No 10 Lobby Briefing
Asked for Downing Street's view on the IISS report, the PMOS said that the report really spoke for itself. This was clearly a very serious piece of work. As we had said over the weekend, it had been produced without any access to intelligence material. People should read it carefully and digest exactly what it was saying. It painted a powerful picture of a highly unstable regime with access to biological and chemical weapons. On the nuclear side, it underlined the point made by Jacque Baute of the International Atomic Energy Agency that, since putting an end to weapons inspection in 1998, Iraq had had the opportunity to reconstitute elements of its nuclear weapons programme and to keep it secret. It also portrayed very clearly and succinctly precisely how Saddam had played games with the UN weapons inspectors and the international community during the time they had been inside Iraq. The Government's own evidence dossier was due be published soon, and we also believed it was important to go back through some of the history in order to remind people what we were dealing with and precisely why we were in the position we were in today. Asked if he was implying that the Government's dossier would go further than the IISS report, the PMOS pointed out that the former would contain intelligence material which the latter was obviously unable to do, although discussions were still ongoing as to what we would and would not be able to include. Clearly, the use of intelligence material was a serious matter since we did not want to jeopardise our sources. It was also worth pointing out that the dossier, by definition, was going to be incomplete given we had had no access to Iraq for four years. As Mr Baute had pointed out on the radio last week, four years was a long time for there to be no inspections to evaluate Iraq's nuclear capability, for example. Clearly, Saddam could have done a lot within that timescale and the amount of illegal funds he was now getting hold of would be helping him.
