Iraq Inquiry - The Plan For Regime Change

By Chris Ames. 

This is pretty clear. Blair knew that he didn’t have anything 100% certain that he could use to convince various people that it was right to go to war and therefore asked for something intelligence-based to this effect. He was told that the best that could be said was that “the body of available reporting was highly damning”. (SIS1 later described how he sent Blair “a stocktake: where are we, and can we have an assessment of what’s the likelihood of the UNMOVIC process producing this kind of evidence?” It appears that it was in this document, rather than a direct conversation, in which SIS1 told Blair that there was no “silver bullet”.)
Blair, who had notoriously asserted that intelligence had “established beyond doubt” that Iraq had WMD, was told by SIS that none of the evidence was conclusive. Did he share this with any of those that he had wanted to convince with the non-existent silver bullets? Apparently not. But two months later he commissioned a document that described the JIC’s “view” of the situation, without the JIC itself producing a new assessment. Read More.