BRITISH PRIME minister Gordon Brown has rejected charges that he had starved the British army of money to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan which were made by retired senior military officers just hours before he appeared before the Iraq Inquiry yesterday.
Saying that he had agreed to “every single request” for extra funds from the ministry of defence, Mr Brown implied that responsibility for equipment problems should lie with senior commanders, not with him.
“I have to stress it is not for me to make the military decisions on the ground about the use of particular vehicles,” he told the inquiry.
“What I can however say is 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.”
Hours before his appearance, the former chief of the general staff, Gen Lord Guthrie, said the lack of money had “undoubtedly cost lives”, while the former top ministry of defence official Kevin Tebbit said he had to operate a crisis budget to meet Iraq costs.
However, Mr Brown said he had found the money to pay for heavily armoured Mastiff and Bulldog vehicles “within months” of being asked by the military, following losses in more lightly protected Snatch Land Rovers.
Mr Brown’s decision to take such a confrontational position with the military comes amid fears that British losses in Afghanistan could be laid at his door in the election expected to be held in May.
Defending the decision to invade Iraq, Mr Brown, who was chancellor of the exchequer at the time, said Saddam Hussein had led an “aggressor state” and “‘ridden roughshod over numerous UN resolutions”. But he had held out hope “right up to the last minute” that diplomatic action would work, though he had been concerned before it began that the Americans had not done enough planning for the aftermath of Saddam’s overthrow.
“It was one of my regrets that I wasn’t able to be more successful in pushing the Americans on this issue – that the planning for reconstruction was essential, just the same as planning for the war,” he said.
Defending his predecessor, Tony Blair, the prime minister said: “I do say that everything that Mr Blair did during this period, he did properly,” and he added that he made it clear to Mr Blair from the beginning that the money needed for the war would be found. “I said immediately to the prime minister that the military options that were under discussion, there should be no sense that there was a financial restraint that prevented us doing what was best for the military.
“I told him that I would not – and this was right at the beginning – I would not try to rule out any military option on the grounds of cost, quite the opposite.”
