Iraq war blunders yet to be unravelled fully

London: The public have not been told a fraction of the blunders and misjudgments that led Britain to go to war with Iraq, senior former government experts said Friday.

Carne Ross, Britain's former Iraq expert at the Foreign Office, told MPs there was a wealth of secret documents and expert testimony which revealed how the Government got it wrong on the threat posed by Saddam Hussain.

In dramatic videolink evidence to the Commons public administration committee, Ross said that it was "disgraceful" that ministers were still refusing to hold a full inquiry into the run-up to the conflict.

He said he had personally told ministers that a much tougher sanctions regime was a viable alternative to war, but his concerns got "lost" in the Whitehall system. Ross said that Britain was more concerned about keeping allies Turkey and Jordan on side than implementing an oil embargo that would have had more impact on Baghdad.

Dr Brian Jones, former head of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons analysis in the Ministry of Defence, also lambasted MPs for failing to carry out their own independent inquiry into the war.

Ross, who gave his evidence live from New York, was the Foreign Office's Iraq specialist at the United Nations for four years before the war. He quit in protest after the conflict began.

Today, he said that Gordon Brown's refusal to hold an inquiry until after British troops are brought home should not prevent Parliament holding its own investigation.

"There are many other people involved who have yet to tell their story and yet to have been questioned by you or Parliament or anyone else," he told the MPs. "There are many documents to come to light, for example the intelligence assessments from the Joint Intelligence Committee in the run-up to war that should be scrutinised and should be made available publicly and should be released now that the war is long over."

Ross said that the Government should stop claiming that the Iraq war had been fully covered by the Hutton Inquiry, the Butler Review and two other inquiries. "There should be a full public inquiry, a Parliamentary inquiry, into the decision-making that took place."