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Blair`s concentration of power blamed for Iraq chaos

IRNA

London, Nov 24, IRNA -- Former British foreign secretary Lord Owen has
blamed Prime Minister Tony Blair`s concentration of power for the 
current chaos in occupied Iraq. 
Discussing the new overseas and defense secretariat created by 
Blair in his office, Owen said that the cabinet discussed fairly 
frequently `but the foreign office, ministry of defense and ministry 
of overseas development were not deeply enough involved`. 
"In part this seems to be why Britain was not able to plan for the
war`s aftermath more effectively. We cannot just blame the Bush 
administration," he said in an article for next month`s edition of 
Prospect, a monthly magazine on current affairs. 
Labor`s former foreign secretary criticized the planning for the 
aftermath of the war as being `too Pentagon-dominated in the US` and 
said that it was also hampered in Britain by `politicians keeping 
their fingers crossed that there would not be a war`. 
"Neither the US nor Britain appear to have anticipated that Saddam
Hussein might stage a guerrilla war after defeat in a conventional 
battle and were too confident that former Iraqi military units would 
come across to the coalition," he said. 
Owen, who said that he still supported launching the war, also 
referred back to `an unnecessary loss of moral authority before the 
war` being caused by the failure to secure a second UN vote, when he 
believed authority had already been granted by previous resolutions. 
Britain, he said, sustained a `very serious rebuff` and there were
`deep political questions as to why our diplomacy failed so miserably 
and truly worrying questions as to why our intelligence appears to 
have been so deficient`. 
Owen, who was Britain`s foreign secretary during the 1979 Islamic 
Revolution in Iraq, drew parallels between Blair`s concentration of 
powers from 1997 and that of his Conservative predecessor Lady 
Thatcher during the 1980s. 
He suggested that Blair felt the need to dominate foreign and 
security policy because he `clearly does not dominate economic and 
fiscal policy` run by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, his 
leadership rival. 
Like Thatcher, Blair will follow Thatcher`s demise at the hands of
his own party unless there are changes in both the organization and 
attitude of his office, Owen warned. 
HC/AH/210 
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