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.

US wants greater effort from Iraq to form government

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday urged Iraqis on all sides to make greater efforts to overcome differences and end a four-month stalemate in forming a government.

"More is needed from everyone involved," Clinton said after talks with her Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Zebari, saying she shared "a sense of urgency."

"We urge the leaders of Iraq to reach a agreement and to put their personal interest behind the national interest," she said.

"I reiterated the US has no preference about the outcome... but we are concerned about the delay," the top US diplomat said.

For his part, Zebari said the delay was being taken seriously and that despite "some delays, eventually a government will emerge."

"We are doing our best to do that, in order to avoid any constitutional, governmental vacuum."

Iraqi politicians on Monday extended an inaugural parliamentary session by two weeks to give rival blocs more time to form a government, more than four months after the elections.

The parliament, the second democratically elected chamber since the 2003 fall of dictator Saddam Hussein, met briefly for the first time on June 14 after the March 7 general election.

Under the conflict-wracked country's new constitution, there was a one-month deadline from that date for members to reconvene.

But deadlock over who will become Iraq's new prime minister has stalled efforts to form a government.

"Anything the US can do, we stand ready to do in order to encourage the government formation as soon as possible," Clinton said.

Eager to see a peaceful resolution before it begins withdrawing troops in September, Washington has sought to break the political deadlock.

In early July, US Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Iraq to urge politicians to put aside personal ambitions and form a government representative of all Iraqis.

Oil smuggling to Iran embarrassment for Iraq

The smuggling of tens of thousands of gallons a day of crude oil and refined fuels from northern Iraq to Iran, in violation of new U.S. sanctions, is stoking tensions between Iraq's central government and its Kurdish provincial counterparts.

The reports about the oil smuggling surfaced just over a week after the U.S. imposed new sanctions barring the export of refined fuels to Iran. They also arise at a time when Kurdish help may be needed to form the next government as politicians in Baghdad have been deadlocked since the March 7 election.

Iraqi officials quickly vowed to do something about the practice. The smuggling is an embarrassment for Baghdad and the Kurds — both U.S. allies — not only because of the sanctions but also because of Iraqis' perception that politicians are profiting on the trade while the public suffers from fuel shortages.

Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani said Tuesday the cabinet had decided to summon representatives of the Kurdish regional government to discuss the smuggling issue and "to put an end to it, as it harms Iraq's national and economic interests."

"This matter is unacceptable and strange," al-Shahristani told reporters after the cabinet meeting. It is "illogical to export refined products to neighboring countries while Iraq imports refined products such as gasoline."

Days earlier, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said an urgent meeting would be held with Kurdish officials.

The Kurds, however, appeared resistant. One Kurdish government official told The Associated Press he doubted any meeting would take place, noting "the government's mandate is over." He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue.

Kurdish officials acknowledged that some refined fuel from their region was being exported legally, but denied that any crude was being smuggled into Iran.

Kurdish Natural Resources Minister Ashti Hawrami insisted the source of the smuggling problem was not the Kurds. According to the Kurdish news agency, Hawrami said oil from two major refineries in central Iraq is being shipped to Iran and "the Iraqi government's raising of this issue now has a political objective of covering up the unofficial sale of crude oil from southern Iraq."

In a statement this week, the Kurdish regional government blamed Baghdad's policy of selling heavily discounted fuel to private distributors for the Iraqi public, which it said creates "incentives" for the buyers to smuggle it abroad. It acknowledged some of that smuggling may go through Kurdistan and said it is "committed to working with the federal government to eliminate permanently all such profiteering of fuel oil."

An Associated Press reporter who visited the area several weeks ago saw hundreds of fuel tankers lined up at an official crossing on a narrow mountain road at Haj Omran, a Kurdish resort town on the border with Iran. One driver, Nouri Ahmed, said he was to transport his shipment down to the Iranian port of Bandar Imam, where it is unloaded and moved to a tanker in the Gulf.

"I don't know where it goes" from there, Ahmed said.

