At last, Jack Straw's role in making the case for the Iraq War is exposed

Tony Blair’s government had a policy of attacking journalists ('rapid rebuttal’) who questioned its Iraq policy, especially in regards to weapons of mass destruction

The Chilcot report sets out Jack Straw's involvement in 'hardening up' a document setting out the threat posed by Iraq under Saddam Hussein (AFP)

In his evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Jack Straw presented a self-portrait of himself as a source of caution and moderation at a tempestuous time, seeking to avoid over-egging the case for war, especially when it came to WMD and the “dodgy dossier”.

In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the then Foreign Secretary was facing a “moral as well as political dilemma”. The support he gave to military action was “the most difficult decision” he had ever taken. It was an “error”, he realised, not to be more precise about the claims made in the dossier used to justify the invasion and that has “haunted” him ever since. Regime change, he had insisted, was never the agenda.

The Chilcot report has presented a very different picture. Straw had played a key role in making Iraq a target.

Before the dossier was produced, the threat from Iraq was viewed as less serious than that of other key countries of concern – Iran, Libya and North Korea. Tony Blair’s government commissioned an intelligence paper on the WMD threat from “rogue states”. Mr Straw’s reaction, when it came across his desk, was “good, but should not Iraq be the first and also have more text? The paper has to show why this is an exceptional threat from Iraq. It does not quite do this yet.”

On 18 March, the report noted, Straw decided that a paper on Iraq should be issued without mentioning other countries of concern. However, four days later, “Straw was advised that the evidence would not convince public opinion that there was an imminent threat from Iraq. Publication was postponed and the operation began on a dossier which will convince public opinion that military action was necessary.”

This is not the first time that evidence has emerged of Straw’s culpability. During the Hutton inquiry in 2004, an email was unearthed written by Straw’s then private secretary which described the then Foreign Secretary’s role in “hardening up” the dossier with a “killer paragraph”.

A memorandum copied to Alastair Campbell and John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which produced the dossier, stated, “The Foreign Secretary has now had a chance to go through the draft dossier. He has endorsed the comments I made earlier on...” The points endorsed by Mr Straw included: “The first bullet of para 6 the importance of weapons of mass destruction should be strengthened to explain the centrality of WMD to Saddam Hussein's role – the projection of power etc.... Crucially the section should explain the role of the WMD in the political mythology which has sustained the regime.”

When The Independent found and published this memorandum at the time of the Hutton inquiry, Mr Straw’s reaction was to go on the attack, disputing that this showed he was trying to harden up the WMD “evidence” or that this added to the possibility of war. Mr Blair’s government had a policy of attacking journalists – “rapid rebuttal” – who questioned its Iraq policy, especially in regards to weapons of mass destruction.

We had experience of this before the war began. In September 2002, I was among a small group of journalists who downloaded from the internet, at the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, the dossier presented by Downing Street on the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s WMD arsenal, essentially the justification for war.

We had arranged with the office of Tariq Aziz, the Deputy Prime Minister and Saddam’s confidant, to visit some of the sites supposedly used by the regime to manufacture chemical and biological weapons mentioned in the dossier. We chose the sites to visit and we were taken there by the Iraqi authorities within two hours of the dossier being produced. In our reports we said that we had seen nothing overtly suspicious during our visit, stressing the caveat, however, that we did not have scientific expertise.

That, however, was enough for Downing Street spin doctors to accuse us journalists of being “naïve dupes” who had fallen for regime’s guiles, indeed our newspapers, they charged, were irresponsible for printing such propaganda.

One of the sites we visited was al-Qa’qa, a military complex 30 miles south of Baghdad. According to the Number 10 dossier, al-Qa’qa had been dismantled by UN inspectors after the 1991 Gulf War, but had since been rebuilt and was producing phosgene, a precursor for nerve agents. We also went to Amariyah Sera vaccine plant at Abu Ghraib, a suburb of Baghdad, which had – again, according to the dossier – restarted its use of “storing biological agents, seed stocks and conducting biological warfare associated genetic research” which it had been doing before the first war.

Both the sites were inspected soon afterwards by the UN teams which were in Iraq at the time. They found no presence of WMD. They were inspected again by the Iraq Survey Group set up by the US and Britain after the invasion. They also failed to find any WMD, as was the case, of course, with every other site in the dossier.