JAMES KIRKUP
Source
JACK Straw, the Foreign Secretary, yesterday gave more ground to critics who claim the invasion of Iraq contributed to the terrorist attacks on London.
Mr Straw told the BBC that he had personally endorsed an internal memo from Britain's top diplomat early last year that said involvement in the war and backing for United States foreign policy contributed to extremists' ability to recruit British-born Muslims.
Mr Straw said he "agreed" the letter and backed the assessment of Sir Michael Jay, the permanent secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
"It's certainly the case that this perception of the negative effects on Muslims has created a situation which is used then by extremists to try and recruit to extremist organisations," Mr Straw said. "If you look at any website of any extremist organisation, you can see the way they use Iraq in this way."
But the minister insisted that analysis did not mean he accepted the Iraq war had caused the London attacks. The risk of such terrorism pre-dated the war's start in 2003, and had not been significantly raised as a consequence, Mr Straw insisted. "Would we have been safer had we not taken the military action in Iraq? Now, no-one can say for certain.
"But it is my judgment that, because we were in any event a target - and so was the rest of the world for this extremist terrorism well before Iraq - that there is no guarantee whatsoever that we would have been safer had we not taken military action in Iraq".
While the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and John Reid, the Defence Secretary, have taken the public stance that there is no link between Iraq and terrorism, Mr Straw has taken a more equivocal position on the war in general.
Yesterday, the Foreign Secretary moved a little closer to admitting that the UK and US had made mistakes in their handling of the war and its violent aftermath.
"We didn't get everything right, and I don't think anybody could have got everything right in the circumstances immediately after the military action, and one of the things we didn't predict was the speed with which the Saddam regime would collapse," Mr Straw said. Still, he insisted that decisions taken by the allied planners and strategists were "overwhelmingly more right than wrong".
Mr Straw also tried to put a brave face on the troubled process of writing and endorsing a new Iraqi constitution.
"Constitutional processes, trying to bring these together, always produce arguments," he said.
"If you certainly look at the history of the United States, if you look indeed across the water into Northern Ireland, where we are, in a sense, involved in a constitutional process, you see where you have people, opposed communities, trying to come together, the process is difficult."
