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Author regrets writing draft of UK's discredited Iraq arms dossier

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Feb 18, IRNA
UK-Iraq arms Dossier
The former head of the British Foreign Office's news department Monday took the unprecedented step of expressing his regret for writing the first draft of the discredited Iraq arms dossier, used to justify the 2003 war.

"With hindsight, I wish that I had been neither one of life's natural volunteers, nor a fast writer. Although I thought the dossier tactically unwise, I didn't question the strategic case the government was then making," John Williams said.

In an article in the Guardian newspaper, Williams insisted he was opposed to Prime Minister Tony Blair announcing there should be a dossier, but that as press secretary to former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, he "lost without argument" against the case.

"I didn't realise then that a bigger argument had been lost. It is clear from accounts written since that President Bush and his fellow believers, particularly Vice-President Dick Cheney, were not to be deterred," he said.

His admission of regret comes after the Foreign Office was ordered last month to publish the secret draft of the discredited dossier, written in September 2002, under the country's Freedom of Information Act (FOI).

"In the year and a half since I left the Foreign Office, I have thought a lot about how we got such a big thing so wrong. And I have questioned my own role," Williams said.

He suggested that if there was to be a dossier of Saddam Hussein's arms threat he felt it was "better to influence" it and this was why he volunteered to write a draft based on the material available at the ti me.

"My alarm bells never rang about Blair's policy on Iraq," the former press secretary said. One reason, he believed, was that the former prime minister had been proved right to militarily intervene in Kosovo in 1999.

"I thought at the time that what he had done in Kosovo had set a precedent for justified intervention, and that Blair's judgment was sound. Sadly, being right once doesn't necessarily make you right twice," he lamented.

Despite being ordered under the FOI to publish the draft, Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells has said that the government has yet to decide whether or not to make it available.

But Howells said that it would be subjected to a "very small redaction in the manuscript annotations" if, and when, the document is released.

The government has previously insisted that the final dossier, which was used to justify the 2003 joint US-UK invasion, was entirely the work of intelligence agencies.

The New Statesman magazine, which has been campaigning for the release, has suggested that the Foreign Office has been insisting on the handwritten note on the Williams' draft because it would be damaging to international relations.

Since leaving the Foreign Office in May 2007, Williams has since set up his own communications company. He previously served as press secretary for six years not only to Straw, but his predecessor Robin Cook, Jack Straw and successor Margaret Beckett.

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