British officials secretly discussed toppling Saddam Hussein two years before the Iraq War but rejected a policy of "regime change" as illegal under international law, the Iraq Inquiry has heard.

On the opening day yesterday of the public inquiry into the 2003 invasion, Sir William Patey, the former head of Middle East policy at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, said he drew up a briefing paper on policy options for Iraq in 2001.

"We had at the end the regime-change option," he said. "We dismissed that at the time as having no basis in law. It was very much an internal paper. We didn't go into how to achieve regime change."

But, he said, British diplomats heard the "drum beats" of war emanating from Washington even before the September 11 terrorist attacks, as the newly installed Bush administration discussed how to get rid of Saddam.

Claims

One of the main questions the inquiry must answer is whether Tony Blair, the former prime minister, misled Parliament in any way over the reasons for taking Britain into a war which cost 179 British lives and killed an unknown number of Iraqis.

Mr Blair wrongly claimed that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which posed a threat to security in the Middle East, but his critics believe he had decided to back a US-led invasion of the oil-rich state long before parliament voted to go to war.

The inquiry is headed by Sir John Chilcot, a civil servant. It will spend the next nine months considering evidence from officials, politicians and military personnel involved in the conflict, before reporting its findings in 2011.

Relatives of some of the servicemen who died were among those gathered at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster, together with a handful of anti-war protesters, some wearing Blair masks and carrying blood-soaked dollar bills. Sir John vowed to "get to the heart of what happened" before and during the Iraq war and insisted he "will not shy away" from criticising anyone who made mistakes.

The chairman said he and his team would be "thorough, rigorous, fair and frank", though Sir John made it clear that "no one is on trial". "We cannot determine guilt or innocence," he said. Sir John insisted that as well as hearing from politicians and military officers, "we want to know what people across Britain think are the important questions", and invited anyone who felt they had "relevant" information to contact them.

The five-strong panel has already met the families of servicemen killed in Iraq and veterans of the campaign.

Mr Blair is due to give evidence early next year, as is Sir John Scarlett, the former head of MI6. Prime minister Gordon Brown has not been asked to give evidence. The inquiry began with evidence from Sir Peter Ricketts, the former policy director at the Foreign Office, Sir William Patey, its former head of Middle East policy, and Simon Webb, former policy director at the Ministry of Defence.

The witnesses, who gave evidence alongside each other, began by setting out Britain's policy towards Iraq in the months before the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001.

Mr Webb said he had described Iraq in his own notes at the time as "the dog that didn't bark", and all three men said there was no desire to force regime change in Iraq. Sir Peter said: "We quite clearly distanced ourself from regime change. It was clear that was something there would not be any legal base for."

At the time, British and US policy towards Iraq was one of "containment" of Saddam, through economic sanctions, restricting his oil sales and the imposition of no-fly zones in southern and northern Iraq. Asked whether Saddam was "in a cage", Sir William replied "yes", and said he could "possibly" have been contained until the end of his regime.

But Sir Peter said there was concern in London and Washington that the strategy of containment was "failing". And in the US, the newly installed Bush administration had an appetite for war even before the 9/11 attacks.

Saddam

Sir William said: "We were aware of the drum beats from Washington . . . our policy was to stay away from that.

"We didn't think Saddam was a good thing, and it would be great if he went, but we didn't have an explicit policy for trying to get rid of him."

Sir Peter said the 9/11 attacks led to a "striking shift" in US policy towards Iraq.

"We heard people in Washington suggest that there might be some link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

"We never saw any evidence of it, but the tone of voice was more 'if there turns out to be any link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that is going to have major implications for Iraq and Saddam Hussein'."

He said that while the initial response to 9/11 had been to engage al-Qa'ida in Afghan- istan, from November 2001 he began to hear talk in Washington of a "phase two" in the "war on terror" which would involve going to war in Iraq.

However, he insisted that in Britain the policy remained one of containment and of using UN weapons inspectors to check on Saddam's suspected WMD programme.

The 9/11 attacks led to concerns in Whitehall about the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on WMD, said Sir Peter. "That concern was made worse by the discovery by coalition forces that al-Qa'ida had been interested in experimenting with chemical and biological weapons in Afghanistan, all of which threw into greater relief the concern about WMD being acquired, not to say that we had any evidence that Iraq was linked directly to 9/11."

Although there was a consensus that Saddam did have WMD, partly based on the fact that he had used chemical weapons to kill thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s, gathering accurate intelligence was hampered by the fact that Britain did not have an embassy or any official presence in Iraq.

Sir William said that much of Britain's intelligence about Iraq came from other countries, and from MPs who had visited the country, including George Galloway. Sir William revealed that there was a disagreement between Britain and the US about whether it was worth trying to get UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq to search for evidence of WMD.

Sir Peter said: "There was a feeling in the US that a weapons inspection regime was risky." Some American officials felt Saddam would "pull the wool over the inspectors' eyes". The hearing continues. (© Daily Telegraph, London)

- James Kirkup

Irish Independent