QOTD

General Lord Guthrie, on Gordon Brown's admission that his evidence to Chilcot was "inaccurate":

“What I said was absolutely right and what he said was wrong. I am delighted that the Prime Minister has made this statement and admitted what I said was right and those who attacked me were wrong, intemperate and cheap. It does highlight the great difficulties defence had when other departments of state were being showered with money. Undoubtedly the underfunding caused huge problems in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Translation: "huge problems" = "avoidable deaths".

Mr Brown wrote to Sir John yesterday, saying that he wished to provide the inquiry with “further detail” about defence spending. The letter did not include any apology or regret for the evidence he gave this month.

Of course.

(Source)

It Wasnae Me, Part 2

The military have been quick to react:

Former commanders accused Gordon Brown of deliberately misleading the Iraq inquiry after he blamed the military for failing properly to equip the Armed Forces for war.

Admiral Lord Boyce, the Chief of the Defence Staff up to the start of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, disagreed. “He’s dissembling, he’s being disingenuous. It’s just not the case that the Ministry of Defence was given everything it needed,” he said.

Colonel Stuart Tootal, former commander of 3rd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, said: “I am quite staggered by the lack of any sense of responsibility. He was the man with the purse strings.”

And the response of No. 10?

A No10 spokesman said: "The Prime Minister could not have been clearer in responses to repeated questions about military funding. Every request that the military commanders made to us for equipment was answered. No request was ever turned down."

Knowing the way these people work, there is a probably a sense in which that is strictly true - in that it could not be proved completely false, and therefore allows some room for spin and wriggle. Every request will have been answered - in one way or another. And no request will ever have been turned down - although that allows for a multitude of other responses, some of which could be completely inadequate from a military point of view.

The Prime Minister repeatedly expressed sorrow for the British and Iraqi deaths. He told the inquiry: “I think this is the gravest decision to go to war. It was the right decision and it was for the right reasons.”

Crocodile tears. And catch that heavyweight Brown bluster: not "I believe it was the right decision", or even The People's Tony's "I accept that people don't agree, but this was the way I saw things at the time".

It. Was. The. Right. Decision.

Agree with me or fuck off.

It Wasnae Me ...

A big boy did it and ran away (again).

Gordon Brown at the Chilcot Enquiry - I knew nothing.

• Mr Brown said that he had been unaware of key questions surrounding the legality of the invasion, the intelligence used to justify the war publicly and Mr Blair’s secret “pledge” to join the United States in military action.
• ... the Prime Minister admitted he had been unaware of a number of controversial issues.
• Mr Brown acknowledged that he had not been present at a number of key meetings held by Mr Blair in the build-up to the invasion in March 2003.
• He said he did not see a Cabinet Office “options paper” in March 2002 which included the possibility of invading Iraq. The paper was prepared ahead of Mr Blair’s meeting at President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas.
• Mr Brown said he was also unaware of a series of highly confidential letters from Mr Blair to President Bush in which the Prime Minister is said to have “pledged” that Britain would join in the military action.
• Mr Brown also did not know that of Lord Goldsmith’s late change of view on the legality of the war. The Attorney-General had said in early 2003 that the invasion would be unlawful but told the Cabinet just days before the war that it would be legal.
• He was also unaware of doubts about evidence obtained by MI6 that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), including concerns from his Cabinet colleague Robin Cook, who was the only minister to resign over the war.
  
• “I do not recall a conversation with Robin about the intelligence. He may have mentioned that at the Cabinet, I cannot recall.”

For the second most powerful man in Britian at the time, he didn't know very much, did he? Good God, I knew most of that, just by listening to Radio Sodding Four in the mornings.

The professionals seem to take issue with his claim to the Enquiry that "at every point we were asked to provide money and the resources for new equipment or for improving equipment, we made that money available”:

• Major-General Patrick Cordingley, who commanded 7th Armoured Brigade in the Gulf War and retired from the Army in 2000, said: “I think it is difficult to see how one’s conscience can be clear when it’s very obvious that the Armed Forces have been underfunded for many years. Despite enough money being available for operational requirements, it never overcame the capability gap that had grown up over the years.”
• Another senior defence source said: “If it was possible for us to do whatever we wanted to do then why has almost every other single witness to the inquiry said that the operation was undermanned and under-resourced?”
• General Lord Walker of Aldringham, the head of the Armed Forces at the time, had told the inquiry that senior commanders threatened to resign if cuts went much further.

Well, one of them is lying. And I know who my money is on.