- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 25 November 2009 20.46 GMT
Sir John Chilcot, chair of the Iraq war inquiry. Photograph: David Cheskin/PA
Days before the invasion of Iraq, the British government received intelligence that Saddam Hussein might be unable to use his chemical weapons, the official inquiry into the war was told today. And despite claims at the time by Tony Blair, intelligence about what Saddam was up to in the runup to the war was "patchy".
Questioned by the panel of the Iraq inquiry, Foreign Office officials said they believed Saddam's nuclear programme had been dismantled and they had no evidence of his trying to supply chemical or biological weapons to terrorists.
Sir William Ehrman, the Foreign Office's director of international security at the time, yesterday revealed that ministers were repeatedly warned over the limits of intelligence on Iraq. "We did, I think on 10 March [2003], get a report that chemical weapons might have remained disassembled and Saddam hadn't yet ordered their assembly," he told day two of the inquiry in London. "There was a suggestion that Iraq might lack warheads capable of effective dispersal of agents."
The department's officials told how ministers heard that knowledge of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes was "sporadic" in the years up to the invasion of 19-20 March 2003. In September 2002 the intelligence "remained limited", they heard. Yet Blair that month described Saddam's banned weapons programme as "active, detailed and growing" and said the picture emerging was "detailed and authoritative".
In the government's dossier on Iraqi weapons, published that month, Blair wrote that he believed intelligence assessments had established "beyond doubt" that Saddam was continuing to produce chemical and biological weapons – an assertion repeated up to the invasion.
However, Ehrman said that the intelligence warnings had not made any difference to the case for war. "I don't think it invalidated the point about the programmes he had. It was more about use," he said.
Tim Dowse, then head of counter-proliferation at the Foreign Office, told the inquiry that Iraq was not seen as the main concern in 2001. "In fact, after 9/11, we concluded that Iraq actually stepped further back. They did not want to be associated with al-Qaida. They weren't natural allies," he said.
Asked about suggestions that the Blair government's 45-minute deployment claim had referred to weapons of mass destruction usable by Iraq to strike another nation, Dowse said: "I don't think we ever said that it was for use in a ballistic missile in that way." The inquiry panel member Sir Lawrence Freedman pointed out: "But you didn't say it wasn't."
Neither MI6 nor the joint intelligence committee explained that the 45-minute claim was speculative and referred only to short-range weapons. Ministe rs later claimed they had never asked what kind of weaponry the claim was about.