Tony Blair used "deceit" to persuade parliament and the British people to support war in Iraq, Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said today.

In an article in the Times, Macdonald attacked Blair for engaging in "alarming subterfuge", for displaying "sycophancy" towards George Bush and for refusing to accept that his decisions were wrong.

Macdonald's comments about Blair's decision to go to war are more critical than anything that has been said so far by any of the senior civil servants who worked in Whitehall when Blair was prime minister.

MacDonald is telling us something we already know, but it's still nice to hear it from someone who was close to the action.

It would have been a lot nicer to hear it back in 2003.
- posted by truthspeaker    Comments

We've heard all this before, but this is the first time we've heard it on the record from high-ranking British officials. They were giving evidence at the UK government's inquiry into the Iraq war. I urge all Americans to read the accounts of the British inquiry, since it seems clear that we will never have such an investigation here in the US.

There was a "dire" lack of planning in Washington for what would happen in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, a senior British diplomat has said.

The US had a "touching faith" that its troops would be welcomed in Iraq and democracy would soon follow, Edward Chaplin told the Iraq inquiry.

Mr Chaplin, director of Middle East policy at the Foreign Office in the run-up to the 2003 invasion and ambassador to Baghdad after the war, said preparations for what would follow the toppling of Saddam Hussein were a "real blind spot" in Washington.

Although the State Department looked at the issue in detail, Mr Chaplin said there was less interest "elsewhere" in Washington and that policy was largely dictated by the White House and Pentagon.

"They [US officials] had a touching faith that once Iraq had been liberated from the terrible tyranny of Saddam Hussein everybody would be grateful and dancing in the streets and there would be really be no further difficulty.

"And then the Iraqis would somehow magically take over and restore their state to the democratic state it should be in.

"We tried to point that this was extremely optimistic."

The US put too much faith in Iraqi opposition groups and political exiles about how quickly the country could be stabilised after the invasion, Mr Chaplin said, while coalition forces did not fully realise how "fractured" Iraqi society had become under Saddam Hussein.

From BBC News
- posted by truthspeaker    Comments