http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15166761/U.K. tried to curb U.S. on Iraq, ex-minister says
Blunkett: Britain was incapable of stopping war plans by Cheney, Rumsfeld
The British government tried to rein in U.S. policy in Iraq from the outset of the March 2003 invasion but found itself powerless to do so, a former cabinet minister was quoted on Saturday as saying.
David Blunkett, Home Secretary at the time of the invasion, told newspapers that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could not be diverted from their goal of dismantling the Iraqi Baathist government system.
“The issue was: ‘What the hell do you do about it?’ All we could do as a nation of 60 million off the coast of mainland Europe was to seek to influence the most powerful nation in the world,” he said in interviews to publicize his new diaries.
“We did seek to influence them, but we were not in charge, so you cannot say that if only the government recognized what needed to be done, it would all have been different. The government did recognize the problem,” he added.