Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is rewriting the history of the Iraq War

“We were misled by the Pentagon,” Brown told a television show earlier this week.

What is Brown’s justification for this claim?

Not much.

The former British leader references a 2002 Pentagon report commissioned by Donald Rumsfeld, which apparently found that evidence for “the existence of WMDs [in Iraq] was weak, even negligible and in key areas nonexistent.” Whether or not this report actually exists is another thing altogether, but let us suppose it does.

Does it alter the collective assessment of the U.S. and British intelligence communities?

No, it does not.

While intelligence services disagreed over the central political justification for the war: the risk of Saddam Hussein providing weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, intelligence services concurred in the belief that Saddam Hussein possessed a potent WMD stockpile.

So why is Brown making these claims?

Simple, to sell his book.

In conspiratorial language, the former prime minister wonders, “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.” Brown continues:

“Given that 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.”

It might be a perfect ploy to win book purchases from a British public that has come to regard the Iraq War as a disastrous escapade. But it’s a fictional account, not corresponding to what actually happened. That’s not to say that the war was the right decision, but Brown misrepresents the facts as they were and as they are.

Brown further evidenced his desperate populist ploy when he told a TV show, “I became prime minister in 2007, we were out of Iraq by April 2009 and I told George Bush we were not going to put more troops in, they were coming out. I thought we had to become the occupiers and not the liberators. And we were out three years before the Americans.”

Again, while Brown’s words will sound good to some, they only illustrate his failure of leadership. After all, Brown’s decision to restrict British Army to its bases in southern Iraq allowed Iran to dominate Iraqi political structures in that region. And his decision to oppose Bush’s surge meant that the U.S. military and Iraqi forces had to shoulder the burden of “the surge” alone, albeit with a key contribution by British special forces.

And that history matters because the surge dramatically reduced the violence in Iraq. Attracting Iraqis to security formations, annihilating al Qaeda and forcing Iranian-supported militias into retreat, the surge also proffered a period of Iraqi political progress. It was not until the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq at the end of 2011 that Islamic State was able to move into the vacuum from neighboring Syria.

Nevertheless, it’s not surprising that Brown is playing games with history. He was a disastrous prime minister who presided over an explosion of British debt and a collapse of public confidence.