Senior figures in the British intelligence community and across Whitehall briefed the former international development secretary Clare Short that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had made a secret agreement last summer with US President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in February or March, she claimed yesterday.
In damning evidence to the House of Commons foreign affairs select committee, Short refused to identify the three figures, but she cited their authority for making her claim that Blair had actively deceived the Cabinet and the country in persuading them of the need to go to war.
Short told the first day of the committee's inquiry into the events leading up to the Iraq conflict that Blair had "used a series of half-truths, exaggerations, reassurances that were not the case to get us into conflict by the spring."
She claimed Blair told Bush that "we will be with you" without laying down conditions to temper US ambitions.
She also claimed that the intelligence and diplomatic community had privately opposed the war. This is the first time she has alleged that intelligence figures had serious doubts about the need for early military action.
Justifying her charge of deception, she said: "Three extremely senior people in the Whitehall system said to me very clearly and specifically that the target date was mid-February."
She went on: "I believe that the prime minister must have concluded that it was honorable and desirable to back the US in going for military action in Iraq and therefore it was honorable for him to persuade us through various ruses and ways to get us there -- so for him I think it was an honorable deception."
No. 10 last night denied Short's charge and said Blair had worked as hard as possible to secure support for a second UN resolution that may have persuaded former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to cooperate.
In the same evidence session Cook exonerated Blair of the charge of deliberately misleading the country, but asserted that intelligence material was chosen selectively to fit a predetermined policy.
He said his own personal briefing by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) confirmed him in his belief that Iraq did not have weaponized chemicals, let alone weapons capable of being fired within 45 minutes, a claim made in the main intelligence document published last September.
"I think it would be fair to say there was a selection of evidence to support a conclusion," he said. "I fear we got into a position in which the intelligence was not being used to inform and shape policy, but to shape policy that was already settled."
He asserted that No 10 had "a burning fixation" with weapons of mass destruction that led Blair to reject Cook's view that the policy of containment was working.
Both former ministers confirmed a previous Guardian story that Cabinet ministers had been given private intelligence briefings by SIS, but insisted the briefings did not indicate that the world had to act immediately to stem an imminent Iraqi threat. At best, Short said, Iraq had scientists working to try to develop biological and chemical weapons, but it was wrong to suggest that meant there were "weaponized" materials.
Short also claimed there was a shocking collapse in proper government procedure, with a small unelected entourage in Downing Street making the decisions without minutes, proper options papers or any written material. She said the Cabinet was never shown military options papers.
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