UK official says US needs to engage with Iran
Iraq-UK, Politics, 9/14/2007

Britain's outgoing ambassador to the US, Sir David Manning, yesterday added his voice to growing calls for serious efforts to open a wider-ranging dialogue with Iran.

In an interview with the New Statesman Magazine, Manning indicated that relations with Iran was overly dominated by concern about the country's civilian nuclear program.

"I would like to see a bolder effort by all of us to engage with Iran more broadly, so that the nuclear file becomes just one area of the dossier," he said.

His call comes after his predecessor, Sir Christopher Meyer, urged US President George Bush to use his last year in office to open a serious dialogue with Iran to help stabilize Iraq.

"I would say to the president you have nothing to lose and you may, at the same time be able to fix the nuclear problem as well, bring the Iranians into the negotiating family," Meyer told BBC Radio Four's Today program on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the co-chair of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) in the US, Lee Hamilton also suggested that the Bush Administration had not gone nearly far enough in trying to resolve its problems with Iran.

Iran has made no decision yet on holding the fourth round of talks with US on Iraq, Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Tuesday.

"You cannot solve the problems with Iran in two meetings at ambassadorial level. You have to have long, sustained meetings at a very high level," Hamilton said in an interview on the same BBC program.

Manning, who is due to formally step down from his Washington post next month, was previously Prime Minister Tony Blair's foreign affairs adviser, including during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, In his interview with the New Statesman, he suggested that Blair was in effect deceived by the White House and the neoconservatives over plans for the reconstruction of Iraq, when the responsibility was switched from the Secretary of State to the Defense Department.

The ambassador said "Was it a double-cross? I don't think they set out to double- cross the prime minister. I don't think that is true," adding that it may be due to "confusion."

He said he "never entirely understood what happened" but that he assumed that, in some kind of interagency discussion, US Defense Secretary at the time Donald Rumsfeld said "We're going to do this." "I did not know that the D.O.D. was going to take over the running of the country. We didn't have any sense that that was about to be the way postwar Iraq was going to be run," Manning said.

He maintained it was Blair's hope that war in Iraq would not be necessary and that Saddam Hussein would be removed by diplomatic pressure.

The ambassador also insisted that the former British premier had differences with the US on the Israel-Palestine conflict, but that he took the view that disagreements should be kept in private.

Previous Stories:
  UK urged to redefine objectives in Iraq   (7/16/2007)
  UK Conservatives for inquiry into Iraq war   (7/2/2007)
  UK leader denies urging apology for Iraq war   (6/25/2007)

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