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UK must not be 'conned' again by the US over Iran, warns Cook

IRNA

 London, May 30, IRNA -- Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook   
warned Friday that Prime Minister Tony Blair's government must "not   
be suckered a second time" by the US over Iran as it was over the war 
against Iraq.                                                         
    "Britain was conned into a war to disarm a phantom threat in      
which not even our major ally really believed," he said in relation to
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claims that Saddam Hussein's     
banned weapons may have been destroyed before the invasion of Iraq.   
    "The truth is that the US chose to attack Iraq not because it     
posed a threat, but because they knew it was weak and expected its    
military to collapse," said Cook, who resigned from his cabinet post  
as House of Commons leader in protest against the war.                
    The former foreign secretary was responding to what he called the 
Bush Administration's "blanket hostility to Iran" following the Iraq  
war, saying that Rumsfeld's "latest sabre-rattling" was consistent    
with the "one dimensional character" of his world view.               
    In an article for the Independent newspaper Friday, he spoke of   
the British government being left in an "uncomfortable position" now  
that the US felt it did not "need to keep up the pretence" that it    
fought the war against Iraq to deliver disbarment.                    
    "The more time passes, the greater the gulf will widen between    
the obliging candour on the US side that they never was a weapons     
threat and the desperate obfuscation on the British side that we might
still find one," Cook warned.                                         
    He suggested that the time had come when the British government   
needed to concede that the war was not because Saddam was a threat to 
the US national interests but "for reasons of US foreign policy and   
Republican politics."                                                 
    "One advantage of such clarity is that it would help prevent us   
from being suckered a second time" over Iran, the former Foreign      
Secretary said.                                                       
    He referred to the British policy of constructive engagement with 
Iran, which he helped to initiate after Blair's Labour government     
came to power in 1997, as making "sense" in securing reforms in Iran. 
    "This time we must make clear to the White House that we are not  
going to subordinate Britain's interests to a US policy of            
confrontation. Iran must not become the next Iraq," Cook warned.      
/SF/AR                                                                
End