Giving evidence before the Iraq inquiry, Britain’s man at the UN said that attempts to win international authorisation for the invasion were deliberately undermined by the United States.
Jeremy Greenstock, the UK’s Ambassador to the United Nations at the time testified that President George W. Bush had no real interest in winning a U.N. resolution, which Britain and others had hoped would provide global backing for the conflict.
The ex-diplomat, who later served in Iraq as Britain’s envoy after the invasion, said that serious preparations for the war had begun in early 2002 and that the United States was little troubled by Britain’s hopes of forming an international consensus to justify military action.
In a written statement to the inquiry Greenstock said: “The United States was not proactively supportive of the U.K.’s efforts and seemed to be preparing for conflict whatever the U.K. decided to do,” adding the U.S. stance was “decidedly unhelpful to what I was trying to do in New York.”
Greenstock said that in his opinion the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was legal, a view rejected by critics who say it violated international law because there was no second U.N. resolution specifically authorising the use of force.
But he acknowledged the unpopular war may have lacked legitimacy because the decision to invade did not have broad-based public support in Britain and in many other countries.
“It did not have the democratically observable backing of the great majority of member states, or even perhaps of the majority of people inside the U.K.,” he said.
According to Greenstock British officials, both at the UN and at the Foreign Office, worried about Bush’s private assurances to Blair. Bush insisted he supported work to try to win the support of key allies, including France, Russia and Germany. But when attempts to agree on a second resolution specifically authorising the use of force failed in March 2003 the invasion began just days later.
“President Bush’s words on this subject in public were rather less warm and specific than those he had used with the prime minister in private,” Greenstock wrote in the statement.
Greenstock told the inquiry that the U.N. process also was dented because the Bush administration failed to use sympathy for the United States in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to develop stronger relationships with international partners.
“It was the policy of the Bush administration to seek allies only when they needed allies for a particular piece of policy. If they could do it on their own, they would do it on their own,” Greenstock testified to the panel.
In a sign of just how frustrated Greenstock was at dealing with the US he told the five members of the panel that he threatened to resign his post if no international backing was agreed.
On Thursday Christopher Meyer, Britain’s former ambassador to the U.S told the inquiry that he believed Bush and Blair had used a private meeting at Bush’s Texas ranch, in April 2002, to “sign in blood” an agreement to take military action on Iraq — a year before Parliament approved Britain’s involvement.
Greenstock said that following the Crawford meeting, he realised Britain “was being drawn into quite a different discussion.” But, like Meyer, he said the talks were secretive and the conversation between the British and top U.S. officials were not disclosed to diplomats.
“That discussion was not totally visible to me,” Greenstock said. “I was not being politically naive, but I was not being politically informed either.”
Greenstock said that, by early 2003, the U.S. was unwilling even to consider delaying the Iraq invasion until October 2003, which would have allowed U.N. weapons inspectors more time to search for evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — the key justification for the war.
“The momentum for earlier action in the United States was much too strong for us to counter,” he said in his written statement.
