Publication of The Costs of War by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN during the build-up to the 2003 war and the Prime Minister's special envoy to Iraq in its aftermath, has been halted. In an extract seen by The Observer, Greenstock describes the American decision to go to war as 'politically illegitimate' and says that UN negotiations 'never rose over the level of awkward diversion for the US administration'. Although he admits that 'honourable decisions' were made to remove the threat of Saddam, the opportunities of the post-conflict period were 'dissipated in poor policy analysis and narrow-minded execution'...
Greenstock's British publishers, Random House, were remaining tight-lipped but it is thought that the book is almost certain not to be published in the autumn as planned. It was also to be serialised in a British newspaper.
In fairness, the block on publication is based on the revelation of privileged conversations with Blair, Straw and others. The problem is that those conversations should tell precisely the story that we'll need to hear in order to figure out how the Iraq debacle was allowed to happen from the UK's perspective.
In contrast to Rove's leaks against a devoted CIA agent for political gain, this is precisely the kind of inner knowledge that actually improves the population's ability to evaluate its leaders. Hopefully the book will come out fairly soon one way or another, but if Blair wants to be any better than his partner in crime on Iraq, he needs to let Greenstock tell something resembling the whole story.
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