Senior British diplomat in Baghdad John Sawers, representing Prime Minister Tony Blair, warned his country of following bungling US policies. In a series of confidential memos leaked to the media, Sawers says that the US General Jay Garner and his crew of retired Generals are well intentioned but “out of their depth” and are inadvertently creating “an unbelievable mess.” 

Senior-most British officer with US land forces Major General Albert Whitley reinforced this assessment in a separate memo published by The Guardian saying that the coalition was in danger of losing the peace. In the first ever public admission of failure by coalition forces and tensions within it, he wrote, “we may have been seduced into something we might be inclined to regret.” He says that a “strategic failure” is possible. In a stinging critique of the US, he characterizes the ground situation as “no leadership, no strategy, no co-ordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis.”