A government commission report into Dutch support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq has been heavily criticised by the man responsible for drawing up the Netherlands’ position.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer was foreign minister until August 2003, when he was appointed secretary general of Nato.
In an interview with the Volkskrant on Saturday, De Hoop Scheffer denied the report’s conclusion that Dutch security service doubts about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been ignored. There were not any doubts, he said.
And, he said, many of the report’s conclusions are based on hindsight not the evidence at the time.
De Hoop Scheffer told the paper he was speaking out in defence of senior civil servants who could not speak for themselves.
Legality
Ministry officials had come under attack for blindly following the US line and for ignoring advice about the legality of the invasion. ‘That is not far, not right and legally dubious,’ he said.
And the claim that he and his officials adopted their decision to support the invasion after a short afternoon meeting and then stuck to it rigorously is a caricature of the truth, he said.
The publication of the Davids commission report in January almost brought about the collapse of the government.
The report concluded there was no proper legal mandate for the war, that MPs had not been kept properly informed and that officials blindly followed the US and British line.