London, November 28: Former British ambassador to the United States Christopher Meyer admitted that British and American officials were desperately looking for a ‘smoking gun’ that would justify their invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
“We found ourselves scrabbling for the smoking gun, which was another way of saying, ‘It’s not that Saddam has to prove himself innocent, we now bloody well have to prove he’s guilty.’ And we’ve never — we, the Americans, the British — we’ve never really recovered from that,” he said.
Meyer noted that the Bush administration’s timetable for military action was too tight and did not allow enough time for UN inspectors to search for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction which were never found.
Meanwhile, former British ambassador to the United Nations Jeremy Greenstock, said Friday that US was ‘hell bent’ on a 2003 military invasion of Iraq and actively undermined efforts by Britain to win international authorization for the war.
Greenstock added that George W. Bush had no real interest in attempts to agree on a U.N. resolution to provide explicit backing for the conflict. The ex-diplomat pointed out that serious preparation for the war had already begun in early 2002 and took on an unstoppable momentum.
Greenstock told the five-person inquiry panel that the failure to win UN approval for the war had seriously undermined the legitimacy of the conflict.
He said, in his opinion, the US-led invasion of Iraq was legal, a view rejected by critics who say it violated international law, but was of “questionable legitimacy”.
“It did not have the democratically observable backing of the great majority of member states, or even perhaps of the majority of people inside the UK,” he said.
In London, an anti-war rally in 2003 drew an estimated 2 million Demonstrators, the largest street protest in a generation.
More than one million Iraqis have died due to the war, according to data compiled by the London-based Opinion Research Business (ORB) and its research partner in Iraq, the Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies (IIACSS).
Moreover, a fifth of Iraqi households have lost at least one family member due to the conflict. The United Nations estimates the number of displaced persons at more than four million, nearly half of whom have fled to neighboring countries, particularly Syria.
——Agencies