My Views on News

Geoffrey Hoon, the British Secretary of Defense during the invasion of Iraq, sat down for an exclusive interview with The Guardian on the issue of Iraq.

In addition to admitting errors in the postwar planning phase, Hoon also says the Brits underestimated the influence of Vice President Cheney:

"Sometimes ... Tony had made his point with the president, and I'd made my point with Don [Rumsfeld] and Jack [Straw] had made his point with Colin [Powell] and the decision actually came out of a completely different place. And you think: what did we miss? I think we missed Cheney."

Most interesting of all, however, was Hoon's comment on pre-war WMD intel:

Mr Hoon also expressed regret over the government's claim in the run-up to war that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which, he now accepts, turned out to be false. He said he had "gradually come to the acceptance" the weapons did not exist. But he insisted the government had acted in good faith.

He still does not understand why the intelligence proved to be false. "I've been present at a number of meetings where the intelligence community was fixed, and looked in the eye and asked are you absolutely sure about this? And the answer came back 'Yes, absolutely sure'."

Mr Hoon added: "I saw intelligence from the first time I came into office, in May 1999 - week in, week out - that said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ... I have real difficulty in understanding why it was, over such a long period of time, we were told this and, moreover, why we acted upon it."

Obviously, this further puts the lie (bad pun intended) to the charge, now taken as gospel among most Democrats, that the Bush administration knowingly fed the public false information to justify going to war. The Brits were as wrong about the pre-war intel on Iraq as we were (as were many other countries), and prior to taking action against Saddam we'd all been laboring under the same misperceptions for close to a decade.