WASHINGTON, June 12: A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the US-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the US military was not preparing adequately for a “protracted and costly” post-war occupation of that country, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.

In its introduction, the memo “Iraq: Conditions for Military Action” notes that US “military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace,” but adds that “little thought” has been given to, among other things, “the aftermath and how to shape it.”

The July 21 memo was produced by Mr Blair’s staff in preparation for a meeting with his national security team two days later that has become controversial since last month’s disclosure of official notes summarizing the session.

In those meeting minutes — which have come to be known as the Downing Street Memo — British officials who had just returned from Washington said President Bush and his aides believed war was inevitable and were determined to use intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his relations with terrorists to justify invasion of Iraq.

The “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” said the memo — an assertion attributed to the then-chief of British intelligence, and denied by US officials and by Mr Blair at a news conference with Mr Bush last week. Democrats in Congress led by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), however, have scheduled an unofficial hearing on the matter for Thursday.

Now, disclosure of the memo written in advance of that meeting — and other British documents recently made public — show that Mr Blair’s aides were not just concerned about Washington’s justifications for invasion but also believed the Bush team lacked understanding of what could happen in the aftermath.

In a section titled “Benefits/ Risks,” the July 21 memo states, “Even with a legal base and a viable military plan, we would still need to ensure that the benefits of action outweigh the risks.”

Saying that “we need to be sure that the outcome of the military action would match our objective,” the memo’s authors point out, “A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise.” The authors add: “As already made clear, the US military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden.”

The British had begun focusing on doubts about a pos-twar Iraq in early 2002. A March 14 memo to Mr Blair from David Manning, then the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser, reported on talks with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Among the “big questions” coming out of his sessions, Mr Manning reported, was that the president “has yet to find the answers . . . [and] what happens on the morning after.”