the terrorist threat - before and after iraq

Extracts from Eliza Manningham-Buller's evidence to the Chilcot Enquiry

Director of MI5 2002-2007
All emphasis mine

The threat was containable:

EM-B: ... if I can refer to the letter from me as Deputy Director General from March 2002 ... we felt we had a pretty good intelligence picture of a threat from Iraq within the UK and to British interests, and you will see from that letter we thought it was very limited and containable.

... we regarded the threat the direct threat from Iraq as low. We did think -- and it comes in that letter -- that Saddam Hussein might resort to terrorism in the theatre if he thought his regime was toppled, but we did not believe he had the capability to do anything much in the UK. That turned out to be the right judgment. What the letter -- has been redacted from the letter, like I say, in general terms is that is partly as a result of action we took. But I don't think the threat in the UK was anything other than very limited.

Iraq increased the threat of terrorism:

SIR RODERIC LYNE: ... how significant in your view a factor was Iraq compared with other situations that were used by extremists, terrorists, to justify their actions?

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: I think it is highly significant and the JIC assessments that I have reminded myself of say that. By 2003/2004 we were receiving an increasing number of leads to terrorist activity from within the UK and the -- our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people, some British citizens -- not a whole generation, a few among a generation -- who were -- saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam. So although the media has suggested that in July 2005, the attacks on 7/7, that we were surprised these were British citizens, that is not the case because really there had been an increasing number of British-born individuals living and brought up in this country, some of them third generation, who were attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and saw the west's activities in Iraq and Afghanistan as threatening their fellow religionists and the Muslim world.

So it undoubtedly increased the threat and by 2004 we were pretty well swamped -- that's possibly an exaggeration -- but we were very overburdened by intelligence on a broad scale that was pretty well more than we could cope with in terms of threats to plot --

SIR RODERIC LYNE: So you're saying you had evidence that the Iraq conflict, our involvement in the Iraq conflict was a motivation, a trigger, for people who were involved in the attacks in London in July 2005, who were going to Afghanistan to fight...

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: Yes. I mean, if you take the video wills that were retrieved on various occasions after various plots, where terrorists who had expected to be dead explained why they had done what they did, it features. It is part of what we call the single narrative, which is the view of some that everything the west was doing was part of a fundamental hostility to the Muslim world and to Islam, of which manifestations were Iraq and Afghanistan, but which pre-dated those because it pre-dated 9/11, but it was enhanced by those events.

Saddam was not a threat before 2003:

SIR RODERIC LYNE: ... there is an indication that you did not at that time [before 2003] see Saddam Hussein's regime as an important sponsor of terrorism directed at least against this country.

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: That is correct.

SIR RODERIC LYNE: Does it therefore follow from that that you don't subscribe to the theory that at some point in the future he would probably have brought together international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in a threat to western interests?

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: It is a hypothetical theory. It certainly wasn't of concern in either the short term
or the medium term to my colleagues and myself.

The terrorist threat increased substantially after Iraq

SIR RODERIC LYNE:... there is an indication that you did not at that time see Saddam Hussein's regime as an important sponsor of terrorism directed at least against this country... to what extent did the conflict in Iraq exacerbate the overall threat that your Service and your fellow services were having to deal with from international terrorism?

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: Substantially... the threat increased, was exacerbated by Iraq, and caused not only my Service but many other services round the world to have to have a major increase in resources to deal with it... I found it necessary to ask the Prime Minister for a doubling of our budget. This is unheard of, it's certainly unheard of today, but he and the Treasury and the Chancellor accepted that because I was able to demonstrate the scale of the problem that we were confronted by.

We knew it would do so...

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: ... your view was that a war in Iraq would aggravate the threat from whatever source to the United Kingdom?

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: Yes.

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: How did you communicate this view to the Prime Minister?

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: It was communicated through the JIC assessments, to which I fed in... I can't tell you to what extent senior ministers read the JIC assessments. I don't know the answer to that. I believe they did read them. But if they read them, they can have had no doubt.