UK was ‘dragged’ into Iraq war, says former top MI6 official
rawstory.com
In a revealing speech delivered this weekend, the former deputy director of Britain’s secret intelligence service said the Iraq war “was always against” the “better judgment” of the agency.
Nigel Inkster was deputy director of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, during Tony Blair’s Administration. According to an article in the Telegraph Sunday, Inkster was being groomed to succeed Sir Richard Dearlove, then MI6 chief, but may have been passed over because of his vitriolic opinions about Iraq.
In a speech at the Institute for Public Policy Research, Inkster blamed the Foreign Office — the UK equivalent of the State Department — for allowing his country to get “dragged into” a war with which intelligence officials found dubious at best.
“The Foreign Office no longer does foreign policy,” Inkster said, according to a report. “It acts as a platform for a multiplicity of UK departments and the lack of a clearly articulated sense of our strategic location in the world explains how we got dragged into a war with Iraq which was always against our better judgment.”
Inkster also rebuked the current joint US-British mission in Afghanistan, saying the UK is trying to manage a plan “ludicrously at variants with the resources allocated to that task.” Both Britain and the US have struggled in their fight with Taliban militants, who have taken shelter along the Pakistan border. Opium production has also bloomed.
The former MI6 official said the lack of coherent foreign policy strategy was hurting policy objectives abroad.
The globe, he said, is going from “being policed by America to be policed by nobody” and that instability across the globe could mean “populations were likely to fall back on the ’snake oil and voodoo’ of religious and nationalistic movements.”
He also bemoaned Britain’s response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, saying his country was caught “completely flat footed” and employed a strategy “amount[ing] to little more than moral indignation.”
“His views on Iraq, expressed for the first time in public, may also explain why he was passed over as the head of MI6 in favour of Sir John Scarlett, who took responsibility for the dossier during the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly,” the Telegraph wrote.
Reservations about intelligence surrounding the Iraq war came out in the now-famous “Downing Street Minutes,” a 2002 account of a meeting between Bush and Blair administration officials in which Dearlove was quoted as saying that intelligence was being “fixed” around a policy of attack. |
