Gordon Carrera

No one had ever done this before where you've got a dossier, which is going to be a joint intelligence committee dossier, but where you've got political appointees also involved in the process and commenting on it.

And I think that's where some of the difficulties come with this.

Yeah.

And that is, I think, the problem.

Because as they start working on this public case on both sides of the Atlantic...

focusing here on the UK, but it's definitely true on the American side as well.

They kind of go, well, we know he's got WMD, but they look at the actual facts that they can put out into the public domain.

They go, well, that doesn't look that good because, of course, it's not there.

But they think, well, that's a bit weak.

But the intelligence is described as sporadic and patchy in March by the Joint Intelligence Committee.

Sporadic empathy does not sound very convincing if you're making a public case, does it?

No.

Yeah.

So you get two pressures.

One is how far can you push this intelligence you have, reduce the caveats?

And the second is, can you actually improve the intelligence base of which you're working, which is thin, as we said, to get fresh intelligence, to make it stronger?

And we're going to see a bit of both of those things.

I mean, we've talked about the analytic failure by the poor old analysts.

I think here we get into a collection failure, though, particularly for MI6.

We talked last time about Iraq having been a bit of a backwater in the 90s for collection.