BRITAIN: Claims that the British Foreign Secretary Mr Jack Straw made a last-minute plea to Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair not to go to war in Iraq are set to be published in a new book on the conflict.
It says Mr Straw sent a private memo to the Prime Minister just days before hostilities began, urging him to tell President Bush that Britain would offer moral and political support to the US, but no combat troops.
But Mr Blair rejected the advice and demanded an assurance that Mr Straw would support the war despite his reservations, says the book, entitled Blair's War, by political journalist John Kampfner.
Neither the Foreign Office nor 10 Downing Street would comment on the claim. The leader of the Commons, Mr Peter Hain, said Mr Straw had never expressed doubts about the wisdom of the government's policy on Iraq in cabinet meetings in the run-up to war.
Mr Hain told Sky News's Sunday with Adam Boulton: "When the cabinet meetings were held, there was very strong support for the Prime Minister's position, including from the Foreign Secretary, so I don't really know where these stories came from." If true, the allegation would suggest that doubts about the wisdom of committing troops to action in Iraq reached the very innermost circles around Mr Blair.
Kampfner's book also alleges that Mr Blair had secretly agreed to go to war as early as April 2002. And it claims Mr Blair himself had doubts about the intelligence over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which formed the basis of his justification for war, and had received evidence that Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological capability was actually diminishing.
According to Kampfner, Mr Straw sent Mr Blair a personal memo warning that going to war without an explicit UN resolution would be damaging for Britain. Instead, he urged him to offer to deploy British troops for peacekeeping and reconstruction work after the conflict. But he was told his intervention had come too late.