Ex-envoy defies Blair on Iraq war
Sarah Lyall, New York Times
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2005
London. On Monday, 7 November, the former British ambassador to the United States accused Prime Minister Tony Blair of squandering a golden opportunity to push the United States to delay the invasion of Iraq.
On Tuesday, he characterized Blair's government as, mostly, "a crowd of pygmies."
These assessments, and others, appear in a memoir by the former ambassador, Christopher Meyer, which is being excerpted in British newspapers. Although Blair's Labour government is affecting an insouciance about Meyer's unflattering analysis, the book is proving a huge embarrassment at a time when the prime minister is confronting restiveness in his own party and sturdier than usual challenges from the Conservative opposition.
Meyer, who supported the invasion of Iraq, was known as a skilled ambassador with impeccable contacts who witnessed, or took part in, much of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that led up to the war. That he has broken so completely with the British government tradition of discretion and loyalty, publishing his book so soon after the events he describes - and while Blair is still in office - makes it particularly shocking.
Meyer is now back in London, where he works as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission. He told The Guardian that he did not write the book, titled "D.C. Confidential," for the money and that he planned to donate the proceeds from the newspaper serializations to several children's charities.
Meyer is particularly damning about what he sees as the rush to war in Iraq, accusing the British government and the Bush administration of being ill prepared to deal with the aftermath of the invasion.
"History's verdict," he writes of the war, "looks likely to be that it was terminally flawed both in conception and execution."
In the book, Meyer charges that Blair could have used his influence to delay the Iraq war by six months or so - buying crucial time to determine whether Saddam Hussein had unconventional weapons, to seek a second UN resolution authorizing the use of military intervention, and to formulate a coherent long-term plan for post-Saddam Iraq.
"Indeed, if it all went wrong at the UN, and the U.S. was faced with going to war alone, it seemed to me that Bush might blink," Meyer writes.