With the articles about the British Memo making the diaries, I was remined of an article that I read last year in the UK Telegraph. This article concerned me so much that I added it to my book marks and watched the news and read the US papers looking for reporting about this. It never came.
Added to what is in this latest memo, the secret papers from last year paint a more horrifying picture of what was going on and how easy it is to go to war, even if level heads are trying to reason with those in charge.
Secret papers show Blair was warned of Iraq chaos
By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 18/09/2004)
Tony Blair was warned a year before invading Iraq that a stable post-war government would be impossible without keeping large numbers of troops there for "many years", secret government papers reveal.
The documents, seen by The Telegraph, show more clearly than ever the grave reservations expressed by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, over the consequences of a second Gulf war and how prescient his Foreign Office officials were in predicting the ensuing chaos.
All the talk of Britian backing up the WMD claims seem to have been BS. They saw this as a personal war of GWB.
The documents further show that the Prime Minister was advised that he would have to "wrong foot" Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, and that British officials believed that President George W Bush merely wanted to complete his father's "unfinished business" in a "grudge match" against Saddam.
But it is the warning of the likely aftermath - more than a year in advance, as Mr Blair was deciding to commit Britain to joining a US-led invasion - that is likely to cause most controversy and embarrassment in both London and Washington.
Britian knew Iraq was going to be a headache and the outcome could give us someone worse than Saddam.
Mr Straw predicted in March 2002 that post-war Iraq would cause major problems, telling Mr Blair in a letter marked "Secret and personal" that no one had a clear idea of what would happen afterwards. "There seems to be a larger hole in this than anything."
"But no one has satisfactorily answered how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be any better. Iraq has no history of democracy so no one has this habit or experience."
Senior ministerial advisers warned bluntly in a "Secret UK Eyes Only" options paper that "the greater investment of Western forces, the greater our control over Iraq's future, but the greater the cost and the longer we would need to stay".
Many in the British govt felt that Bush would go it alone if need be. The Brits seem to be the only ones thinking about what happens after.
But there would be other major problems with a democratic government.
If it were to survive, "it would require the US and others to commit to nation-building for many years. This would entail a substantial international security force."
The documents also show the degree of concern within Whitehall that America was ready to invade Iraq with or without backing from any of its allies.
Sir David Manning, Mr Blair's foreign policy adviser, returned from talks in Washington in mid-March 2002 warning that Mr Bush "still has to find answers to the big questions", which included "what happens on the morning after?".
In a letter to the Prime Minister marked "Secret - strictly personal", he said: "I think there is a real risk that the administration underestimates the difficulties.
This part really got my goat. It was all about Terror, remember... The Brits saw it as a grudge match.
The Cabinet Office said that the US believed that the legal basis for war already existed and had lost patience with the policy of containment.
It did not see the war on terrorism as being a major element in American decision-making.
There were "real problems" over the alleged threat and what the US was looking to achieve by toppling Saddam, he said. Nothing had changed to make Iraqi WMD more of a threat.
"Even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years. Military operations need clear and compelling military objectives. For Iraq, 'regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge match between Bush and Saddam."
UK Telegraph link
Someone please tell me, with all this concern that seems to have been passing through Whitehall, why the hell did Blair back this misadventure? It couldn't have been because a bully wanted to take out another bully and show up his old man. Are we just stuck with stupid men who see war as moving "things" around on a map? Stupid men who can't see past the blowing things up stage? Why would Blair take the risk of being hounded by the people in govt and the people of Britian over what they knew could turn out to be a fiasco? (I listened to enough Q&A and the problems in Iraq were always being thrown in his face). What does Bush have on him?