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• Wednesday, December 3, 2008 05:26 PM

  The failure of intelligence...

  ... was in the Oval Office.

  Here is an extract from the resignation speech of British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook Tuesday 18th March 2003:

  I hope that Saddam, even now, will quit Baghdad and avert war, but it is false to argue that only those who support war support our troops.

  It is entirely legitimate to support our troops while seeking an alternative to the conflict that will put those troops at risk...

  Ironically, it is only because Iraq's military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam's forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days.

  We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.

  Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

  It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories.

  Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?

  What intelligence did Mr. Cook receive that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair did not receive? Obviously none, but the difference was that there was a lot more intelligence in Cook's thinking processes.

  Unfortunately he died of a heart attack soon afterwards.

  —Amerigo Read Amerigo's other letters
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