Can it be salvaged? Right now, we seem as far away as ever from real international cooperation. Just today, the New York Times reported that the White House might drop attempts to get a United Nations resolution supporting American efforts in Iraq.

It seems the United States isn't willing to give enough authority to the U.N. The international community should be willing to unite, allowing the U.N. to play its proper role. If America isn't willing to concede that, there isn't going to be much international support for rebuilding Iraq. There will be limited legitimacy for the coalition presence in Iraq and the danger of ever-growing resistance, which is against everybody's interest.

The only way to turn it around is to raise more voices in the U.S. to say, 'Come on, we're being foolish. We've got to make whatever concessions are necessary to get the international community to come and help us.' At the moment, we don't have that willingness. The White House is taking over [Iraq's reconstruction] from the Pentagon, showing they're worried about the situation. But then other American voices are saying it's not as bad as everybody thinks. Meanwhile lives continue to be lost and Iraq isn't stable enough to develop on its own.

How willing would other countries be to commit resources to Iraq even if the U.S. did make concessions? Aren't some leaders driven by a personal animus toward Bush, and a desire not to do anything that would help him get reelected?

The world is not acting in that shallow political way. Everyone knows the Middle East is so dangerous right now. The U.S. asked Pakistan and India to come in with troops, but both considered it and said no because their own public opinion would be so hostile without a U.N. umbrella. Public opinion across the world will only think it's right to come and participate and provide troops if it's run by the U.N. They're not willing to come in to back up an American strategy that they opposed.

But there are problems with foreign troops as well. Right now, there's a controversy over bringing Turkish troops into Iraq. Should the United States welcome the opportunity provided by Turkey to internationalize the occupation and bring in Muslim soldiers, even if the Iraqis don't want them?

The Kurds in the north, who very much supported the war and the American occupation, are very fearful of Turkey because the Kurds in Turkey are very heavily repressed. The Kurds are very nervous that the Turks will intervene. It's another dreadful complication. It's better not to have Turkish troops there, because there's too much complex politics and history. It's a further destabilizing development.

You quit not because of the war, but because of the mishandling of the postwar situation. Britain has a lot of experience in battle-scarred countries. Why didn't Blair force the United States to be more responsible about postwar planning?

Blair was under so much pressure. He made contradictory promises -- he promised Bush that Britain would be behind him, and he promised the people of Britain that we'd go through the U.N. He was enormously strained, and terribly relieved when the war happened and was over. He stopped tending to what would happen afterwards. I think he thought, "Oh well, the Americans must be taking care of this."

I was telling him and my department was telling him how important it was to prepare and get things right. We'd worked on Afghanistan, East Timor, Kosovo, Sierra Leone. The U.N. was preparing to move. So was the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The Pentagon just became utterly arrogant. Because the U.N. had not done what America wanted and had not voted for war on the date they wanted, they just did not work with them to make proper preparations. ORHA [the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance] was only put together a couple months before the war started. The Pentagon started believing their own propaganda, that the streets would be lined with cheering Iraqis waving flags at the incoming troops, that it would all be simple. People working in the U.N. with the sanctions regime and the oil for food program knew it wouldn't be simple, but no one asked them to help.

Does Blair have any leverage to push the United States toward cooperating with the U.N.?

The State Department and the Foreign Office talk, and Blair and [Foreign Secretary Jack] Straw have said they want a second U.N. resolution, but it doesn't look as though the U.K. has enough leverage to get the U.S. to come to a position where the international community would support it. Britain's influence internationally is much less now than it was before. We're seen as a U.S. poodle, so you might as well talk to the poodle's master.

If the situation in Iraq doesn't change soon, what scenarios do you foresee? Is there a danger of civil war, or a protracted quagmire?

The parallel I fear is what happened to Britain in Northern Ireland. We went to Ireland in 1969 after the [Catholic] civil rights movement. The British troops went in and they were cheered. Within a year, the Irish Republican Army was born as a nationalist movement against the occupation, and it began attacking troops.

At the moment in Iraq, attacks are coming from the remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime, probably from some elements of al-Qaida, and from individuals who've had members of their family killed. The danger is that the whole thing turns into a national resistance. Then it becomes even worse.

The British people have been far more angry over Blair's distortions in leading the country into war than Americans have over Bush's lies. Do you see that changing at all? Might the scandal over Ambassador Joseph Wilson turn into something akin to the uproar over David Kelly, whose death prompted a government inquiry into Britain's pre-war intelligence?

Some U.S. citizens say to me that there's a real parallel. There's the same distrust and the same investigation. What seems to be happening, on a slightly later time scale, is the same doubt is taking place, the same growing feeling that people weren't told the truth. In addition to that, the continuing loss of life of U.S. troops seems to be causing a severe reaction here. Iraq isn't going to go away. It's still sitting there in its chaos.

How important is it for the future of the world that Bush is defeated in 2004?

That's for the people of America to decide. But it's really important for the future of the world that the American people face up to mistakes that were made over Iraq. Even America needs a strong international community and a U.N. that's working. All this talk of preemptive power and no need for international law is bad for America. America needs to not make those errors again, otherwise we're going to get growing chaos.

We must make sure this doesn't happen again.

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