LONDON, 3 May 2007 — Geoff Hoon, the British defense secretary during the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, admitted in an interview published yesterday that Britain and the United States had not properly planned what would happen after the invasion.
Hoon, now in the lesser position of minister for Europe, also said that he and his colleagues had disagreed with their American counterparts over key decisions taken in the Iraq war, but had under-estimated the role of the US vice president.
Speaking to The Guardian, Hoon conceded, “We didn’t plan for the right sort of aftermath.”
“Maybe we were too optimistic about the idea of the streets being lined with cheering people,” he said.
He continued to say that history would have to be the judge of whether coalition planners should have anticipated the level of violence between rival Sunni and Shiite communities in Iraq.
“Given what we know now, I suppose the answer is that we should (have known), but we did not know that at the time.” Britain’s military intervention has proved politically costly for the governing Labour party, with the war often cited as one of the principal reasons for a drop in support for the government. A poll in The Independent this week showed that 69 percent of British voters thought the war would define Prime Minister Tony Blair’s legacy.
There are about 7,100 British troops in Iraq, most of whom are in and around the southern Iraqi city of Basra, though the government has said it wants to withdraw about 1,600 this year.
Hoon told the daily that US Vice President Dick Cheney wielded more power than the British had anticipated, in comparison to then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, in terms of President George W. Bush’s decision-making.
Sometimes, Blair “had made his point with the president, and I’d made my point with Don and (then foreign secretary) Jack (Straw) had made his point with Colin, and the decision actually came out of a completely different place.”
“And you think: What did we miss? I think we missed Cheney.” He said that Britain disagreed with key American decisions to disband the Iraqi Army and the removal of all Iraqi civil servants who were members of the Baath party from Iraq’s ministries.
On the subject of the dismissal of Iraq’s military, Hoon said that Britain “certainly argued against (the United States) ... I would have called it the other way.”
Hoon added that Britain also saw the decision to dismiss Iraqi government employees “in a different way” to the United States:
“I think we felt that a lot of the Baath people were first and foremost local government people... they weren’t fanatical supporters of (Iraqi president) Saddam (Hussein).”
He told The Guardian that he still had “real difficulty” understanding why prewar intelligence warning that Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction proved to be false, but has “gradually come to the acceptance” that the weapons do not exist.
Asked about the possibility of a public apology, Hoon said: “That’s the whole thing about apologizing, and saying we were wrong — it’s quite hard.” “At the end of the day, I defy anyone to go through what we went through and come to a different conclusion.”
Hoon’s comments come just a day before crucial elections to some local councils in England, as well as the Scottish and Welsh regional assemblies, where Labour is expected to fare poorly.
The British Defense Ministry declined to comment on the interview.
