UK official: We didn't plan for Iraq aftermath

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Britain's defense secretary during the Iraq war says the coalition failed to plan properly for the aftermath and British officials underestimated the influence of US Vice President Dick Cheney, a newspaper reported Wednesday. But Geoff Hoon, who was defense secretary in Prime Minister Tony Blair's government from 1999 until 2005, said intelligence officials had believed that Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction and that the allies did not lie about why they went to war. In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Hoon said that "we didn't plan for the right sort of aftermath." "Maybe we were too optimistic about the idea of the streets being lined with cheering people. Although I have reconciled it in my own mind, we perhaps didn't do enough to see it through the Sunni perspective. Perhaps we should have done more to understand their position," Hoon was quoted as saying.