Former British Defense Minister on Iraq Disaster: "Cheney Ran It"

May 3 (EIRNS)--Geoff Hoon, British Secretary for Defense during the 2003 Iraq war, said that the planning for the aftermath of the military victory had been wrong because of the role of U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, in an exclusive interview with Britain's The Guardian on May 2.

Hoon, now Britain's Minister for Europe, said, "Sometimes ... Tony [Blair] had made his point with the President, and I'd made my point with Don [Rumsfeld] and Jack [Straw] had made his point with Colin [Powell], and the decision actually came out of a completely different place. And you think: What did we miss? I think we missed Cheney."

Hoon said that Britain had argued strongly against the summary dismissal of Iraq's 350,000-strong army and police forces, but the U.S. was uncompromising. The sacking of so many with military training and weapons allowed "Saddam's people to link up with al-Qaida and to link up ultimately with Sunni insurgents" to foment sectarian violence. It was also a mistake, Hoon said, to fire all state employees with Ba'ath Party membership because "they were first and foremost local government people ... they weren't financial supporters of Saddam."

This occurred, Hoon said, because dealing with the U.S. Administration was a "multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle." Hoon, The Guardian reports, "accepted that Britain had greatly underestimated the influence of the neo-con Vice-President Mr. Cheney, and had lacked a comparable figure able to engage him regularly over the war."