Straw plays down link between Iraq war and terror
The foreign secretary has denied that British involvement in the war in Iraq made the UK a target for extremists.
Jack Straw said that the UK was a target long before the war in Iraq began.
His comments come after the leaking of a letter written a year ago by Foreign Office permanent secretary Michael Jay. In that letter, Mr Jay said the war was a ‘key driver’ of extremism and membership of extreme organisations in the UK.
“It was written 15 months ago and what is in this letter is not different from what I had said at the time,” Mr Straw told Today.
He said violent extremists used Iraq as an excuse for their actions.
And he said there was “no guarantee whatsoever” the UK would have been safer had the country not joined the war against Iraq – as Britain was a target for extremist terrorism “well before” the Iraqi war.
Mr Straw added: “The point that both [Defence Secretary] John Reid and I wholly refute is this suggestion that if we had not invaded Iraq then we would somehow have been immune from the extremist terrorism we have seen. I am sorry but that is not the case.”
The foreign secretary said that he did not regret the British involvement in the war. He said that on the basis of the “only information that was available” at the beginning of March 2003, the government made the “right decision”.
Since the London bombings on July 7th, the government has been at pains to repeat that al-Qaida was carrying out terror attacks several years before the war in Iraq, of which 9/11 was the most destructive.
But opposition parties have queried this flat denial of any link between the Iraq war and the terror attacks on London.
Shadow foreign secretary Liam Fox told BBC News the government’s handling of the problem had been “inept from start to finish”.
“What I find surprising is that the government denies there is any link when most people, with common sense, would say there is some link that makes it easier to recruit extremists from the Muslim community,” he said.
