By Greg Hurst, The Times Online UK
Britain’s outgoing Ambassador to Washington has accused the Bush Administration of misleading Tony Blair over its much-criticised plans for the reconstruction of Iraq after the invasion of 2003.
Sir David Manning, who leaves his post at the end of this month, said that Britain was left in the dark as Donald Rumsfeld, the former US Defence Secretary, overruled the plans for postwar Iraq drawn up by Colin Powell and the US State Department.
“There were plans made and deployed in the State Department, but in the end the State Department wasn’t allowed to take the job,” Sir David told the New Statesman.
“I did not know that [Rumsfeld’s Defence Department] was going to take over the running of the country. We didn’t have any sense that that was about to be the way postwar Iraq was going to be run.”