Will any prime minister desperate to become a war leader ever tell us the truth? David Cameron’s claim to there being 70,000 Syrian rebels ready to do battle with Isis looks as dodgy as Tony Blair’s dodgy dossier.
According to front page reports in the Times and the Sun - yes, newspapers that favoured war - military officials warned the government against making such a claim.
The Times, citing “Whitehall and defence sources”, said there was concern that “offering such a precise figure could make the government a hostage to fortune.”
Ministry of defence officials who provided Cameron with information were conscious of the false claim made by Blair in a 2003 that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.
They were not worried about the validity of the 70,000 figure but the source quoted by the Times said the officials “looked at the latest text and said that [the 70,000 figure] could become the ‘45 minutes’ moment of this document.”
According to the report in the Sun, sarcastically headlined “You and whose army?”, a Whitehall source said senior defence staff argued that the 70,000 figure was “misleading”.
But Cameron, in striving to convince MPs to back his call for airstrikes against Isis in Syria, used it anyway by telling the Commons that “around 70,000 opposition fighters” were on the ground ready to attack Isis following British bombing attacks.
Both the Times and the Sun quote criticism of Cameron by Julian Lewis, the Conservative chairman of the defence select committee who voted against the launching of air strikes by British forces.
He said: “Instead of having dodgy dossiers, we now have bogus battalions of moderate fighters.”
The Sun’s article stated that MoD officials had pointed out that the number of fighters opposed to Bashar al-Assad’s regime included groups with extremist links and factions who fight each other. But the ministry’s objections were overruled by the government’s Joint Intelligence Committee.
It quotes the Whitehall source as saying: “It’s got 45 minutes written all over it. Cameron didn’t think this through. If he really didn’t know about the MoD’s worries, he should have asked more questions about it.”
According to the Times’s report, a Downing Street spokeswoman said: “The ministry of defence did not raise concerns with No 10 on whether this figure should be included in the prime minister’s response to the foreign affairs committee.”
And the Times’s columnist, Philip Collins, wrote that it was a “mistake” by Cameron “to hang so much on the apparent army of 70,000 moderates who will form the Syrian vanguard against Islamic State.
“Scattered and serving many masters, this figure may haunt him, particularly as it was a blatant attempt to fill the gap in his case.”
Similar reports were also posted on the websites of the Daily Telegraph and of the Daily Mail.
Although these stories are new, concern about the truth of Cameron’s claims were widely raised before the parliamentary debate. For example, on Monday, the Guardian’s defence correspondent, Ewen MacAskill, asked: “Who are these 70,000 Syrian fighters David Cameron is relying on?”
He quoted Charles Lister, author of The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency, who said a 70,000-strong anti-Isis force existed only in theory. He said: “They will not suddenly overnight become British tools to fight Isil as long as they are still having to fight Assad.”
And MacAskill also spoke to Ghadi Sary, a Syria specialist at Chatham House, who told him: “The idea that there was a force of 70,000 waiting to take Raqqa was an oversimplification.”