Baroness Manningham-Buller added that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein had caused a "long-term major and strategic problem" for Britain by allowing al-Qaeda time to build a stronghold in Afghanistan unnopposed.
She told the inquiry: "Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people - not a whole generation, a few among a generation - who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam...
| The alternative was that Saddam Hussein had regained control over Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, with the goal of controlling the majority of the world's oil production. And he was sponsoring and training a variety of terror groups, including Al Qaeda, so that had we not conquered Iraq in 2003, we would now be looking at Saddam Hussein threatening to choke off oil to Europe and Asia to reward and punish, while loosing or tightening his hold on terror groups with plausible deniability. Is that a preferable scenario, Baroness Manningham-Buller? |
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