Blair knew US had no post-war plan for Iraq

In a new two part documentary for Channel Four on Blair's ten years in office, it is being revealed that Blair knew that the Americans had no plans for what to do in post-war Iraq and that he committed British troops even though Bush had offered that the Brits could contribute in "some other way".

In a devastating account of the chaotic preparations for the war, which comes as Blair enters his final full week in Downing Street, key No 10 aides and friends of Blair have revealed the Prime Minister repeatedly and unsuccessfully raised his concerns with the White House.

The disclosures, in a two-part Channel 4 documentary about Blair's decade in Downing Street, will raise questions about Blair's public assurances at the time of the war in 2003 that he was satisfied with the post-war planning. In one of the most significant interviews in the programme, Peter Mandelson says that the Prime Minister knew the preparations were inadequate but said he was powerless to do more.

'Obviously more attention should have been paid to what happened after, to the planning and what we would do once Saddam had been toppled,' Mandelson tells The Observer's chief political commentator, Andrew Rawnsley, who presents the documentary.

'But I remember him saying at the time: "Look, you know, I can't do everything. That's chiefly America's responsibility, not ours."' Mandelson then criticises his friend: 'Well, I'm afraid that, as we now see, wasn't good enough.'.

US readers might be surprised to realise that this has been an issue in Britain since long before the invasion. British newspapers were speculating in late 2002 about the lack of a plan for the post invasion period, obviously because people within the government were worried enough to be leaking on the subject.

No-one doubted that the coalition forces would have little difficulty in overthrowing an Iraqi regime weakened by twelve years of punitive sanctions, but the problem was always how one united an Iraqi society - made of mainly three different groups - who had only been held together by the iron fist of Saddam.

Iraq was, after all, a British construct. It was formed by drawing lines in the sand with no consideration of the ethnicity of it's component parts. This was always going to be a potential powder keg.

Blair's most senior foreign affairs adviser at the time of the war makes clear that Blair was 'exercised' on the exact issue raised by the war's opponents. Sir David Manning, now Britain's ambassador to Washington, says: 'It's hard to know exactly what happened over the post-war planning. I can only say that I remember the PM raising this many months before the war began. He was very exercised about it.'

Manning reveals that Blair was so concerned that he sent him to Washington in March 2002, a full year before the invasion. Manning recalls: 'The difficulties the Prime Minister had in mind were particularly, how difficult was this operation going to be? If they did decide to intervene, what would it be like on the ground? How would you do it? What would the reaction be if you did it, what would happen on the morning after?

'All these issues needed to be thrashed out. It wasn't to say that they weren't thinking about them, but I didn't see the evidence at that stage that these things had been thoroughly rehearsed and thoroughly thought through.'

On his return to London, Manning wrote a highly-critical secret memo to Blair. 'I think there is a real risk that the [Bush] administration underestimates the difficulties,' it said. 'They may agree that failure isn't an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it.'

What's astonishing is that Blair went ahead without having what happened after the invasion ever thrashed out with the Americans. It is, as Menzies Campbell says, "a devastating indictment".

It is quite clear from all the reports that Blair was aware of the problems that lay in Iraq after the war, even if his American counterparts weren't, which makes his decision to go ahead all the more odd.

With Bush signalling that the Brits didn't need to send troops, and that we could help in "some other way", it's as if Blair was so anxious not to be excluded from the party that he deliberately ignored his own fears and apprehensions and simply ploughed on anyway.

And, when one considers that he was sending young people to their possible deaths, it's simply scandalous that he did so whilst well aware of the shortcomings of the American plan.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's envoy to the postwar administration in Baghdad, confirms that Blair was in despair. 'There were moments of throwing his hands in the air: "What can we do?" He was tearing his hair over some of the deficiencies.' The failure to prepare meant that Iraq quickly fell apart. Greenstock adds: 'I just felt it was slipping away from us really, from the beginning. There was no security force controlling the streets. There was no police force to speak of.'

The programme will undermine all the reassurances Blair gave to Neil Kinnock and others that he was satisfied with the post invasion planning:

'I said to Tony, are you certain?' Kinnock told the programme. 'And when he said: "I'm sure," that was a good enough reassurance.'

We now know that those assurances were worthless and that Blair himself was "tearing his hair" over the lack of planning for the post war period. And yet he sent the troops in anyway. Despite being told that he didn't have to.

Nor did he do so for any great honourable reason. He did so because he was determined to prove that he could have as good a relationship with a Republican administration as he had had with Clinton. And, with that narrow political consideration in mind, (depriving the Tories of a possible Republican ally) he sent the British armed forces into battle and crossed his fingers.

The results of that gamble are there for all to see in the streets of Iraq today.

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Tags: Blair, Bush, Iraq war, post invasion planning, Saddam, Labour, Conservatives, Republican