If you are likely to have been “radicalised” by Iraq are you not just as likely to have been radicalised by Afghanistan which, erm, you supported?

Opposition to the Iraq war was the first political thing my parents and I had agreed on in 25 years! You didn’t even have to be on left to see it was a really bad idea.

Its important not to let our opinions based on what we now know influence our recollections of the time.

I can remember very mixed feelings because I despised Saddam and the Ba’athists but I was deeply sceptical of Bush’s motives and Blair’s position. As we came closer to war it became clear that the weapons inspectors’ work was being sidelined and the UN was being steamrollered. However, I think a lot of people were confused and equivocal at the time.

Of course in retrospect we can see it was ill-calculated and Blair really let us down. What was going on in his head will remain one of the great mysteries of our time.

Eliza Manningham-Buller has merely admitted the main reason why the left opposed the war in Iraq.

Really? I thought (genuinely) that the main reason why the left opposed the war in Iraq was out of concern for the Iraqis.

I’ve never really understood this controversy. I mean that if you thought the war in Iraq was worth supporting, for whatever reason, I do not see why one would then want to deny that the war may prompt some terrorist attacks on the UK. You can still support the war on the basis of some longer-term threat to the UK posed by Saddam H. In a more general context, it’s hardly unusual for a war to eliminate some threat to actually provoke attacks from that threat.

An increase in terrorist attacks on the UK is a “cost” of war, the same way that British soldiers being killed and Iraqi citizens being killed are costs. You may still believe the benefits outweigh the cost, I don’t understand why this particular cost (UK terrorist attacks) is seen as such a deal breaker.

New Labour (as it still is) will want, in Mr Tony’s words to ‘move on (as in move on, nothing to see here)

If you are expecting a New Labour ‘truth and reconciliation commission’ on Iraq, forget it. Many of the New Labour lobby-fooder who voted to support the illegal invasion of Iraq were privately opposed to it.

Incidentally, I didn’t oppose the Iraq war principally because it would lead to ‘home grown’ terrorists and I believe neither did many other on the left.

I principally opposed the Iraq war because, like all America’s nasty little wars, it was obviously going to lead to a catastrophic bloodbath with many innocents killed and maimed and the outcome a fiasco. You didn’t need to be Einstein to forsee that.

are you not just as likely to have been radicalised by Afghanistan which, erm, you supported?

There was a much more obvious link between Afghanistan and 9/11 – then between Iraq and 9/11 (where no link existed). There was legitimacy and support for getting rid of the Taliban in 2001.

There was legitimacy and support for getting rid of the Taliban in 2001.

Indeed there was. But probably not amongst the likely-to-be-radicalised crew.

There’s plenty of ground on which to criticise Iraq; this though is one of the weaker arguments.

If Blair and the Labour MPs who supported the invasion of Iraq couldn’t comprehend that would be likely to promote terrorist attacks on Britain then they are even more dense than I had previously supposed them to be.

On the legality of the Iraq war, readers can judge for themselves from this letter in the Guardian on 7 March 2003 – the House of Commons debated the issue on 18/19 March:

“We are teachers of international law. On the basis of the information publicly available, there is no justification under international law for the use of military force against Iraq. The UN charter outlaws the use of force with only two exceptions: individual or collective self-defence in response to an armed attack and action authorised by the security council as a collective response to a threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression. There are currently no grounds for a claim to use such force in self-defence. The doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence against an attack that might arise at some hypothetical future time has no basis in international law. Neither security council resolution 1441 nor any prior resolution authorises the proposed use of force in the present circumstances.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,909275,00.html

The signatories were:

Prof Ulf Bernitz, Dr Nicolas Espejo-Yaksic, Agnes Hurwitz, Prof Vaughan Lowe, Dr Ben Saul, Dr Katja Ziegler
University of Oxford
Prof James Crawford, Dr Susan Marks, Dr Roger O’Keefe
University of Cambridge
Prof Christine Chinkin, Dr Gerry Simpson, Deborah Cass
London School of Economics
Dr Matthew Craven
School of Oriental and African Studies
Prof Philippe Sands, Ralph Wilde
University College London
Prof Pierre-Marie Dupuy
University of Paris

““Our involvement in Iraq radicalised a few among a generation of young people who saw [it] as an attack upon Islam,””

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war, these “young people” must be Grade A cretins. Unless I’m mistaken, Iraq was a secular state.

