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Cook fears US may `cut and run` from Iraq

IRNA

London, Nov 7, IRNA - Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook 
voiced fears Friday that the US may walk away from Iraq and leave the 
country in the same violent turmoil as it left Afghanistan. 
He also suggested that financial scandals of the occupation, with 
rules ignored over the normal rules of tendering from public 
contracts, may turn out as grave as the intelligence controversies 
over Iraq`s arms that preceded the invasion. 
Cook, who resigned from his cabinet post as House of Commons 
leader in protest against the Iraq war, said that he was relieved 
that even the US Pentagon recognised the need for an exit strategy. 
"I am though anxious that an exit strategy does not become code 
for cut and run," he said, suggesting that the timetable could be 
driven more by the date of President George W Bush`s re-election 
campaign next year than by any progress on the ground. 
The former minister said that Britain and the US should never 
have got themselves into the dilemma in the first place by refusing to
listen to the concerns against the launching the pre-emptive war. 
"But having occupied Iraq, we cannot walk away and leave it in 
the same violent turmoil as we have Afghanistan," he said in an 
article for the Independent newspaper. 
Cook is currently touring the UK to promote his new book on the 
Point of Departure, which traces in diary form his growing 
disillusion with government policy in the countdown to the Iraq war 
that culminated in his resignation two days before the invasion. 
Speaking in Cardiff on Thursday, he repeated his argument that 
Prime Minister Tony Blair knew that Saddam Hussein`s regime had no 
weapons of mass destruction before the war. 
"The real reason why Tony Blair took Britain into Bush`s war is 
because he very strongly believes that Britain must be the number one 
ally of the United States," the former foreign secretary said. 
In his book, he praises Blair for his attempt to get the second 
United Nations resolution, but argues that once the attempt had 
failed, Britain should have refused to accompany Bush into the war. 
HC/214 
End