ctdAnother British ambassador who attended the meetings and talked to colleagues about the looming
invasion said: "Everyone was underprepared for the aftermath." He admitted that "to my shame I
was in the complacent camp ... We underestimated the insurgency. I didn't hear anyone say, 'It'll be
a disaster, and it'll all come unstuck.' People felt it was a leap in the dark, but not that we were
staring disaster in the face."
The leader of the country where he served was far more perceptive about post-Saddam Iraq than
the Foreign Office's Arabists. "He predicted it would all fall to pieces on sectarian grounds. He was
unhappy about the invasion, even though he was a host to US forces and the top US brass came
through regularly," the ambassador told me.
In London the Foreign Office set up a special Iraq policy unit in the run-up to the war. But it had a
narrow brief, concentrating on contingency planning for the invasion and its short-term effects,
according to a diplomat who attended its meetings. What would happen if Saddam's forces used
chemical weapons and British forces took heavy casualties? The government had plans to
commandeer hospitals in Britain's National Health Service, if army hospitals were swamped. What if
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fled the bombing? Plans were made for huge tented camps and
emergency food supplies, to be run with the United Nations. The Department for Trade and Industry
tried to guess what would happen to oil prices in the event of war. The Department for International
Development focused on humanitarian assistance to refugees, and reconstruction. No discussions
were held on vital issues such as how to choose Iraq's future government after Saddam fell, and
what role the occupiers should play. Would Iraqis or the Americans be in charge?
According to Clare Short, the Secretary of State for International Department who resigned from
the government shortly after the invasion, the Cabinet had only informal prewar discussions on Iraq.
"There were never any papers or proper analysis of the underlying dangers and the political,
diplomatic and military options. The whole crisis was handled by Tony Blair and his entourage with
considerable informality," she recorded later. Her worry was that without a UN resolution the
occupiers would have no legal right to make political changes in Iraq. Peter Hain confirmed that the
cabinet saw no papers on postwar Iraq.
"In Iraq the failures of covert intelligence were compounded by the absence of political intelligence:
a comprehensive lack of the understanding of sectarian forces and fault lines present across the
country," he disclosed recently.
Blair was not interested in these matters. He took the view that it was in Britain's strategic interest
to go along with whatever Bush decided. Civil servants and senior British military sources repeatedly
complained that he never raised difficult problems with Bush, even when he had been briefed to
mention them before going to Washington.
He either lacked consideration for the consequences of an invasion, or perhaps he feared risking his
friendship with Bush by sounding like a sceptic or a wimp. He thought he had considerable influence
in the White House, and his various trips to Washington, which always culminated with a press
conferences at Bush's side, were designed to give the impression that as a major contributor of
troops he was an equal partner in decision-making.
British officials were under no such illusions. "We weren't plugged into the State Department's
detailed planning exercise. We tried but couldn't get into it. It was the first warning sign that we
weren't part of it," one senior diplomat told me. In the words of another: "The UK supplied 10% of
the invasion force. We provided 10% of the staff of the Coalition Provisional Authority. We had 10%
of input into policy." In the final weeks before the invasion, the Pentagon wrested control of
postwar planning away from the state department, leaving British ministers even more in the dark.
A senior British officer was attached to US central command in Florida, but the main issues of Iraq's
postwar governance were not discussed there. Even in Washington, among the neocons who were
leading the drive for an invasion, there was no clear idea whether to appoint Iraqis to run the
country or put a US overlord in charge. This was only decided after Saddam was toppled.
Unlike France, Germany and Italy, the British had no embassy in Baghdad in Saddam's final 12 years
of rule. This left them bereft of good on-the-ground intelligence. It also meant there were few
people in the Foreign Office with direct experience and knowledge of Iraq. As a result, the British did
not predict the rise of Iraq's Islamists, whose strength destroyed the American neoconservative
project for a liberal, secular and US-friendly democracy. "The conventional view was that Iraq was
one of the most Western-oriented of Arab states, with its British-educated, urban and secular
professionals. I don't think anyone in London appreciated how far Islamism had gone, not just among
the Shia, but the Sunnis, too," Christopher Segar, who took part in the prewar discussions and
headed the British office in Baghdad after the invasion, told me.
Thanks partly to their Baghdad embassy, the French were better informed. They saw the potential
for tensions between religious and secular forces in Iraq if Saddam were toppled. They also sensed
that occupation would create resistance. "We believe that the use of force can arouse rancour and
hatred, fuel a clash of identities, of cultures," Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister,
declared in a speech to the UN Security Council two weeks before the invasion. For his part,
President Jacques Chirac argued that the war would be perceived in the Arab and Muslim world as
an attack on Islam. "A war of this kind cannot help giving a big lift to terrorism," he told
Time
magazine. "It would create a large number of little Bin Ladens."
The British government got almost everything wrong before the war. A senior Foreign Office official,
who saw the few papers that were written about the invasion's likely consequences, told me: "The
basic assumption that turned out to be false was that Iraqis felt themselves more Iraqi than Sunni
or Shia." The papers also predicted that "in the south there would be a welcome and it would be
less difficult than in Baghdad, where it would be harder to manage a transition". "We underestimated
the difficulties. No one realised how difficult it would be," the official said.
British ambassadors in the region concentrated on telling London what sort of support for the
invasion was likely to be given, publicly and privately, by the Arab governments to which they were
accredited. The Gulf states and Jordan wanted Saddam removed. Syria did not. There was little
analysis of what the "Arab street" would feel or what their official Arab contacts saw as the fallout
in Iraq.
British diplomats at the UN also failed to warn London, either by not seeking their Arab colleagues'
advice or not passing it on. In this they were less efficient than diplomats from the countries that
were on the Security Council, but not as permanent veto-bearing members. Juan Gabriel Valdes, a
former foreign minister of Chile who served as his country's UN envoy in 2003, represented one of
the 10 countries that the British wooed hard for support for a second UN resolution. The British
claimed to have intelligence about Saddam's efforts to cheat the UN weapons inspectors --
evidence that the Chilean ambassador and his colleagues did not find convincing, even though they
had no evidence of their own.
"The fact that we didn't have intelligence didn't mean that we didn't have good common sense,"
Valdes said later. He and his colleagues decided to talk to "every one of the members of the Arab
group at the UN, but particularly with Jordan and specially with Saudi Arabia and other countries
that were good friends of the US". They predicted, in private, "exactly what has happened
historically in Iraq. It was not very difficult to get that information -- that if the war happens, Iran
would take an enormous role, that the situation would be absolutely catastrophic, and that the turn
of events would leave the US and Great Britain involved in an atrocious situation."
A senior Foreign Office official admitted to worrying that Iran would benefit from the invasion more
than other countries. "I remember saying to myself that we might be in a position of having
destroyed Iraq and leaving a resurgent Iran," he told me. Typically, he never communicated his
concern to ministers. His reason, he said, was that as the war drew nearer, the mood in Downing
Street discouraged officials from raising problems.
Extracted from
Defeat: Why They Lost Iraq, by Jonathan Steele
- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
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M&G