Cook tears apart UK's justification for Iraq war

By BEN RUSSELL

LONDON - In just over an hour of testimony yesterday, Robin Cook took apart the British Government's justification for war in Iraq.

The former Foreign Secretary and Leader of the Commons used the quiet forensic skills which made his name in Opposition to pick away at the evidence used to argue that Saddam Hussein was a clear and immediate threat to his neighbours and the international community.

Cook used his knowledge of intelligence reports on Iraq from 1997 to 2001 and a face-to-face briefing from the chairman of the Government's joint intelligence committee to insist that MI6, the intelligence agency, had not regarded Iraq's chemical or biological arsenal as a high risk to the world.

Cook told the all-party Commons foreign affairs committee that secret briefings he received immediately before the outbreak of war differed sharply from the rhetoric from Downing St.

He declared that they reflected "word for word" the warning in his resignation speech that "Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term; namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target."

He also revealed that concerns about Saddam's arsenal had eased to the extent that Britain had considered "closing the files" on Iraq's nuclear and long-range missile programme in the late 1990s

In a devastating critique of the Government's culture of spin, Cook accused ministers of carefully selecting intelligence information to back their case for war.

He said the Government's first dossier on Iraq's weapons, which included the claim that weapons could be launched within 45 minutes, was "very thin".

"I was taken aback at how thin the dossier was. There was a striking absence of any recent and alarming firm evidence. The great majority was derivative.

"The plain fact is that a lot of the intelligence in the dossier turned out to be wrong."

The second publication, now labelled the "dodgy dossier" after it emerged that much had been culled from a PhD thesis, was condemned as "a glorious and spectacular own-goal".

It was a quiet, under-stated performance - in sharp contrast to former Cabinet minister Clare Short's highly charged testimony - from a man who has become the respected leader of anti-war opinion on the back benches, amid increasing concern in Labour's ranks at the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Unlike Short, Cook refrained from attacking Blair's goodwill in the run-up to war.

Cook likened raw intelligence to alphabet soup. "I fear on this occasion what happened was those bits of the alphabet which supported the case were selected. That's not deceit, not invention, but it was not presenting the whole picture.

"I fear the fundamental problem is, instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a conclusion for a policy, we used intelligence as a basis to justify a policy on which we had already settled."

There is talk about Cook's motives. Some Labour MPs believe he is a potential leadership contender, something which Cook has denied.

But Labour insiders said there was a "vacancy" for a "stop Gordon Brown" leadership candidate to keep the Chancellor of the Exchequer out of Downing St after the resignation of Health Secretary Alan Milburn last week.

Some believe Cook would regard such a role as an irresistible challenge given his feuds with Brown, which go back more than 20 years.

Others, however, believe Cook has his sights on Brussels and a seat on the European Commission that will come up next year. He has retained his cross-Channel links by keeping his leadership of the Party of European Socialists.

Short aimed at the "collapse in decision-making" at the heart of the Blair Government. The former Secretary for International Development accused Blair of sidelining the Foreign Secretary and Cabinet and relying on his close entourage of unelected advisers in the run-up to war.

She unleashed a tirade against Blair's style of Government, accusing him of commissioning no formal discussion papers on the diplomatic option as war loomed, and preventing detailed debate on the crisis.

"Things were not decided properly; no records, no papers; in the Prime Ministers' study - all informal with a small group of in people," she said.

Short, who threatened to resign in the immediate run-up to war, but stayed in the Cabinet until fighting in Iraq ceased, was scathing about the conduct of Blair, his senior ministers and top officials.

She said Blair's closest advisers - director of strategy and communications Alastair Campbell, chief of staff Jonathan Powell, and Baroness Morgan and Sir David Manning - attended the War Cabinet and made policy at Downing St.

"I am really shocked by the way these decisions were taken," Short said.

The Cabinet defence and overseas policy committee had not even met in the lead-up to war, and discussions around the Cabinet table were mere "updates".

'That is quite a collapse in the normal procedures for British decision-making. It was only the close entourage who were really part of this," she said.

"Not having any papers, not considering opinions or diplomatic opinions, I think, is very, very poor and shoddy work."

Short's hour-long appearance before the foreign affairs committee was punctuated with jibes at Blair, accusing him of using "ruses and devices" as part of a campaign of "honourable deception" to persuade colleagues and the public to back war.

She said Foreign Secretary Jack Shaw had been "helpful" to Downing St, but warned: "The Foreign Secretary had a close relationship with the Prime Minister and the entourage, but the Foreign Secretary was helpful and went along with these decisions.

"But I think that the decision-making was sucked out of the Foreign Office, which is a great pity. There is great expertise in the Foreign Office about the Middle East."

Short repeated her claim that Blair and United States President George W. Bush had reached a secret agreement as early as September to go to war by the northern spring, arguing: "I think the Prime Minister had said to President Bush, 'We will be with you'. He hadn't laid down the conditions needed to bring Britain's influence to bear to temper the US."

She insisted that by September 24 "senior people in the system said to me that a date had been fixed some time ago".

Short insisted that there was no other explanation for the decision to deny United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix more time to secure Iraqi disarmament, despite his success in destroying 57 of Saddam's long-range missiles.

"The question is why, if Blix was succeeding, his process was truncated? Why? Because we were working to a target date and that date did not give Blix enough time to complete his work."

Short accused ministers of deliberately misrepresenting the position of France to provide justification for war without a second UN Security Council resolution, and said the Government used false claims of links between Saddam and al Qaeda to justify war.

She said profound discussions such as the decision to go to war required a "commitment to higher level of truth" within the Government, but condemned its two dossiers on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and a separate document on Saddam's record on human rights as "pretty shoddy pieces of work".

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