Gordon Brown, former British Prime Minister (2007- 2010), who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Government of Tony Blair (1997 – 2007) that made the fateful decision to join the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, has revealed that the US knew all along that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) but did not share this information with the UK at the time.
In 2003, the US invaded Iraq because it said that Saddam Hussein had developed and possessed chemical, biological and nuclear WMD (which however were never found) and therefore presented a threat to his neighbors and to the world community.
Ex-PM Gordon Brown claims in book My Life, Our Times UK "misled" by US over existence of WMDs in "rush to war" with Saddam Hussein in Iraq pic.twitter.com/fTGmuCCZwk
— The Daily WhatXit (@TheDailyWhatxit) 5 ноября 2017 г.
In his new memoir My Life, Our Times, which was released this week, the British politician, however, says that back than the US Defense Department was aware that Iraq was unable to develop such deadly arms due to the lack of the "precursors for sustained nerve-agent production" and that the US intelligence "could not identify any Iraqi sites producing the final chemical agent."
It also doubted that Baghdad was able to produce long-range missiles to target countries of the coalition. And all the US calculations "relied heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence."
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Gordon Brown refers to a secret US intelligence report from September 2002, which was commissioned by the then US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. However he maintains that the papers, which were leaked last year, have been never shared with the UK at that time and that he himself became aware of them only after leaving the office.
"It is astonishing that none of us in the British government ever saw this American report," he writes. "It is now clear how forcibly this report challenged the official view."
With all the above in mind, the former prime minister concludes that if he is "right that somewhere within the American system the truth about Iraq’s lack of weapons was known, then we were not just misinformed but misled on the critical issue of WMDs."
"Given that Iraq had no usable chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that it could deploy and was not about to attack the coalition, then two tests of a just war were not met: war could not be justified as a last resort and invasion cannot now be seen as a proportionate response," he states.
