MI5 chief: Iraq war increased terror threat to the UK

Eliza Manningham-Buller, director general of the Security Service (MI5) at the time of the Iraq war has told the Chilcot inquiry that Britain’s support for military action increased the terrorist threat at home.

She told the inquiry into the war that the threat to Britain from Saddam Hussein before 2003 was low.

And she said he was not thought to have been linked to terrorists planning to attack the west: “"It certainly wasn't of concern in either the short term or the medium term to me or my colleagues."

Instead, according to Ms Manningham-Buller, Britain’s involvement to the war increased the threat to the UK by radicalizing young British Muslims, who saw the war as part of an attack on Islam.

She said: “"Arguably, we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad,”

She also said that the focus on Iraq meant that the UK and US lost focus on operations in Afghanistan.

See the Guardian’s live blog of Ms Manningham-Buller’s evidence today.

To my mind this last point is one of the main arguments against the whole Iraq adventure.

Even before the war began, and certainly before it emerged that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, it was obvious that invading Iraq was going to damage attempts Islamist terrorism.

For a short while after 9/11 there was and international consensus on taking action against Al Qaeda.

The French press was saying “We are all Americans now,” the Russians and Chinese were willing to co-operate, even Iran was making conciliatory noises to the west about helping out.

And that opportunity was totally lost; first with the ‘axis of evil’ speech, then with the angry denunciations of ‘old Europe’, and accusations of being collaborators.

So now we have troops in Iraq, which is hardly a stable democracy, UK troops are being killed seemingly every week in Afghanistan, UK muslims have been radicalized and Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are free to organize in Yemen, Pakistan or Sudan.

It is bad enough that hundreds of western troops, and uncounted thousands of Iraqis died in an ill-conceived war; but perhaps the real tragedy is that more will die in terrorist attacks when there was, perhaps, an opportunity for international action that was totally lost.