Report: Blair was warned of post-Saddam turmoil

LONDON — The government was accused Saturday of misleading the British public over plans for postwar Iraq after a newspaper reported that Prime Minister Tony Blair was warned a year before the invasion that postwar stability would be difficult.

Blair responded that the allies had a plan for postwar Iraq, but it had been frustrated by the insurgency.

Citing government documents marked “secret and personal,” The Telegraph newspaper said that Blair’s chief policy adviser Sir David Manning warned Blair that President Bush had no answers to big questions, such as “what happens on the morning after.”

The documents show that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw wrote to Blair a year before the conflict saying large numbers of troops would have to be committed for many years if order was to be maintained after the war, the newspaper reported.

He wrote that nobody seemed to know what would happen after a war had been won, writing: “There seems to be a larger hole in this than anything,” according to the Telegraph.

Blair responded to the report Saturday while taking a break from talks on Northern Ireland that were being held at Leeds castle, southeast of London.

Speaking of the warning he reportedly received from Straw, he said: “What it warned of was this: it’s very important that we don’t replace one dictator, Saddam Hussein, with another.”

That is why, he said, the United States and Britain sought U.N. “blessing” for elections “to guide Iraq to democracy.”

“The idea that we did not have a plan for afterwards is simply not correct. We did, and we have unfolded that plan, but there are people in Iraq who are determined to stop us,” he said.

Blair said Iraq was “the very crucible of the fight against terrorism, against groups that are prepared to kill, or take hostages, or do whatever they can in order to prevent Iraq becoming a stable, democratic country.”

The Daily Telegraph said the documents showed Blair had signed up to the U.S. policy of regime change in March 2002, a year before the conflict started.

“This underlines very starkly not only the reservations that existed in the (Foreign Office) about our ability to handle post-conflict Iraq, but also the lack of a comprehensive plan for the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq, which we consistently called for before the war,” said Michael Ancram, shadow foreign secretary for the opposition Conservative Party.

“The assurances given to us by both the Prime Minister and Jack Straw that such a plan was in hand were clearly misleading, and yet again cast grave doubts on the conduct of ministers in the run up to the war.”