

Most of us in Britain never accepted Blair's current line of

argument, and never wanted to take these risks to begin with. On 15

February 2003, hundreds of thousands of us demonstrated in London

against the coming war on Iraq. At the time, 79% of Londoners felt

that British involvement in the invasion "would make a terrorist

attack on London more likely". In the wake of the London bombings,

two-thirds of Britons expressed the view that the invasion of Iraq

and the attack on our capital were linked.

Now, after a second attack on London in as many weeks, which might

easily have been as bad as the first, I can't help but notice (as

you yourself have done) that my government's policies are putting

me, my fellow Londoners and everyone else in Britain at an

increased risk of falling victim to terrorists. What's worse is

that in doing so they've been deliberately and repeatedly ignoring

the advice of the UK's intelligence services, departmental advisers

and independent experts, as well as strenuously avoiding any honest

discussion of the problem, preferring to obscure the issues with

self-serving mendacity. As far as I'm concerned, New Labour is

clearly failing to uphold its basic duty of care towards us and as

such has rendered itself unfit to govern in the most fundamental

sense. '

<end letter>

Michael



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