http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1095545411641&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724LONDON—Top British officials warned before the Iraq war that U.S. President George W. Bush's "grudge match" against Saddam Hussein could result in post-war chaos, secret British government documents reveal.
Prime Minister Tony Blair received the warnings in documents written by his top foreign policy advisers, including Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, a year before British troops took part in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Extracts from the documents, published by The Daily Telegraph newspaper yesterday, reveal that Blair's officials did not accept the Bush administration's main arguments for war.
They did not consider Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction to be an imminent threat, and insisted there was "no credible evidence" to link Iraq to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.
"For Iraq, `regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge match between Bush and Saddam," wrote Peter Ricketts, the foreign office policy director, in March, 2002. Bush was bent on launching the war, the documents said, because he wanted to complete the "unfinished business" of his father, who stopped short of ousting Saddam in the 1991 Gulf War.
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Read the original Telegraph report in its entirety here...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/18/nwar118.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/09/18/ixnewstop.html'Failure is not an option, but it doesn't mean they will avoid it'
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