Britain found itself in a subservient, as much as a special, relationship with the US over the invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 and was rarely able to overturn sometimes ill-informed American decision-making, the lead British administrator in Iraq in 2004 has claimed.

Giving a unique insight into the realities of the UK-US relationship at a time of stress, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a former UK ambassador to the UN and one of Britain’s most highly regarded diplomats, suggested that British influence over the US during the war was at the margins.

“We were in the second-class carriage not driving the engine,” he said, adding that the US administrators “saw Iraq as an American project in every sense that mattered and only Americans – and the right Americans at that – were qualified to conduct it”.

Greenstock said the shadow of the war still hung over contemporary politics, and even the current isolationism in the UK revealed in the Brexit vote could be traced back to “the British public’s distaste for the Iraq war”. “The elite and the superpower is no longer accepted,” he said.

In his book Iraq: the Cost of War and accompanying Guardian interview, Greenstock also suggested that the rebellion against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad may have happened regardless, but said the “predatory emergence of al-Qaida and then Islamic State at the heart of the Syrian opposition was made far more likely by the survival of [Isis leader] Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq and by the battle-hardening experience of the resistance there”.

Greenstock abandoned plans to publish the book in 2005 after complaints from the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, but it has now been released with Whitehall consent following publication of the Chilcot report in the summer. Sir John Chilcot is due to give evidence to parliament’s liaison committee on Wednesday.

Greenstock said the Iraq episode had done immense damage to US standing. “To most people on the planet now it is unacceptable for the US on its own to interpret international legitimacy.”

Due to wider changes in society, he claimed, “America’s pure moral authority is no longer greater than if it was a small island state”.

The whole US Iraq effort was dysfunctional, he said, because the political and military wings were not unified, and there was an optimism culture that discouraged open debate. Colin Powell, the then secretary of state, took to reading UK rather than US telegrams from Baghdad to find out the the truth of the chaos in Iraq. Greenstock likened the US’s Baghdad-based Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to “a cowboy operation”, adding that its size was that of an embassy rather than a functioning government, its true role in the wake of the invasion.

In one of the cardinal themes of the book, Greenstock argued: “Throughout the whole Iraq saga the UK never had a significant impact on US policy formulation.”



He added: “We have got to understand that, for all the rhetoric, we have different backgrounds, different values, different working methods, different psychologies, in approaching a serious military or politico-military operation; that not only is it quite difficult to inter-operate with the Americans, but that Americans don’t inter-operate well with each other.



“America will make its decisions on American advice, within American procedures and politics. They do not close doors, but they do not open the doors where the final decisions are made. It would not have occurred to Donald Rumsfeld to consult the British every time he took a corner on the road.”

Paul Bremer (right) jealously guarded decision-making, according to Greenstock. Photograph: Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images

He said: “I sensed from the main UK official, Nigel Sheinwald, who was in constant conversation with the US national security adviser, Condi Rice, that there were limits on what we could say to Washington. So many things were going wrong in 2004, Britain could not raise them all at the same time. It is a junior cousin status, and you can only play the relationship for as far as the elastic will give.”

An additional problem was that the UK’s excellent contacts with the US state department were redundant due to postwar planning being handed to the Pentagon, where UK contacts with the true decision-makers were very thin.

Tony Blair, Greenstock said, was constantly having to judge how much to load on to any one conversation with George W Bush for fear the door would be slammed shut. Greenstock suggested: “Perhaps because we have adopted the role of first ally, we over-expect that we have some privileges in the decision-making process.” Greenstock felt forced to remind UK cabinet ministers that although Britain might want 50% of the influence it only provided 2% of the resources in the war.

Greenstock added: “I personally believe that the prime minister liked to avoid rows, and therefore he wasn’t going to take things through to a hard argument with Washington.”

He said Blair’s senior advisers were exasperated because the prime minister would not draw a clear line on what the UK was prepared to do.

The UK was not consulted on key decisions such as the appointment of the CPA leadership, the decision to stay in Iraq until elections were held or the orders requiring tens of thousands of Ba’ath party officials to be sacked, he said.

“Bush got the mission wrong,” Greenstock said. “It was too narrowly focused on getting rid of Saddam Hussein and not the next stage, otherwise he would have insisted on a different military mission. The Brits were too trusting in assuming the Americans had thought what sort of Iraq they wanted.”

He revealed that as UK representative to the CPA in Baghdad he was ordered by Paul Bremer, the lead US CPA official, to be loyal to the US. He said he was systematically excluded from all meetings on oil contracts, electricity, money, and prisons. He was also excluded from most meetings on US intelligence or security.

He claimed Bremer’s “jealous guardianship of decision-making shut out the kind of brainstorming discussion at which the UK made the best contributions”.

In his sharpest criticism of Blair, he said the prime minister allowed his reasons for going to go to war to shift from British to US reasons, so embracing the concept of regime change. This disturbed his closest advisers and led to his wider unpopularity, he claims.



Greenstock exonerated Blair from the charge of committing himself to war regardless of Saddam’s behaviour or deliberately misleading the public about Saddam’s possession of biological weapons. He said Blair would have preferred a peaceful outcome with compliance by Saddam with the UN weapons inspectors. He claimed that as late as weeks before the war started Blair would have been overjoyed if Bush had said he would delay the invasion.

“The prime minister would have been, if he had been in sole control of this, much more comfortable with making a decision on war after the summer [of 2003] than before the summer. But there was no way that we were going to get that out of the Americans. So in that sense we were on a timetable of American making, which we couldn’t escape from, and therefore the prime minister’s decision was absolutely black or white. Either he went with them or he did not. He didn’t have a third route.”

He claimed the British were willing to fly blind alongside the Americans, and that they were totally unprepared for the occupation and had not adequately assessed the risks or the need to ensure security after the fall of Saddam. He also suggested Blair did not make sure the UK government addressed the crisis as it developed in 2004. “What I thought was structurally weak was that there was no clear political responsibility taken at an elected level below the prime minister in London,” he said.

He wrote scathingly: “Choices were made with a best-case scenario, with no insurance policy in place for the worst outcome. The US suffered a ‘reveal no weakness’ mode with no one clearly accountable for the results. The Americans worked on an assumption that difficulties did not require a deep analysis and no one could in the end resist American power.

“The reliance on one channel of Iraqi exile advice, together with the failure to examine the conflicting forces inside Iraq itself with all the American expertise available, led to the decision to commit the post-conflict administration to such a small team, one that had no experience of political planning and did not attract the respect and attention of the US administration. The emphasis lay on what the US does best: war. No one really knew what would happen in the aftermath.

“As a result a security vacuum developed, the country became awash with arms and many of the civil servants that ran the country were rendered redundant, breeding resentment.”