The oil smuggling is far from new. For several years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, it was one of the preferred ways for insurgents to fund their operations. As security improved, private individuals and political groups picked up on the lucrative practice. Analysts say that smuggling of oil has been going on in the Kurdish north since the early 1990s.

But the issue is in the limelight now after President Barack Obama this month signed the new sanctions, which punish entities involved in exporting refined fuel products to Iran. Iran is a major exporter of crude oil, but it sorely lacks refineries, making it heavily reliant on imports of gasoline and other refined fuels. The U.S. move aims to put extra pressure on Iran over its nuclear program after four rounds of U.N. financial sanctions.

"If Iran had not been placed under international sanctions, the smuggling would have continued without a single comment," Bassem al-Sheik, the editor-in-chief of Ad-Dustour newspaper wrote Monday. He said the Kurdistan government's silence on smuggling for so long was likely because the Kurdish political groups were benefiting from the proceeds.

U.S. officials in Iraq said smuggling had long been an issue, even before the new sanctions were approved. But as major oil companies grow increasingly reluctant to sell refined products to Iran, new players had been stepping up.

"We're concerned about this, and we're reviewing these developments," said Nolan Barkhouse, a U.S. embassy spokesman in Baghdad.

Oil has long been a source of tensions between the central government in Baghdad and the government in the autonomous Kurdish region in the north. The two sides have been at odds over just how much control the Kurds — who sit on more than a third of Iraq's 115 billion barrels in proven crude reserves — should have over the oil in their territory.

Several years ago, Baghdad deemed illegal the unilateral oil deals signed by the Kurds with foreign companies following Saddam Hussein's ouster.

While the Baghdad government struck a deal in June 2009 with the Kurds to allow exports to resume through the pipeline that runs from Kirkuk to Ceyhan, Turkey, the agreement was short-lived, with exports halted three months later over a dispute over payments to foreign companies operating there.

Exports through the line have yet to resume with any consistency, raising the question of what becomes of production from the Taq Taq and Tawke fields that feed it. Taq Taq is operated by China's state-owned Sinopec Group and Turkey's Genel Enerji, and Tawke by the independent Norwegian oil company DNO.

Tawke's production in May — the latest available — stood at about 4,800 barrels per day, far shy of the field's 50,000 barrel per day capacity. Of that production, 80 barrels per day go to power the company's operations at Tawke, according to company figures. The rest is split between DNO's local refinery and the small refineries in the region, said DNO spokesman Tom Bratlie.

While DNO doesn't keep track of what happens to the oil once it's sold, "all deliveries are subject to approval by the local government," Bratlie said. He said oil refined by DNO is distributed by the local government.

The smuggling seems less a matter of helping Iran than of turning a profit.

"It's physically impossible for the oil being smuggled to be more than a drop in the bucket for Iranian needs," Samuel Ciszuk, Mideast energy analyst with IHS Global Insight said.

El-Tablawy is based in Baghdad and Barzanji in Sulaimaniyah; AP writer Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this report from Baghdad and Ian MacDougall from Oslo, Norway.

At least 11 dead in Iraq attacks

At least 11 people were killed in bomb and gun attacks in Iraq on Tuesday, including three by a device which blew up in a mock coffin during a demonstration, security officials said.

Dozens of people took part in the protest in Khales, 65 kilometres (40 miles) north of Baghdad, to demand stiff penalties for the perpetrators of anti-Shiite attacks in the city, the local security operations command said.

The demonstrators were carrying a mock coffin when a booby-trapped device exploded inside the box, killing three people and wounding seven, an official at the centre told AFP.

Sectarian tensions remain high in Khales, a city which in 2006-2007 was a battleground between Sunni insurgents of Al-Qaeda and Shiite militias.

At the end of May, a car bombing in a Khales marketplace killed 30 people, two months after another 42 people perished in a double bomb attack near a coffeeshop and a restaurant.

