Rumsfeld kept us in the dark

In the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the British government did not understand what reconstruction plans were underway in Washington, according to Alastair Campbell, a close adviser to former British prime minister Tony Blair for nine years.

Audio: Alastair Campbell talks about Tony Blair and the Iraq War (mp3)

Talking to Gulf News this week, Blair's former Director of Communications and Strategy said: "In the build-up there was a sense that we were dealing with the State Department plan for the aftermath. It became perfectly clear that once the aftermath began, that Rumsfeld and the Defence Department were very much in charge of it."

He said that "it is a fair criticism" that the aftermath was not properly considered, and that responsibility for this can be directed in two directions".

Firstly, at the Americans for the state of aftermath preparations and for not "preparing for worst-case scenarios rather than best-case scenarios. Everything was going to flow from the belief in parts of the US and UK administration that the troops were going to be greeted as conquering heroes, and that did not happen".

Audio: Alastair Campbell speaks about the post-war planning in Iraq (mp3)

Secondly, the build-up discussions between the British and Americans were not coordinated as they should have been. Campbell quoted David Manning, the British ambassador in Washington at the time, (and Blair's main foreign affairs adviser on the issue) as saying recently that while Downing Street was dealing with the White House, the Foreign Office was dealing with the State Department, and everyone else was dealing their opposite numbers.

The right thing

Blair and the British government agreed that it was right "to support military action to depose Saddam, because the prime minister had been growing over a period of time more concerned that Saddam was a genuine threat", and because it was in Britain's strategic national interest, Campbell said.

Two main reasons were the concern that terrorists capable of an act of terrorism as great as 9/11 might be capable of getting weapons of mass destruction through rogue states, and also that Saddam's regime was so bad that it deserved to go.

Audio: Alastair Campbell speaks about the Middle East peace process (mp3)

"There has always been a constituency in world and British public opinion, that of all the bad guys in the world, Saddam was the worst, and why had the major powers of the world not done more to remove him," said Campbell.

Campbell referred to a passage in his recently published dairies, The Blair Years, during the build-up to the invasion, "when I asked Tony, ‘If you are history before your time because of Iraq, is it really worth it?'

He replied: ‘It is always worth doing what you think is the right thing, and Iraq and Saddam have been a problem for far too long, we have ignored it for far too long, and that includes Britain'."

WMD

Campbell admitted that the intelligence about Iraq's possible weapons of mass destruction has now been questioned. He told Gulf News that "it is true that a lot of the cause for that concern was intelligence-based and it is equally true that there is now an on-going debate about the nature of some of that intelligence".

Audio: Alastair Campbell talks about Tony Blair and the Northern Ireland peace process

But he defended Blair by saying that "if you are the prime minister, you are not doing the job based on hindsight. You do the job based on what you know".

Campbell said that in the discussions during the build-up to the invasion, the issue of WMD had not been as big as it became later.

"Because of the furour over weapons of mass destruction driven by the report in the BBC and all that followed from that, that issue has had far greater saliency than it did during the build up itself.

Audio: Alastair Campbell talks about the 'creative tensions between Brown and Blair (mp3)

"At the time of the WMD dossier being published, many of the journalists who later would claim that we were hammering the 45 minutes point, actually said that there was nothing much new in the dossier and there was nothing much that we did not know. That was their line at the time. It only took on this mythical status because of subsequent events," he said.

Hope for Iraq

Despite the chaos in Iraq, Campbell pointed out that there had to be some small elements of hope.

"Iraq does not look good if you turn on the news at night," said Campbell, "but you have the beginnings of democracy, you have prog-ress happening in parts of the country, and provided people stay the course Iraq could start to become a stable democracy.

"If you make the analogy with Northern Ireland, if you had said a decade ago that Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness would be sharing power in a devolved assembly, people would have taken you off to the funny farm. So likewise something might happen in Iraq"

Middle East peace

Blair spoke many times during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq that he wanted the Americans to become more involved in the Middle East peace process. In the event this did not happen, but Campbell said that Blair did not feel let down by the Americans over this.

He argued that Blair "passionately wanted the Middle East peace process to happen. As you will know from his public statements many times, he does believe that a lot of the foreign policy issues that world faces and some of the implications for terrorism, can be found in the failure to find a solution to that basic problem, which is the Middle East peace process".

Campbell ascribed the failure to revive the peace process to the a lack of will from the different parties on the ground to look for peace, adding that if the Americans commit to such a renewed effort after so many failures, they will want to see a reasonable chance of progress.

"Tony was disappointed that the pieces of the jigsaw did not come together sufficiently for a proper drive on it," Campbell said.

If a blind leads a blind, then they will both fall into a ditch and since UK decided to go blind, they cannot pass the buck of failures in Iraq conveniently to US. They should learn to share it and most important of all, they both should learn to abstain from "Imperialism". UK should stop worshipping their "divide and rule policy" which they are good at. It?s time to advocate and push for world unity.
Rahul
Dubai,UAE
Posted: October 10, 2007, 08:44

When has war ever been a direct result to peace? Yes, there is a long road ahead but the suffering war causes cannot just be forgotten.
Yaser
Sydney,Australia
Posted: October 10, 2007, 06:56

Why didn?t this article mention oil as a reason? The western world is dependent on oil and they couldn't depend on oil not being stopped because of the problems the Middle East is having. Saddam became easy because he was disliked and this allowed the American government to use WMD. Which I believed they planted to justify the war, with the help of other western governments. And this will give these governments a military presence and all the oil guaranteed that they will need.
Robert
Bronx,United States
Posted: October 10, 2007, 04:07