British memo faulted US postwar plan
Report to Blair concluded 'little thought' given
WASHINGTON -- A briefing paper prepared for Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his top advisers eight months before the US-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the US military was not preparing adequately for what the memo predicted would be a ''protracted and costly" postwar occupation.
The eight-page memo provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable and realized more clearly than their US counterparts the potential for the postinvasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.
In its introduction, the memo, ''Iraq: Conditions for Military Action," says US ''military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace," but adds that ''little thought" has been given to ''the aftermath and how to shape it."
The White House took exception yesterday to the characterization of the British memo. ''There was significant postwar planning," said spokesman David Almacy. ''More importantly, the memo in question was written eight months before the war began; there was significant postwar planning in the time that elapsed."
The July 21, 2002, memo was produced by Blair's staff in preparation for a Downing Street meeting with his national security team two days later that has become controversial on both sides of the Atlantic since the disclosure last month of official notes summarizing the session.
In the meeting minutes, which have come to be known as the Downing Street Memo, British officials who had just returned from Washington said Bush and his aides believed war was inevitable and were determined to use intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his relations with terrorists to justify invading Iraq.
The ''intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," said the memo, an assertion attributed to the chief of British intelligence and denied by US officials and Blair during a news conference with Bush last week in Washington. But Democrats in Congress led by Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan have scheduled an unofficial hearing on the matter for Thursday.
Now, disclosure of the memo written in advance of that meeting, along with other British documents recently made public, indicates that Blair's aides were not just concerned about Washington's justifications for invasion, but also believed that the Bush team lacked understanding of what could happen in the aftermath.
In a section titled ''Benefits/Risks," the July 21 memo states, ''Even with a legal base and a viable military plan, we would still need to ensure that the benefits of action outweigh the risks."
Saying ''we need to be sure that the outcome of the military action would match our objective," the memo's authors note that ''a postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise."
The authors add: ''As already made clear, the US military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden."
The memo and other internal British government documents originally were obtained by Michael Smith, who writes for the London Sunday Times. Excerpts were made available to The
A March 14, 2002, memo to Blair from David Manning, then the prime minister's foreign policy adviser and now British ambassador in Washington, reported on talks with Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser.
Among the ''big questions" coming out of his sessions, Manning reported, was that the president ''has yet to find the answers . . . [and] what happens on the morning after."
About 10 days later, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain wrote a memo to Blair to prepare him for meeting with Bush in Crawford, Texas, on April 8, 2002. Straw said ''the big question" about military action against Hussein was, ''how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be any better" because ''Iraq has no history of democracy."
