Britain rushed to invade Iraq

A former British diplomat says government did not tried hard enough to find an alternative to the military action to deal with Iraq's former dictator Saddam Hussein.

Carne Ross, who served as first secretary at the UK's mission to UN between 1997 and 2002, told the Iraq war inquiry on Monday that Britain's pre-invasion containment policy ruled that the government considers sanctions and other measures before leaping to a military solution.

He said no "significant intelligence" backed up the claims that Iraq was armed with weapons of mass destruction but officials opposing a military campaign there were "very beleaguered".

Ross resigned from the Diplomatic Service in 2004 to protest the invasion of Iraq citing serious blunders by the British government in the use of the intelligence and its failure to use possible diplomatic options.

At the inquiry session, Ross made it clear that those who supported the use of economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure and controlling of no-fly zones in Iraq in 2001 were "under pressure".

He said though making sanctions work was "politically difficult" it was "doable" but Washington and London offered "very little senior support" to the UN mission in that regard.

Ross added Saddam regime's illegal oil exports through Turkey and Syria could be hindered to pressure Iraq by cutting its vital income but that was an "available option to us, as a government, that we never took".

"It is astonishing to me that neither the US nor UK did anything about Saddam's illegal bank accounts which we knew to exist in Jordan" he said, "It was far less effort than any subsequent military effort was made to topple Saddam".

Also on the threats posed by Saddam, Ross said "we continued to believe Iraq was certainly pursuing WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programmes […] but we had no significant intelligence".

He said the intelligence documents prepared by the government to justify its attack on Iraq "converted" the "uncertain and patchy" looks of the reports into a "positive" base for military action.