Sir Peter Ricketts
Ricketts on Blair's wider concerns in the Middle East
"We now look at Crawford [when George Bush met Tony Blair in April 2002] as a key event in the Iraq saga, but for those of us preparing at the time for the prime minister's visit, the Arab/Israel issue was at least as major a concern. It was a time when the Israelis were occupying the West Bank and there was military pressure on Jenin ... The briefing for the prime minister was at least as concerned with Arab/Israel and I think his discussions with the president were as much concerned with that as with Iraq. It was an issue which he was passionately concerned about and very, very active in pressing the president on."
On the need for diplomacy
"The prime minister and David Manning [Blair's foreign policy adviser] and the foreign secretary could not have been clearer with the United States, throughout the period from Crawford onwards, that if the UK were to be part of some eventual military operation, not at that time decided, then it would be essential that we exhausted every option short of that, most particularly through the UN. That could not have been clearer."
On the presumption of war
"That was not my presumption, no. My presumption was that we were now in a phase of diplomacy backed by the threat of force. It had been containment up to 9/11. By the summer of 2002, it was diplomacy backed by the threat of force and the threat of force became more and more obvious as the autumn went on.
On the need for a legal basis
"I was conscious of two things. First of all, I was absolutely sure that it would not be possible for British forces to join military operations without the agreement of the law officers, the CDS [chief of defence staff] would require the attorney general to make clear that he was giving a lawful order in ordering our troops into military operations. So that was an absolute requirement, and, also, that the UN route offered Saddam Hussein the opportunity to comply."
Edward Chaplin
On the lack of post-war planning
"I think they [the Pentagon and neo-conservatives] had a touching faith that, once Iraq had been liberated from the terrible tyranny of Saddam Hussein, everyone would be grateful and dancing in the streets and there would really be no further difficulty and the Iraqis would somehow magically take over and restore their state to the democratic state that it should be in ... some Americans were hearing some very happy talk from the likes of Mr [Ahmed] Chalabi [leader of an exile group] that, once Saddam Hussein had gone, they didn't need to worry, everything would be fine, the subtext being particularly if they handed over power to someone like Mr Chalabi ... We had a view that they carried actually very little credibility where it mattered in Iraq.
"They really didn't want to hand things over to the UN. They just thought that was against US interests and against the interests of Iraq."
On splits within the UN security council after the failure to pass a second UN resolution after 1441
"I think there was – and this was very clear, I think – a fundamental lack of trust at the heart of the security council amongst the permanent five [US, Russia, UK, France, and China] and in particular between the United States and France, and I think it boiled down to the fact that the United States could not, did not believe that, there were any circumstances in which the French would join military action, whatever happened, however much time we gave the inspectors, whatever Saddam Hussein did."
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