By IRNA
London :The way the Iraq war was conducted was a “tragedy” that has seriously damaged the credibility of the US and the UK on the international stage, according to former British Ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock.
Greenstock blamed the architects of the 2003 joint invasion, in particular the US, of “woefully inadequate planning.” Years of potential progress were wasted in the first few days in April 2003 after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, he said.
“Nothing was so careless as the approach to security. It all started to go wrong immediately after the conflict was over on April 9 2003. After a meticulously planned and executed invasion, the light-switch was turned off.”
The criticisms come in the introduction of a new book, War Without Consequences: Iraq’s Insurgency and the Spectre of Strategic Defeat, published Wednesday by the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) to mark the fifth anniversary of Saddam’s overthrow.
Greenstock served as UK Ambassador in New York during the countdown to the war and subsequently as Prime Minister Tony Blair’s special envoy to Iraq. His own memoirs have reportedly been blocked by the UK Foreign Office.
“We cannot just put these mistakes behind us and move on, because the consequences have seriously affected, at least for a while, the credibility of the US and the UK in the international arena,” he warned.
The former envoy said that also damaged was “the range of instruments they can legitimately and effectively bring to bear in the Middle East and their capacity to give due priority to other pressing problems.”
He uses the book to pay tribute to the courage and resourcefulness of the British troops, who have “regularly risked their lives to put the interests of the Iraqi people first” but suggested that they had been let down by their political masters.
“They were all let down by a high-level failure to provide a strategic framework combining understanding of the complexity of the task, knowledge of the terrain and deployment of adequate resources,” Greenstock said.