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U.K. also failed to foresee Iraqi militancy

London: The British government’s top foreign policy advisers were as inept as their U.S. counterparts in failing to see that removing Saddam Hussein in 2003 was likely to lead to a nationalist militancy by Sunnis and Shias and an Islamist government in Baghdad, run by allies of Iran.

None of London’s “Arabists” warned Tony Blair of the difficulties which have plagued the occupation. The revelation undermines the British claim that it was U.S. myopia which was to blame for the failure to foresee what would happen in post-war Iraq.

“Everyone was unprepared for the aftermath,” said a former Ambassador, who served in the region. “To my shame I was in the complacent camp [in the Foreign Office]. We under-estimated the insurgency. I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘It’ll be a disaster, and it’ll all come unstuck’. People felt it was a leap in the dark but not that we were staring disaster in the face.”

Privately, and in rare cases publicly, British Ministers and officials have blamed the chaos of the occupation on blunders in Washington, pointing the finger particularly at Donald Rumsfeld, who was sacked as Defence Secretary in 2006. Britain’s analysts were equally wrong.

Christopher Segar, who took part in the U.K.’s Iraq Policy Unit’s pre-war discussions and later headed the British office in Baghdad immediately after the invasion said, “The conventional view was that Iraq was one of the most Western-oriented of Arab states, — with its British-educated, urban, and secular professionals. I don’t think anyone in London appreciated how far Islamism had gone.”

Officials alone cannot be blamed. Ministers failed to ask serious questions. Mr. Blair never called on the experts for detailed analysis of the consequences of an invasion, officials say. He saw the war as Iraq’s liberation and felt any post-war problems would pale in the face of Iraqi delight.

Opposition parties urged the government last year to authorise a full-scale independent inquiry into London’s pre-war discussions, but Mr. Blair refused to. His successor, Gordon Brown, has taken the same line. The two men claim it would be wrong as long as British troops remain in Iraq. In the absence of a public inquiry, this reporter interviewed a range of recently retired officials who now feel freer to talk about the crucial pre-invasion period.

Contrary to the conventional view that the occupation’s problems stem mainly from failure to plan for post-war Iraq, they say there was plenty of planning, from how to react to mass refugee flows and a humanitarian crisis to the fall-out from a sharp rise in the world price of oil. The real failure, they concede, was one of political analysis. Officials did not study how Iraqis would react to an occupation and what political forces would emerge on top once Saddam was removed. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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