LONDON, April 29: Britain's chief envoy in Baghdad gave advice to a group of 52 former diplomats over a letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair that savaged his policies in Iraq and the Middle East, a newspaper said on Wednesday.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who has spent just over six months as Britain's special representative to Iraq, had some "interesting" views about events in the country, one of the signatories of the letter told The Times newspaper.
Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, who drafted the virtually unprecedented missive, told the paper that Sir Greenstock had felt unable to add his name to the signatories.
"He quite understandably thought it would be a bit two-faced for him to join (in signing)," Mr Miles said. "But he had some interesting views on Iraq. These were reflected in the letter."
The involvement, however tacit, of one of Britain's most senior serving diplomats in the near-unprecedented protest adds yet further to the woes of Mr Blair over Iraq and the Middle East. In the letter, sent on Monday, the 52 ex-diplomats - many of them seasoned Middle East hands - took the prime minister to task for toeing the US line on Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It also urged him to use his reputed influence in Washington to persuade the administration of President George Bush to change tack from its current "doomed policies". Downing Street has sought to portray these views as somewhat out of touch with current thinking.
However the fact that Sir Greenstock - Britain's former ambassador to the United Nations, who leaves Iraq for retirement this weekend - backed the letter meant such dissent was present at the highest levels of government, The Times noted.
Earlier on Wednesday, Downing Street's attempts to play down the affair were also confounded by the intervention of Mr Blair's former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who sided with the dissidents.
"Britain now finds itself yoked to a White House approach to the Middle Eastern region that is not the product of any knowledge of its complexity or understanding of its culture, but the result of the simplistic and fundamentalist ideology of the neo-conservatives who influence Mr Bush," Mr Cook wrote in the Independent newspaper.
"Both the Middle East and UK are victims of the faith-based foreign policy pursued by the Bush administration," said Mr Cook, who resigned from Mr Blair's government last year in protest over the invasion of Iraq.
Among the signatories of the letter were former British ambassadors to Iraq and Israel, as well as Marrack Goulding, a former head of peacekeeping for the United Nations, and Sir Crispin Tickell, who served as Britain's ambassador to the UN.
"By the standards of diplomatic communiques, their statement is off the Richter scale," said Mr Cook, who served as foreign secretary from 1997 to 2001. Mr Blair kept up a defence of his Iraq policy in parliament on Wednesday, rejecting the diplomats' assertion that not enough was done in the way of pre-war planning for an Iraq minus Saddam Hussein. -AFP