In Yusifiyah, 25 kilometres (15 miles) south of Baghdad, gunmen on Tuesday killed a leader of the Sahwa militia, which has sided with US forces against Al-Qaeda, and four family members in their home, an interior ministry official said.

In the capital itself, two bombs exploded near a petrol station in the central district of Muhandicin, killing two and wounding five others, the capital's police said.

And a man was killed in the western city of Fallujah when a "sticky bomb" attached to his car blew up, a local police official said.

Although overall levels of violence in Iraq have fallen markedly since their peak in 2006 and 2007, deadly attacks against civilians and security forces take place on a daily basis.

Iraq has only a caretaker government more than four months after a general election in which no clear winner emerged.

Non-military options over Iraq neglected says diplomat

Dealing with Saddam Hussein through sanctions and other methods was a "very available" alternative to military action, a former UK diplomat has said.

Carne Ross, who resigned over the war, told the Iraq inquiry that the UK did not work hard enough to make its pre-2003 policy of containment work.

Officials trying to argue for this approach felt "very beleaguered".

There was no "significant intelligence" to back up beliefs Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, he added.

The Iraq inquiry is continuing to examine the background to the UK's participation in the 2003 invasion, the build-up to the war and its aftermath.

Mr Ross was first secretary at the UK's mission to the UN between 1997 and 2002.

In this role, he played an important role in liaising with UN weapons inspectors in Iraq and Security Council members as they sought to get Saddam Hussein to comply with his disarmament obligations.

Mr Ross resigned from the Diplomatic Service in 2004 in protest over Iraq policy and told the Butler inquiry into the use of intelligence by the British government in 2004 that he believed serious policy mistakes had been made.

He told the Chilcot inquiry on Monday that the policy of trying to contain Saddam Hussein by a combination of economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure and policing of no-fly zones in Iraq, was "under pressure" in 2001.

Enforcement of sanctions was "politically difficult", because of concerns they were not adequately targeted and were being widely breached by the regime, but it was "doable", he said.

However, UN officials received "very little senior support" from London and Washington in their efforts to make the sanctions regime more effective.

During the period, Saddam Hussein's regime was being "sustained" by revenues from illegal oil exports through Turkey and Syria but the international community did little to clamp down on this.

"That was an available option to us, as a government, that we never took," he said.'Not justified'

Other methods of undermining the regime and preventing the momentum towards a military confrontation were neglected, he suggested.

"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.

"That was not brain surgery to attack all those bank accounts. It was far less effort than any subsequent military effort was made to topple Saddam."

Asked about the threat posed by Iraq, Mr Ross said there was no evidence that it was "substantially rearming" in the years before the invasion.

"We continued to believe Iraq was certainly pursuing WMD programmes and there was a widespread belief that Iraq probably possessed some WMD of some kind.

"But we had no significant intelligence, in the time I worked at the UK mission, of significant holdings of WMD."

Criticising the September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons capability, he said the "uncertain and patchy" picture suggested by intelligence reports had been "converted" into the appearance of "positive" knowledge of a threat.

"Whick I think is a process that is not justified," he said.

He also criticised what he said was a document on Iraq's weapons capability circulated to Labour MPs in March 2002 - which suggested Saddam could develop a "crude" nuclear device within five years if arms programmes went unchecked.

This was contrary to the government's position on the issue, he said, while the assertion was not corrected despite efforts by a senior foreign official to draw attention to it.

Amid threat, U.S. heightens security at its Iraq bases

The U.S. military has beefed up security at some of its bases after a threat that an Iranian-backed militant group was planning to attack, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq said Tuesday.


Men from Kataib Hezbollah, a Shiite group that U.S. officials say is trained and funded by Iran'sRevolutionary Guard Corps, crossed into Iran for training and returned to conduct attacks just as U.S. troop levels plummet over the summer, Gen. Ray Odierno said. By September, only 50,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq.

"In the last couple weeks there's been an increased threat," Odierno said in a briefing to reporters. "We've increased our security on some of our bases. We've also increased activity with the Iraqi Security Forces. This is another attempt by Iran and others to influence the U.S. role here inside Iraq."

