What is really going on in politics? Get our daily email briefing straight to your inbox Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Former American President George W. Bush duped Tony Blair into the 2003 Iraq War, Gordon Brown sensationally reveals today.

The US kept quiet about a top secret intelligence report which showed there was NO evidence Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

And Mr Brown, Chancellor at the time, says Britain would not have invaded Iraq had we known about it.

The report also blew out of the water the claim in Britain’s so-called dodgy dossier that Saddam Hussein could deploy biological weapons against the UK within 45 minutes.

(Image: Press Association)

Mr Brown said he obtained the report after leaving No10 in 2010. It was finally published last year.

In his new book My Life, Our Times – to be published on Tuesday – Mr Brown says: “We were all misled on the existence of WMDs.

“Given Iraq had no usable chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that it could deploy and was not about to attack the coalition, then two tests of a just war were not met.

“War could not be justified as a last resort and invasion cannot now be seen as a proportionate response.”

The five-week war cost 33 British lives, 172 American ones and 30,000 Iraqis. Another 146 UK servicemen and 70,000 more civilians died in the eight-year conflict which followed – and which cost Britain £9.2billion.

It destroyed Mr Blair’s legacy as Labour’s only three-term PM and he is now widely reviled.

Mr Brown says his role as Chancellor was to fund the campaign.

(Image: REUTERS)

But he adds: “I ask myself over and over whether I could have made more of a difference before that fateful decision was taken.”

Mr Brown says he was assured by then MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove that Iraq had WMDs.

Mr Brown writes: “I was told they knew where the weapons were housed. I remember thinking it was almost as if they could give me the street name and number where they were.”

What neither Mr Brown nor Mr Blair knew was that the US Defence Department had its own report into WMD commissioned by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and delivered to him in September, 2002.

The document revealed 90 per cent of US-held information on Iraq’s WMDs was based on “imprecise intelligence” and relied on “judgment rather than hard evidence”.

American spooks admitted they had not pinpointed any nuclear, chemical or biological weapons facilities.

And they did not believe Saddam had the ­chemicals needed to produce nerve gas.

Crucially, the report contradicted the claim made by Tony Blair about biological weapons targeting British territory.

Rumsfeld was told: “We doubt the processes are in place to produce longer-range missiles.”

(Image: AFP)

Mr Brown writes: “In these months before the war, I had no idea that key decision makers in America were already aware that the evidence on the existence of WMDs was weak, even negligible and in key areas non-existent.

“It is astonishing that none of us in the British Government ever saw this American report.

"As we were later to discover, the intelligence had not established beyond doubt either that Saddam had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons or that efforts to develop nuclear weapons continued.”

Mr Brown quotes Sir Christopher Meyer, UK ambassador in Washington at the time, as saying: “When it came to Saddam’s WMD, absence of evidence was not the same as evidence of absence.

“We should not be afraid to argue that Iraq’s programmes were probably much further advanced than we knew.”

Sir Christopher told the Sunday Mirror he had no recollection of making the remark. He added: “It became imperative in Washington, which Tony Blair latched on to, to find the smoking gun in time for a Spring campaign.”

Mr Brown adds: “I am convinced that if resolutions of the United Nations are approved unanimously and repeatedly they have to be upheld if we are to have a safe and stable world order.

"On this basis, Saddam’s continuing failure to comply justified action. The question is whether it required war in March, 2003.

“If I am right, that somewhere within the American system the truth about Iraq’s lack of weapons was known, then we were not just misinformed but misled on the critical issue of WMDs.”

(Image: Reuters)

Mr Brown does not say if he obtained the report in time for the £10million, seven-year Chilcot Inquiry into the war – which he ordered, after becoming PM in 2007.

As PM, Mr Brown was determined to pull out of Iraq quickly. President Bush wanted us to stay but we pulled out in April, 2009. Mr Brown says in his book: “We know that even a just war does not necessarily deliver a just peace.

“When we left Iraq was one country, one government, one parliament. But in the last few years Iraq has again been torn apart by deep sectarian divisions.

“There’s a good reason why it was more difficult to sustain a peace than win a war.

“Nation-building from the outside is fine in theory, but hard in practice. Not every world problem can be solved by America or the West – a lesson impressed on us with equal force in Afghanistan.”