@9 Secular state violently repressing its religious population, the populaton attacked and killed by the US and the UK…

To be fair to Tony Blair, Ms Manningham-Buller also added that the fact that invading Iraq would increase the terrorist risk was not necessarily a compelling reason not to invade, if politicians thought it was “the right thing to do”.

@9: “Unless I’m mistaken, Iraq was a secular state.”

It was. Whatever else, Saddam wasn’t stupid. He knew his continuing survival as a self-serving despot depended on the ability of his regime to contain – or suppress – the endemic religious sectarian and ethnic rivalries in Iraq. That’s why the Americans had facilitated his rise to power in the first place.

All that was well-understood by those who knew the history of the Middle East. It was completely predictable that the removal of Saddam and his Ba’athist Party regime would unleash sectarian and ethnic strife.

The supposed dire threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was cooked up – and Blair knew that from this leaked secret memo of 23 July 2002, leaked to the Sunday Times and published on 1 May 2005, shortly before the 2005 election on 5 May:

“C [the traditional title for the head of MI6, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service - at the time: Sir Richard Dearlove] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The final sentence is absolutely damning: “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article387374.ece

‘Now, I don’t believe the Labour leadership election should be a referendum on the Iraq war. We face bigger challenges in the form of devastating front-line cuts.’

*We* might face bigger ‘challenges’ but describing front line cuts as ‘devastating’ in comparison with the Iraqi experience of having their country bombed to shit is a poor choice of words.

“I don’t believe the Labour leadership election should be a referendum on the Iraq war. We face bigger challenges in the form of devastating front-line cuts.”

Yes, because the small to medium reduction in domestic quality of living is far more important than the lives of the /at least/ 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians in this war.

Electing a Labour MP who supported this war – even if they have decided to change their mind post hoc, would be an even bigger mistake than electing Diane Abbott.

‘Electing a Labour MP who supported this war – even if they have decided to change their mind post hoc, would be an even bigger mistake than electing Diane Abbott.’

Precisely. You don’t get to commit mass murder and walk away with it when other politicians have their careers destroyed for sleeping with rent boys. It’s the UK’s greatest crime in living memory.

Why do you think Blair is getting millions of £ for speaking platitudes to corporate multi nationals?

Because they are the ones who have benefited from the trillions of $’s that have been spent (mostly by the America tax payer) on the Iraq war, and occupation. Blair is now being rewarded for one of the biggest corporate give away’s we have seen for decades.

I was delighted to see the head of MI5 make Blair look like the moron he is with her testimony yesterday. If Blair was so concerned by 9/11, then he should have invaded Saudi, since all but one of the high jackers was from that country. Blair’s dismissal of the rise in terrorism in Iraq that followed his ,and Bush’s clusterfuck invasion shows that he is either the stupidest man ever to be Prime Minister or the biggest liar. When he trotted out his nonsense at the tribunal I was startled that the committee members did not ask him if he wondered why Bin Laden had demanded Saddam’s removal from Iraq before the Iraq war. Bush and Blair effectively did Bin Laden’s work for him. Something that has never been spelled out to both the British and American public.

As for the Labour Mps, they were sheep, as we saw near the end, under Brown when they refused to get rid of him. Blair will die a rich man, and no doubt does not give a shit. Funny how fundamentalist Christians like fundi Muslims are so cavalier with other peoples lives.

@ Sunny

“There was legitimacy and support for getting rid of the Taliban in 2001.”

And now?

Come on. It’s a about time you took a lead on the left by coming out in favour of withdrawal from a war that will in future be seen as an equally unjustified and more futile and costly aggression.

There was a much more obvious link between Afghanistan and 9/11 – then between Iraq and 9/11 (where no link existed).

