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Blair knew Iraq plans were inadequate

British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed to commit British troops to battle in Iraq in the full knowledge that Washington had failed to make adequate preparations for the postwar reconstruction of the country.

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

He also agreed to commit troops to the conflict even though US President George Bush had personally said Britain could help "some other way".

The disclosures, in a two-part documentary on Britain's Channel 4 television about Blair's decade in power, will raise questions about Blair's public assurances in 2003 that he was satisfied with the post-war planning.

In one of the most significant interviews in the program, Peter Mandelson says that Blair knew the preparations were inadequate but said he was powerless to do more about it.

"Obviously more attention should have been paid to what happened after," Mandelson tells the political commentator, Andrew Rawnsley, who is the presenter in 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 said of Blair.

"Well, I'm afraid that, as we now see, wasn't good enough," he said.

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.

"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," Sir David Manning, now Britain's ambassador to Washington, said in the program.

Manning recalled that Blair was so concerned that he sent him to Washington in March 2002, a full year before the invasion.

On his return to London, Manning immediately 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."

Within a year Britain lost any hope of a proper reconstruction in Iraq when post-war planning was handed to the Pentagon at the beginning of 2003.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, British envoy to postwar administration in Baghdad, says Blair was distressed.

"There were moments of throwing his hands in the air," he said.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, confirms that Bush offered Blair a way out.

"Perhaps there's some other way that Britain can be involved," Rice said Bush said to Blair.

"No, I'm with you," Rice said Blair replied.
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