UK's secret plans for war revealed
A leaked secret document yesterday raises serious new questions over Tony Blair's account of when Britain began planning for war with Iraq.
A leaked secret document yesterday raises serious new questions over Tony Blair's account of when Britain began planning for war with Iraq.
The highly-classified Pentagon paper reveals that British commanders began high-level planning with their US counterparts nine months before the war started. At the same time, Blair was publicly denying that any such preparation was taking place. Only yesterday, he was forced to spend a large part of his leader's speech attempting to explain his decision to take the country to war.
But yesterday's disclosures will cause Blair further difficulty on a crucial Iraq debate at the Labour Party conference. The secret document reveals:
- Senior British and American military commanders held a high-level planning conference in June 2002, a time when Blair was denying preparing for a possible conflict.
- Britain and the US commander General Tommy Franks discussed sending British forces to Turkey as early as August 2002. If this had happened, the first significant deployment in what became the Iraq war would have been by British, not American, troops.
- The first planning orders for actual operations were issued on October 7, 2002, more than a month before the UN passed Resolution 1441 giving Iraq a "final opportunity" to disarm.
- The full battleplan, codenamed 1003V, was issued on October 31, eight days before Resolution 1441 and a month before the UN inspectors started work.
Ministers always insisted that war was only a last resort if UN inspections failed. The latest disclosures sit uneasily with Blair's denials that the government was following a course towards war.
MPs yesterday said it was more evidence that Parliament and the public were misled in the run-up to the invasion in March last year.
The document is a Pentagon chronology, part of a presentation by the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, on strategic lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The chronology was produced in August last year.
One of the earliest entries is for a UK and Australia planning conference on June 28, 2002. The meeting is understood to have been held at US Central Command (Centcom) headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
Sources said it was attended by Air Marshal Brian Burridge, the senior British commander in the war, General Tommy Franks, the chief of the US operation, and by senior British officers permanently based at Centcom.
The defence ministry refused to confirm or deny this. Three weeks after the planning conference, on July 16, 2002, Blair faced public questioning by MPs. Downing Street insisted yesterday that Blair had not misled MPs. "We have said all along that of course people carried out the scenario planning that they thought was sensible to do," a spokesman said.
