First the decision, then the dossier

A former "new" labour minister takes Blair to task.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1030406,00.html

When I was a Home Office minister, troops were sent into Heathrow in response to intelligence information. Even then, the spring of this year, some of the media and the public simply presumed this was a stunt designed to create a war atmosphere. It was not, although we shall never know whether the preventive military action was successful or the intelligence flawed.

After the Hutton inquiry, how will the public respond the next time a government defends its actions, or new piece of anti-terrorist legislation, by reference to an intelligence assessment?

For the next 20 years or more we will live with the threat of terrorism on a scale we have not previously imagined. Already British citizens have allegedly been involved in suicide bombings abroad; we can't assume we won't see them at home. Nothing we have done in Iraq has made us any safer.

What Hutton has exposed is that neither the dossier nor the intelligence assessment was designed to inform government decisions on Iraq. The real assessment had already been made by the government, and the intelligence community was asked to provide evidence to support it. The government's real mistake was to persuade the public, media, parliament (and perhaps even itself) that the intelligence would support decisions that had already been taken. Instead of setting out the real reasons for these decisions, the government wanted us to believe it all stemmed from the intelligence assessment. Of course it didn't, and arguably it never could have done. Even if Saddam had a far more extensive weapons programme, our intelligence would still be hedged with "ifs" and "buts". Intelligence is like that: unreliable, capable of many interpretations and a matter of cautious judgment. It will rarely prove a case. The government's first action in restoring credibility must be to promise that the intelligence services should never be asked to do so again.