Which makes invading Afghanistan obviously much more dangerous…

I know this is nit picking but the Guardian story itself is inconsistent. Manningham-Buller said that the Iraq invasion would have motivated some people to become terrorists. But Richard Norton-Taylor writes: “More than once, the former head of MI5 emphasised to the Chilcot inquiry that the invasion exacerbated the terrorist threat to the UK and was a “highly significant” factor in how “home-grown” extremists justified their actions.”

“Justification” and “motivation” have entirely different meanings. Example: Tony Blair was motivated to help invade Iraq because he detested Saddam Hussain; he justified invasion using false claims.

If you read the transcript (http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/48331/20100720am-manningham-buller.pdf), you’ll see that Manningham-Buller avoided the word justification. She did say: “It is part of what we call the single narrative, which is the view of some that everything the west was doing was part of a fundamental hostility to the Muslim world and to Islam, of which manifestations were Iraq and Afghanistan, but which pre-dated those because it pre-dated 9/11, but it was enhanced by those events.”

oh Sunny I’m not sure we should be listening too much to Eliza Manningham-Buller as a way of informing our anti-war sentiments. If I believed in something that might radicalise a certain section of people it wouldn’t matter to me, but so as to avoid hypocrisy, it is not because the Iraq war would radicalise Muslims that I opposed the war, it is because I thought the war in Iraq was wrong, and it meant deploying troops away from Afghanistan where, as you rightly say, the Taliban’s influence needed curbing.

On a different note, what Eliza Manningham-Buller has said should in no way allow or justify radicalisation; unless you stupidly feel that the war in Iraq was a war on Muslims, it should not appeal to anyone that radicalism is the solution – as the commenter above said, this was an issue that brought together people with varying politics – anyone who was radicalised – which, by the way, I don’t take to mean found socialism, radicalised appeals to fundamentalist, ultra conservative and fascistic expressions of political Islam – was never our friend anyway, one wonders whether they really needed an excuse anyway.

@16

Not all multinational corporations made millions out of the Iraq war even if some did.

“WASHINGTON – At least $8.8 billion in Iraqi funds that was given to Iraqi ministries by the former U.S.-led authority there cannot be accounted for, according to a draft U.S. audit set for release soon.

“The audit by the Coalition Provisional Authority’s own inspector general blasts the CPA for ‘not providing adequate stewardship’ of at least $8.8 billion from the Development Fund for Iraq that was given to Iraqi ministries.

“The audit was first reported on a Web site earlier this month by David Hackworth, a journalist and retired colonel. A U.S. official confirmed that the contents of the leaked audit cited by Hackworth were accurate. . .

“One of the main benefactors of the Iraq funds was the Texas-based firm Halliburton, which was paid more than $1 billion out of those funds to bring in fuel for Iraqi civilians.

“The monitoring board said despite repeated requests it had not been given access to U.S. audits of contracts held by Halliburton, which was once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, and other firms that used the development funds.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5763483/

It wasn’t just the $8.8 billions in crisp Dollar bills airlifted into Baghdad airport that went missing:

“WASHINGTON – The Pentagon has lost track of 30% of the weapons transferred to Iraq from the United States, according to a government report newly published in the country.

“The Washington Post reported Monday morning that about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi forces in 2004 and 2005 were not accounted for, according to the report released by the Government Accountability Office.”
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3434115,00.html

But what’s new?

“The Department of Defense, already infamous for spending $640 for a toilet seat, once again finds itself under intense scrutiny, only this time because it couldn’t account for more than a trillion dollars in financial transactions, not to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes. . .

“Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units.”
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/05/18/MN251738.DTL

More on Iraq and multinationals – try this about Blackwater:
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6254508&page=1

Oh I know all about Blackwater, Bob.

Yes, because the small to medium reduction in domestic quality of living is far more important than the lives of the /at least/ 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians in this war.

I’m not actually surprised someone would jump on this.. but given by visceral animosity towards Tony Blair and opposition to the war – I don’t have to justify whether I opposed the war strongly enough or whether I cared enough.

