ABSTRACT
On 12 January 2010 the Conclusions of the Committee of Inquiry on Iraq were summarised as follows:
the policy was worked out at the start of August 2002 in discussions between the new Minister of Foreign Affairs and a small group of civil servants. This policy subordinated the question of legitimacy under international law to the policy principles defined by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Insufficient importance was attached to the information provided by the intelligence services (whose assessments of the threat posed by Iraq’s WMD programme were much more equivocal than government ministers were in their communications with Parliament) and the weapons inspection reports. Ministers and departments extracted those statements from the intelligence services’ reports that were consistent with the stance already adopted.
