Straw questions Iraq terror link

Jack Straw has questioned the link between Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq and the terrorist attacks on London in July.

 

The foreign secretary said there was "no guarantee whatsoever" that the UK would not have been a target for terrorists if it had not taken part in the war.

 

In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Straw conceded that some Muslims' perceptions of British foreign policy may have been used as a tool for recruiting people to extremist organisations.

 

He was asked about a letter sent in May last year by top Foreign Office official Michael Jay to Cabinet secretary Sir Andrew Turnbull warning that British foreign policy in the Middle East was "a key driver" for recruitment to extremist Muslim groups.

 

But Straw said he would "wholly refute" the idea that, if this country had not invaded Iraq, it would not have been a terrorist target.

 

"Would we have been safer had we not taken the military action in Iraq?" he asked.

 

"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."

 

Iraqi constitution

 

A nationwide referendum on Iraq's new constitution is due to take place in October in the face of opposition from Sunni Arabs.

 

Prime minister Tony Blair and President Bush have urged Iraqis to unite behind the blueprint.

 

Straw said that wrangling over such arrangements was not unusual.

 

"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."

 

Straw insisted on the importance of the UN's role in the process, despite international disagreement over military action.

 

"Every right-thinking person across the world and all responsible members of the United Nations take the view that it's in their interests and in the interests of international peace and security to have a constitutional process that produces a stable, peaceful and democratic Iraq," he said.

 

"It is a UN-backed, and in many ways led, process, not a unilateral US-UK process."

 

Asked whether the policy followed after the invasion had produced the right kind of atmosphere for negotiating a constitution, he admitted that some mistakes had been made.

 

"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," he said.

 

He added that decisions taken were "overwhelmingly more right than wrong" but admitted that the extent of violence in Iraq was not entirely due to to the way in which the country was governed under Saddam.