So far the threat has not manifested, he said.

Odierno said the Iranian-backed militant groups seem focused primarily on attacking U.S. troops, and don't pose a long-term threat to the Iraqi government.

The Kataib Hezbollah group is plotting to use powerful rocket-propelled bombs called Improvised Rocket-Assisted Munitions, or IRAMs, Odierno said. The short-range projectiles are propane tanks packed with explosives and launched with 107 mm rockets, often off the back of pickup trucks.

In the past seven years there have been a total of 16 attacks on U.S. bases with IRAMS, including five in the past year, the U.S. officials said. With the U.S. military moving from smaller bases to larger, more densely populated bases as part of the ongoing drawdown, the IRAMs could be particularly lethal.

"There is a very consistent threat from Iranian surrogates operating in Iraq," Odierno said. "Whether it's connected directly to the Iranian government? We can argue about that. But it's clearly connected to" the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.






Iran has been an influential and sometimes nefarious neighbor to Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Iraqi officials often fly to neighboring Tehran for consultation, and the Islamic republic is a top trade partner for Iraq.

U.S. officials say Iran still funnels weaponry to Shiite militia groups in Iraq, although it does so much less frequently than it did in years past. Overall, Iran is pursuing more of a "soft power" approach in Iraq, Odierno said, trying to exert influence through economic investment and political pressure so as not to alienate the Iraqi people.

"The Iranian-supported surrogates have always been a larger threat to U.S. forces" than to Iraqi security forces," Odierno said. "They target specifically U.S. forces. In my mind they are not a threat to the government of Iraq or the formation of the government of Iraq."

Odierno reaffirmed that the U.S. troop withdrawal remains on track even though Iraq has yet to form a new government, more than four months after the national election. There are currently about 74,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. At the height of the U.S. military surge there were more than 165,000.

Iraq doesn't need more troops now, Odierno said; it needs political and economic support.

"For us it's about eliminating the environment that allows extremism to exist. We haven't eliminated that environment. That environment will get eliminated through economic and political progress," Odierno said. "We're not leaving tomorrow. We're going to have 50,000 American soldiers on the ground here. . . . We're not abandoning Iraq. We're changing our commitment from military-dominated to one that is civilian-led."

Iraq parliament session delayed over govt impasse

Iraq on Monday delayed a parliament session scheduled for this week as the political impasse over who will lead the country drags into its fifth month.

The deadlock comes as U.S. forces are pulling out of the country even as politicians seem unable to compromise over the formation of their future government following inconclusive national elections.

"There are still differences in points of views, so it is impossible to enter the parliament hall," said acting parliament speaker Fouad Massoum, warning that the next session could be delayed for days, if not weeks.

Elections on March 7 did not give any party enough seats to form a majority in the 325-member parliament. For the past several months, the major coalitions have been engaged in intense negotiations to win enough allies to form a government.

The alliance in early May of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's coalition and another Shiite bloc backed by Iran seemed to indicate the process was picking up speed with their super-coalition only four seats shy of a governing majority.

But even that alliance is showing cracks as many of the al-Maliki's putative allies are virulently opposed to the prime minister keeping his job.

Massoum said the fact that the parliament was not meeting this week is a violation of the constitution, but he said that nothing can be done. Massoum did not clarify what he meant by the violation but one article of the constitution indicates that the new president should elected within 30 days of the new parliament first meeting.

Meanwhile, Iraq has issued arrest warrants for 39 members of an Iranian opposition group who have lived in a camp northeast of Baghdad since Saddam Hussein's reign.

The development comes just days after American soldiers shut down their base near Camp Ashraf as part of the U.S. troop drawdown.

The presence of the Iranian group, which fought alongside Saddam during his 1980s war with Iran, has long irritated Iraq's Shiite-led government.

A senior Iraqi judiciary official said on Monday that the wanted members of the group — known as The People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran — are suspected of committing crimes while helping Saddam crush the 1991 Shiite revolt.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.