The point is – TB has gone. GB has gone. Goeff Hoon has gone. I’m not supporting David Miliband for this exact reason. But to think this is the biggest issue right now is misplaced. If we’re talking right now – Al Qaeda is killing more people in Iraq now than the US / UK are.

Precisely. You don’t get to commit mass murder and walk away with it when other politicians have their careers destroyed for sleeping with rent boys. It’s the UK’s greatest crime in living memory.

This is an interesting point. I wonder if there is a corollary to Parkinson’s Law of Triviality.

More trivial perspectives on the Iraq war:

According to GB, the fiscal cost to Britain of engaging in the Iraq war was £8 billions.

Think what that could have done to boost manufacturing or the scale of training for vocational and trades skills.

Of course, the downside is that Blair probably wouldn’t have had all those lucrative lecture tours in America after he stepped down as PM. The tours and consultancies reportedly put £12 millions in his bank accounts. Oh, I almost forgot, and earned him that Freedom Medal.

Dr Brian Jones quietly blew up the credibility of Blair’s signed claims in the government’s dossier on Iraq’s WMD, published at a special session of Parliament on 24 September 2002.

In the Ministry of Defence, a branch of the Defence Intelligence Service was tasked to monitor and assess incoming intelligence on WMD. At the time of the Iraq invasion, Dr Brian Jones was head of this branch. A report in The London Times on 4 February 2004 relates to the doubts he had about the claims made in the government’s dossier:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1011171.ece

This letter of 8 July 2003 from Dr Jones to the Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence was submitted to the Hutton inquiry:
http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/mod/mod_4_0011.pdf

The letter includes this passage:

“Your records will show that as [blanked out] and probably the most senior and experienced intelligence community official working on ‘WMD,’ I was so concerned about the manner in which intelligence assessment for which I had some responsibility were being presented in the dossier of 24 September 2002, that I was moved to write formally to your predecessor, Tony Crag, recording and explaining my reservations.”

In the discrete language of the civil service, Dr Jones disowned responsibility for the claims made in the government’s dossier.

“Labour leadership election should be a referendum on the Iraq war. We face bigger challenges in the form of devastating front-line cuts.”

But labour isn’t going to be able to effectively challenge these until it faces up to Iraq, and notes that it started losing its support as a result of this factor more than any other.

@24: “Oh I know all about Blackwater, Bob.”

Please note that @22 and @23, I’m quoting mainstream American and Israeli media, not hairy radical stuff. The missing billions of US Dollars and the weaponry by the US Department of Defense is an absolute outrage by any normal standard of values.

Nifty move of Blackwater to change its name:

“What’s in a name? Blackwater Worldwide changes name to Xe”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/deadlineusa/2009/feb/13/blackwater-corporate-name-changes

@28: “But labour isn’t going to be able to effectively challenge these until it faces up to Iraq, and notes that it started losing its support as a result of this factor more than any other.”

IMO it’s not just a matter of the Labour Party owning up to Iraq. It has to come clean about how it came to elect someone like Blair as its leader in the first place.

I couldn’t stomach Blair from the beginning. He always seemed a complete phoney to me and the later news about the 22-page letter to Michael Foot in 1982 only confirmed that:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5081798.stm

The really sad part is that the first signs of Blair’s talent for spinning tales were there in the public domain before he was elected PM in 1997:

“The first sound of bats flapping in his belfry was heard even before the election, in December 1996, when he told Des O’Connor that as a 14-year-old he had run away to Newcastle airport and boarded a plane for the Bahamas: ‘I snuck onto the plane, and we were literally about to take off when the stewardess came up to me…’ Quite how he managed this without a boarding card or passport was not explained. It certainly came as a surprise to his father (‘The Bahamas? Who said that? Tony? Never’), and an even greater surprise to staff at the airport, who pointed out that there has never been a flight from Newcastle to the Bahamas.

