Ex-Official Says Afghan and Iraq Wars Increased Threats to Britain

Published: July 20, 2010

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"Our involvement in Iraq, for want of a better word, radicalized a whole generation of young people — not a whole generation, a few among a generation — who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam," said the former official, Baroness Manningham-Buller.

Lady Manningham-Buller, who led MI5, roughly the British equivalent of the F.B.I., from 2002 to 2007, made her remarks in testimony to a panel investigating the events leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The panel, led by Sir John Chilcot, has heard from a variety of witnesses, including Sir Richard Dearlove, the former leader of MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence agency, and former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The panel is expected to issue a report later this year examining some of the mistakes that were made and making recommendations for future military operations.

Lady Manningham-Buller has said on a number of occasions that Mr. Blair's government failed to heed MI5's warning that attacking Saddam Hussein would make Britain more vulnerable to terrorism. But her remarks to the panel on Tuesday were particularly pointed and critical of the decisions leading to the American-led, British-supported invasion.

Answering questions from the panel, she also said that Iraq had presented little threat to Britain before the invasion, and that there had been no reliable evidence linking the government of Saddam Hussein to the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

"There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection, and that was the judgment, I might say, of the C.I.A.," she said.

"Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11," she added, "and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind."

But, she said, "it was not a judgment that found favor with some parts of the American machine" — namely Donald H. Rumsfeld, the United States secretary of defense at the time.

That "is why Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment," she said.

Lady Manningham-Buller also said that Britain relied on "fragmentary" intelligence before invading Iraq, and that MI5 had not believed that Mr. Hussein was amassing unconventional weapons in Iraq, as the government contended.

The belief that Iraq might use such weapons "wasn't a concern in either the short term or the medium term to my colleagues and myself," she said.

Not only was the invasion unnecessary based on what was known about Iraq, Lady Manningham-Buller said, but it diverted attention from the real threat, Al Qaeda.

"By focusing on Iraq, we ceased to focus on the Al Qaeda threat or we reduced the focus on the Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan," she said. "I think that was a long-term, major and strategic problem."

The invasion led to an "almost overwhelming" increase in homegrown terrorism, she said, so much so that MI5 had to have its budget doubled in the following months. And after the invasion, about 70 to 80 Britons traveled to Iraq to join the insurgency, she said, thus creating a threat where there had been none.

"Arguably, we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad," she said.