Envoy: Delay may have stopped Iraq war discord

Britain and the US might have been able to avert much of the international discord over the Iraq war if they had planned to fight it in the autumn of 2003 instead of the spring, Britain’s former ambassador to Washington said today.

Sir Christopher Meyer, who left his post just before the war began, said he had always worried that military planning would conflict with UN weapons inspections and eventually cut them off.

“It was extremely difficult to see how you could match the UN timetable with a military timetable based on a contingency plan for a spring campaign,” he said at a gathering of American journalists in London.

Meyer did not say whether he thought planning to fight in the autumn instead of the spring would have prevented war but said it might have helped avoid the bitter international divisions the conflict provoked.

“I remember my thinking as I left Washington was: 'What a pity we didn’t decide to do the contingency planning on a campaign in the autumn,'" Meyer said, noting that Iraq’s heat made a summertime war unfeasible.

“There’s no guarantee that had we done that the outcome would be better than it has been, but it would have allowed more time for the pressure to ratchet up on Saddam, it would have robbed those of an argument who said that (chief weapons inspector Hans) Blix hadn’t been given a chance to do what he’d been mandated to do” and might have helped boost support for another UN resolution on Iraq, Meyer argued.

The US and Britain withdrew an Iraq resolution from the Security Council just before invading.

Meyer, who was ambassador to the United States from 1997 to 2003, said European-American relations were at one of their worst points since the Second World War.

Although many Europeans dislike President George Bush’s administration, most distinguish between the government and the American people and don’t translate their political feelings into general anti-Americanism, he said.

He said ties would probably improve if presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry wins the White House or if Bush gets a second term and takes a different approach with allies.

He also said that while Iraq was mentioned at a dinner Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had together on September 20, 2001, the “overwhelming, dominant subject” was Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terror network.

Vanity Fair magazine had quoted the former envoy in April as saying Bush told Blair “we must come back to Iraq” after dealing with Afghanistan.

Meyer has since said that Iraq was only a footnote in that discussion, which he said did not amount to a decision to go to war.

“I don’t think that occasion can bear that interpretation,” he said today. “What to do about Iraq was something for discussion on another day, and what that thing ought to be was not discussed on September 20.”

Critics have accused the Bush administration of planning after the terror attacks for an eventual war in Iraq instead of focusing exclusively on Afghanistan’s al-Qaida terror camps, a charge the White House denies.