“A couple of years later, he told an interviewer that his ‘teenage hero’ was the footballer Jackie Milburn, whom he would watch from the seats behind the goal at St James’s Park. In fact, Milburn played his last game for Newcastle United when Blair was just four years old, and there were no seats behind the goal at the time.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,230340,00.html

“The Prime Minister was at it again last week [in November 1999] when he told listeners of the rock station Heart FM that his favourite tune was ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ by U2; when he appeared on ‘Desert Island Discs’, it was Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ and Francisco Tarrega’s ‘Recuerdos de la Alhambra’.”
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmhansrd/vo991117/debtext/91117-02.htm

Eliza Manningham-Buller has merely admitted the main reason why the left opposed the war in Iraq.

I suspect most people’s opposition sprang from a concern for Iraqis. This, however, is a neat of example of just how disasterous the war has been. Even if we disregarded humanitarianism, it’s been a tactical catastrophe to make a realist retch.

it’s been a tactical catastrophe to make a realist retch.

Well, quite. I don’t think many people were overly concerned that the invasion would increase domestic terrorism, although it certainly didn’t help. The irony is that the war was explicitly and intentionally sold as an absolute necessity in order to prevent terrorism* and, well, no need to rub it in, I suppose.

Of course, if invading and occupying Iraq had been the right thing to do, the risk of increased terrorism wouldn’t have invalidated it. It’s the fact that invading Iraq was so transparently insane that just compounds the irony.

The most pressing reasons to oppose the war were that a) a cursory glance would’ve shown that we were looking at Vietnam 2 and b) because of all the half-truths, deceptions, propaganda wheezes and ludicrous dossiers. If it was such a good idea in the first place, we wouldn’t have needed to be intimidated into going along with it with such a towering pile of bullshit.

*Sorry to harp on, but I feel this needs to be repeated every time Iraq comes up – the stated justification for war at the time was that the United States of America had to invade Iraq in self-defence. That’s why the word pre-emptive was bandied about with such enthusiasm in 2003.

That’s why the hilarious cavalcade of anthrax-stuffed model planes, aluminium tubes and smoking guns coming in the form of mushroom clouds were necessary – because practically anybody who could crack open an atlas and count could tell that the casus belli was a comedy parade of slapstick state misdirection. The world’s only superpower, with its megabillion defence budget, forced to invade a massive oil field to ward off agression!

People believed this stuff back then, you know. That’s how utterly mental the debate was. There are plenty who would still defend it today.

@32: “*Sorry to harp on, but I feel this needs to be repeated every time Iraq comes up – the stated justification for war at the time was that the United States of America had to invade Iraq in self-defence.”

It wasn’t just America supposedly at risk. The British government’s own dossier on Iraq’s WMD, published for a special session of Parliament on 24 September 2002 and with a forward signed by Blair, claimed no less than four times that such weapons could be used within 45 minutes of a command by Saddam Hussein:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/middle_east/02/uk_dossier_on_iraq/pdf/iraqdossier.pdf

After the invasion of Iraq, launched on 20 March 2003, no WMD weapons were found.

“The threat allegedly posed by Saddam’s WMD was the prime reason cited by the British government for going to war. But not a single item of banned weaponry has been found in the 11 months that have followed the declared end of hostilities.”
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0305-01.htm

“A prominent Israeli MP said yesterday that his country’s intelligence services knew claims that Saddam Hussein was capable of swiftly launching weapons of mass destruction were wrong but withheld the information from Washington.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/feb/04/iraq.israel

So it wasn’t for the oil, that has now has been handed over to US and UK
oil companies.
Or the arrest of trades unionists who opposed the privatisation.
Or the massive rebuilding contracts handed over to US and UK companies.
Blimey that is a relief

Bob B:

Might want to fact check yourself. That Jackie Milburn story about Blair is an urban myth. And you know what they say about people who believe any old rubbish that just happens to fit their preconceptions…

From two sources not known for being particularly Blairite – Auntie and Indie:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7749778.stm

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/pandora/the-shocking-truth-blair-did-not-lie-about-jackie-milburn-495001.html

One of the most damaging criticisms levelled at Tony Blair is that he lied about childhood memories of Newcastle United in order to increase his share of the working- class vote.

Concludes Oborne: “There is abundant evidence that Blair is a liar, but on this occasion he is completely in the clear, and can be exonerated.”