'Iraq not a threat before war'

'Iraq not a threat before war'
15/12/2006 21:22 - (SA)

London - Britain's former top Iraq expert at the United Nations said in previously secret testimony that most government officials did not believe Iraq posed a threat in the months leading to the US-led invasion, according to a new report.

Carne Ross, a former first secretary to the British mission at the UN responsible for Iraq policy, told a house of commons committee that he and other analysts believed that Iraq had only a "very limited" ability to mount an attack of any kind, including one using weapons of mass destruction, or WMD.

Ross declined to comment on his testimony on Friday, saying it spoke for itself.

The house of commons foreign affairs committee on Thursday published the testimony, which Ross gave to Lord Butler's 2004 official inquiry into intelligence on Iraq.
Butler didn't fault the government but criticised intelligence officials for relying in part on "seriously flawed" or "unreliable" sources.

The committee published Ross' testimony after assuring him that parliamentary privilege would protect him from prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

Ross served in the British mission at the UN headquarters from 1998 until 2002. Later, he was posted in Kosovo and Afghanistan, but kept in contact with British foreign ministry and defence ministry experts on Iraq and inquired about the shift toward war.

"At no time did HMG (Her Majesty's Government) assess that Iraq's WMD posed a threat to the U.K. or its interests. It was the commonly held view among officials that the threat had been contained," Ross said in the written testimony.

"Iraq's ability to launch a WMD or any form of attack was very limited," he said.

"There were approx 12 or so unaccounted-for Scud missiles; Iraq's air force was depleted to the point of total ineffectiveness; its army was but a pale shadow of its earlier might; there was no evidence of any connection between Iraq and any terrorist organisation that might have planned an attack using Iraqi WMD (I do not recall any occasion when the question of a terrorist connection was even raised in UK/US discussions or UK internal debates)."

During the months leading up to the war, he said, the evidence of the threat posed by Saddam's regime did not change. "What changed was the government's determination to present available evidence in a different light," he testified.