The men who love war

Two arms dealers attacked Gordon Brown for not spending more on weapons. It doesn't have the same ring as "army big guns attack Gordon Brown's defence budget claims" or "Prime Minister is targeted by top brass over army funding claims." But it is true.

Admiral Lord Boyce and Lord Guthrie are publicly attacking Brown for not buying enough weapons. But Boyce and Guthrie are not merely a retired soldier and a former sailor.

Boyce is a director of the VT Group, which makes hundreds of millions of pounds selling goods and services to the navy.

He is a director of WS Atkins, an engineering consultancy also making a mint from the Ministry of Defence. Boyce is an adviser to computer firm ATOS Origin, which also has many military contracts.

Boyce has another job advising the US Computer Science Corporation, which sends contract technicians to work with the US army in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Boyce accused Brown of "dissembling" and "being disingenuous" about arms spending, adding: "It's just not the case that the Ministry of Defence was given everything it needed" for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Brown says he met all the "urgent operational requirements" the top brass requested for the war.

But Boyce says this is dishonest. He is arguing that while Brown met the military's short-term needs, his long-running refusal to send arms spending ever higher made it harder to fight the Iraq and Afghan wars.

We now spend £36 billion on the military. And Boyce, who has a nice post-retirement job as an arms dealer, wants us to spend more.

If you want to fight ever-more wars you need to spend ever-larger sums. But there is another solution, one which Boyce does not seem to consider - don't spend more money, fight fewer wars.

For his part, Guthrie claimed: "At a time when other departments of state were being showered with money, defence was kept short."

Guthrie's point is simple - bombs not jobs. Warfare not welfare.

Guthrie also has an interest. He is a director of Colt, the company that used to make sixguns and now make army rifles.

Colt is keen on every kind of war - it even has a special division servicing the "private security" fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Guthrie is also a director of NM Rothschild, a bank which wants to make money with large, complex, PFI loans to the MoD for weapons and services.

Guthrie actually thinks there should be cuts in defence spending. He recommends cutbacks in Trident, warships and jets, but only so that spending on guns and armoured vehicles and helicopters can stay high.

So both Boyce and Guthrie are fighting hard to keep arms spending up, when they both make a living selling arms.

They claim that Brown let down the troops by not "showering" the military with cash to make the Iraq and Afghanistan wars easier.

But that was not the only choice. Another option, not going to war, would have meant that the fallen soldiers would still be alive - along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

All that blood would not have flowed and all that money would not have been wasted.

Boyce and Guthrie could have followed the example of General Eric Shinseki.

He was the US army's chief of staff, so an equally big fish in the military pond. He looked at the resources needed for Iraq and, in a fit of honesty, told the US Senate in 2002 that "something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would probably be needed for post-war Iraq.

This was far larger than the force planned by Donald Rumsfeld and was much bigger than the force actually available.

Indeed, Shinseki's honesty about his soldiers' needs almost derailed the war. So Rumsfeld sacked him.

By contrast Boyce and Guthrie were yes-men over the Iraq war. And now they want to retrospectively use it to bump up arms spending.

Guthrie says that Brown is "misleading the public" and "letting down troops."

But if Alastair Campbell is to be believed, Guthrie was involved in misleading claims about Iraq.

According to Campbell's diaries, "Charles Guthrie and Alan West" addressed the first "Iraq media management group," including Campbell and Tony Blair in 1998.

Campbell says: "West was strong on the factual account of Iraq's capability and on missing weapons post-Unscom ... They ran through some of the WMD."

West also seemed to concur when Guthrie "looked at his most menacing" and said: "You wouldn't want to bomb a tank full of anthrax."

According to Campbell, West and Guthrie were warning about Saddam Hussein's WMD stocks as the US and Britain prepared to bomb Iraq in a dispute about UN weapons inspector's access to Saddam's "presidential sites."

If Campbell is correct, they actually went well beyond the existing intelligence - West was the deputy chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) from 1997 to 2002.

Thanks to the Butler inquiry, we now know the evolution of JIC's judgements about Saddam's weapons.

In February 1998 the JIC did not back the "menacing" tales of anthrax and other kinds of WMD.

JIC actually said: "Unscom and the IAEA have succeeded in destroying or controlling the vast majority of Saddam's 1991 weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capability."

Guthrie seems to have been adding colour to West's claims with his menacing look and "tank full of anthrax."

JIC only began to tentatively revise its assessments of Saddam's WMD from September 1998 onwards - for reasons that have never been adequately explained.

Campbell's diaries suggest Guthrie was willing to help West exaggerate or distort limited intelligence on Iraq in 1998 to stiffen British resolve over military action, in a precursor to the disastrous stance taken by so many officials and ministers in 2003.