No decision on Iraq attack, insists Hoon

Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon today insisted that no 'political' decisions had been taken on a United States-led operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Mr Hoon refused to be drawn on press reports suggesting military commanders in both Britain and the US were unhappy at the idea of a full scale invasion of Iraq to oust Saddam.

"The reports are a long way ahead of the political decision-making," he said during a lecture at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

"There have been no political decisions taken and there have been no decisions on the contribution of forces on the ground in Iraq."

He did, however, emphasise that British military commitments elsewhere in the world were reducing, with the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, and plans to scale back the international military presence in the Balkans.

"t is a calmer period as far as the United Kingdom is concerned," he said.

Mr Hoon also stressed the importance that the British armed forces kept up with developments in the US so that they could continue to operate alongside the Americans.

"It is crucial that we are capable of working together with the United States," he said.

"One of the concerns that we must all have is that the massive expansion in the US defence budget, the investment they made in new technology, could mean it is increasingly difficult for us to be inter-operable with the United States.

"That is something that we in the United Kingdom must at all costs avoid. Part of what we are looking at is to ensure that we don’t run a distant second to the United States and can’t operate alongside the United States."