Iraq war probe portrays Britain as frustrated sidekick to US: NYT - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

Britain's ongoing Iraq war inquiry has opened up a can of worms, but one common picture, which has emerged after confessions of most generals, diplomats and intelligence officials, portrays Britain as a frustrated sidekick to the American juggernaut, according to the New York Times. So for, the inquiry panel has found that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was keen to build a close personal relationship with then-President George W. Bush, overrode his advisers' cautions and hastened Britain into a war that it could, and perhaps should, have avoided. The report goes on saying that witnesses of the inquiry panel have presented Britain as a disregarded voice of diplomatic and military prudence, unable to restrain zealous American officials caught up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The embarrassing revelations are unlikely to fetch Prime Minister Brown the much-needed public support for the Afghanistan war that he had hoped to achieve from the public inquiry into the Iraq war. Meanwhile, in a BBC radio interview over the weekend, Blair, unrepentant, said that he would have gone to war against Saddam Hussein even if he had known beforehand that Iraq had no unconventional weapons. The intelligence indicating the existence of such weapons, cited at the time as the primary reason that Britain committed more than 45,000 troops to the invasion.