Jack Straw: I could have stopped Iraq war (From Blackburn Citizen)

Jack Straw: I could have stopped Iraq war

2:29pm Thursday 21st January 2010

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More stories about: Jack Straw, Jack Straw and the Iraq war

BLACKBURN MP Jack Straw said he could have stopped Britain joining the invasion of Iraq.

But Mr Straw said his decision to back military action in March 2003 was ‘the most difficult I have ever faced in my life’.

The Justice Secretary said he had never ‘backed away’ from the choice that he made then and fully accepted the responsibilities that flowed from it.

In a lengthy submission to the official Iraq Inquiry this afternoon, the former foreign secretary acknowledged that if he had refused to support it, Mr Blair would have been un-able to carry the Government or Parliament.

He said the question of whether to back military action in support of the US had posed a ‘moral as well as political dilemma’ which was ‘profoundly difficult’.

“I was fully aware that my support for military action was critical,” Mr Straw said.

“If I had refused that, the UK's participation in the military action would not in practice have been possible.

“There almost certainly would have been no majority in either Cabinet or in the Commons.”

Mr Straw acknowledged that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction – the justification for the invasion – had ‘undermined trust’ but insisted that the decision to go to war was taken on the basis of the best available evidence.

He said: “I believed at the time, and still believe, that we made the best judgments we could have done in the circumstances.

"We did so assiduously, and on the best evidence we had available at the time.”

Mr Straw admitted it had been an ‘error’ not to make clear in the Government's Iraq weapons dossier that the claim that Saddam had WMD which could be launched in 45 minutes did not refer to missiles.

“Plainly that reference should have been much more precise because it only ever referred in the intelligence to battlefield weapons,” he said.

“That was an error and it is an error that has haunted us ever since.”

Mr Straw insisted that Britain would not have gone to war if the weapons inspectors had found that Saddam was complying with the terms of a UN resolution.

He said: “That would have been the end of it from our point of view.

“I don't know what the United States would have done.

"But there would have been no case whatever for us taking part in any military action.”

Mr Straw added: “I certainly didn't want war.”

On the then-top UN weapons inspector, Dr Hans Blix, Mr Straw said: “There are some of those who were involved who sought to give an account of what they were saying at the time without gloss.

“There were others who have sought to give an account of what they thought they were saying at the time with gloss.

"And I think the jury is out on which camp Dr Blix is in.”

The Chilcot Inquiry

THE CHILCOT inquiry is looking at all aspects of the Iraq war, with witnesses including senior government figures and ex-military commanders.

Events from 2001 to 2009, including the build-up to war, preparation of troops and post-war planning, are all coming under the microscope.

Sir John Chilcot will be free to apportion blame in his report, to be published towards the end of this year or early in 2011, and a key issue will be whether or not the 2003 invasion was legal.

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