Iraq war inquiry: Alastair Campbell latest
Updated on 12 January 2010
As today's session at the Iraq inquiry breaks for lunch, we digest Alastair Campbell's revelation that it was he who wrote the prime minister's controversial foreword to a key intelligence assessment in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Giving evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, Alastair Campbell, said that Blair had given him a "verbal draft" of what he wanted to say and Campbell had gone away and written it into the September dossier of 2002 - including the line:
"I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt ... that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme."
Campbell confirmed that he had written the foreword from a "verbal draft" given to him by Tony Blair. "Yes, it was often the case that the PM would give me a verbal draft; he would say what he wanted to write; I would go away and write something and show it to people before I brought it back to him. He was very comfortable with that....ultimately he would have signed off the final version."
Campbell told the inquiry that he felt the words "beyond doubt" were reasonable, because it was widely accepted at the time that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
"Would it have been that weakened had those two words not been there? Probably not."
The JIC had made "minor changes" to the foreword, but were otherwise satisfied with it and it was the basis of the prime minister's statement to the House of Commons, he added.
"I don't believe that the dossier in any sense misrepresented the position. I think it was cautious. Everybody involved in it was aware of the unprecedented nature of it and - because of that - took great care in the handling of it."
Campbell had been Blair's director of communications and strategy at Number 10 between 1997 and 2003 and was one of his closest advisers in the run-up to the war. As such, he was involved in the drafting of two key documents published in the months prior to the invasion that sought to justify action against Saddam Hussein.
The 'sexing up' row
The 'September Dossier' of 2002 - full title 'Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government'- included the personal foreword by Tony Blair.
Campbell told the inquiry that the document had been proposed as an exercise in "openness" - to let the public know as much as possible of what the intelligence agencies were saying.
He said he had become involved because the author - Sir John Scarlett (chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee) "needed presentational support". But he denied that presentational staff had changed its message. "At no time did I ever ask him to beef up - over-write - any of the judgements he had."
It also included the memorable statement that the Iraqi Army could deploy WMD "within 45 minutes of a decision to do so" - a claim that would return in May the following year with disastrous consequences.
Subsequent inquiries would question Campbell's controversial role in helping the Joint Intelligence Committee phrase the dossier and indeed the very intelligence upon which it was it was based (there's a helpful Guardian timeline of its evolution here.)
In a live two-way segment into the BBC Radio 4 'Today' programme on 29th May 2003, the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan claimed that "the government probably knew that that 45 minute figure was wrong even before it decided to put it in" and he went on later to accuse Campbell of "sexing up" the dossier.
The furore which followed triggered a series of events - including the apparent suicide of Gilligan's source (the MoD scientist Dr David Kelly) and - after the Hutton Inquiry had concluded that the "sexing up" allegation was groundless - high-profile resignations at senior levels of the BBC.
Pressed on the 45-minute claim by committee members today, Campbell said the original intelligence had been that WMD could be deployed in between 20 and 45 minutes.
"If we had been in the sexing-up game, we would have said 'come on John, can't we go for 20 minutes?' Such a conversation never took place."
Earlier, Campbell had challenged evidence given to the Inquiry by the former British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer. Meyer had said that he had detected a change in Blair's policy on Iraq after his meeting with George Bush at the President's Crawford Ranch in Texas in March 2002 - from seeking disarmament to backing regime change.
Campbell said that "before, during and after" the Crawford summit the prime minister's policy was to pursue the disarmament of Saddam Hussein through the United Nations. "The prime minister was not saying at Crawford 'we now have a policy of regime change'"
He said Meyer had "rather overstated things". He added: I do not accept that there was a fundamental shift of approach by the prime minister." He said that, throughout, the prime minister had shared America's policy, concerns and objective - which was the disarmament of Saddam Hussein.
Asked by Baroness Usha Prashar whether Blair supported American "means to the end", he replied: "Ultimately - when it came to the invasion - clearly he did. But he was trying the whole way through...He believed - and still believes - that you have to try to go down the diplomatic route. But when you are dealing with somebody like Saddam Hussein you have to have the threat of force beside it."
Blair had been hopeful - right up to the House of Commons vote on the war - that things could be resolved peacefully. But be understood that if military action was the only way to achieve disarmament, he would want to persuade Cabinet, Parliament and the country to support that.
"Would he believe that somebody like Saddam Hussein should be got rid of? Yes. Was that the policy he was pursuing the whole way through? No"
The 'Dodgy Dossier'
Downing Street ran into more trouble in February 2003, when Channel 4 News reported allegations that the bulk of a second dossier - 'Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation' but better known before long to many as the 'Dodgy Dossier' - had been plagiarised from a number of articles, including one written by a graduate student.
Embarrassingly the dossier appeared simply to have been 'cut & pasted' in parts, complete with grammatical errors and tweaks allegedly aimed at making the situation sound more sinister than in the original. Campbell was chairman of the Iraq Communications Group which had commissioned it.
The war of words between the BBC and No 10 also gave rise to this in June 2003 remarkable Channel 4 News interview between Campbell and Jon Snow.
