Families of British troops pressure Blair

LONDON -- One thing became clear to Pauline Hickey after she learned that her 30-year-old son, Christian, had been killed in Iraq in October: In her view, Prime Minister Tony Blair was to blame.

Since then, she has worked relentlessly to get Blair to meet her face to face so she can ask him why he took Britain to war and why he has not yet brought the rest of the troops home.

Hickey, who said she voted for Blair and has always supported his Labor Party, is one of dozens of soldiers' relatives who are planning to march to his official residence at 10 Downing Street on Wednesday to seek a meeting with Blair.

Hickey's decision links her with dozens of soldiers' families across Britain who have captured the public's attention by demanding answers from the government about its justification for going to war, much as Cindy Sheehan did in the United States a year ago.

''I didn't take this decision lightly," the soft-spoken 50-year-old social services worker said about thrusting herself into the public eye. ''It's probably much easier to just kind of say nothing and get on with things. But at the minute, I feel that my son has died for nothing."

To date, 104 British soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Out of an initial deployment of 46,000, Britain now has about 8,000 troops in Iraq, based in the four southern provinces.

In March 2003, at the beginning of the war, just over half of Britons surveyed by the polling firm YouGov said they thought the United States and Britain were right to take military action. The figure jumped to two-thirds in early April, when US forces entered Baghdad.

When asked the same question in September 2005, only 35 percent of those surveyed thought that the countries were right to take military action.

Many soldiers' families say that they initially supported the British presence in the war, which they thought would largely be confined to peacekeeping duties. As the death toll rose, their support waned.

''For some of the families, the grieving process is a private matter," said Andrew Burgin, a spokesman for Military Families Against the War, a group that has helped the families channel their anger and grief. ''For others, it is very necessary to make a public statement."

In the past few months, the organization has increasingly received inquiries from military families interested in joining the antiwar movement. It has been contacted by about one-third of the families of soldiers killed, Burgin said, and even those who are not speaking out publicly are becoming involved through Internet chat rooms and websites, and support groups.

Many family members, like Rose Gentle, say they weren't involved in politics until their children were killed in Iraq.

Gentle and Reg Keys, whose son, Lance Corporal Tom Keys, was killed by an Iraqi mob, unsuccessfully ran for seats in Parliament last May on an antiwar platform. They chose to run in the districts of Blair and the defense minister, respectively, in the hopes of ousting them.

Gentle is also among the military families who filed a motion in Britain's high court that would have launched a public inquiry into the circumstances that led Britain to war in Iraq.

The group's request was denied in December, but their vociferous opposition to the war resonated throughout the country.

''When military families starting chattering, it gets notice -- they're the ones who are supposed to be supportive of foreign policy," said Phil Taylor, professor of international communications at the University of Leeds.

The government announced plans last month to withdraw 800 troops from Iraq by May. Britain's highest-ranking military commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Nick Houghton, said in a newspaper interview in March that Britain might withdraw all of its troops by 2008.

''There is undoubtedly political pressure on the government to try and pull out," said Justin Lewis, a professor of communications at Cardiff University who monitors public opinion about Iraq. This is different from the United States, he said, where there is less support for a complete withdrawal of troops.

British polls suggest that the majority of the public believes that Blair was not honest over reasons for the invasion, particularly over now-discredited allegations that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction. Blair has consistently said that ''getting the job done" would be the test that determined when Britain could completely withdraw troops.

But for Hickey, there's little that Blair can say to assuage her grief.

She still shudders when she thinks of the bottle of champagne in her refrigerator waiting for her son, who was killed by a roadside bomb while on a foot patrol in Basra three days before he was scheduled to return home.

She says she has a list of questions that she wants to ask Blair, should she be granted a meeting: Why the boots her son was issued melted in the desert heat; why her son was not outfitted with an armored car when Blair's wife has one for driving in London; and why Blair chose to take the country to a war led by the Americans and supported by few in the international community.

Since becoming an activist, she says, she has read a lot about Britain and Iraq, and has begun to wonder whether the decision to go to war was made independently of any fears about weapons of mass destruction.

''Up to the point where Chris got killed, we thought it was inconceivable that our government would lie to us," she said.

''Every one of those soldiers -- they're someone's children. You can't send people to their deaths based on lies."