[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