sisyphusshrugged

It looks as if the crisis that Our Fearless Leader and Mr. Blair were seeking to avoid when they leaped into the fray was an epidemic of executive blue balls

Britain started to plan the invasion of Iraq months before the conflict, even as Prime Minister Tony Blair was denying he was on a course for war, according to a report on Wednesday quoting a leaked Pentagon document.

Senior British and US commanders met at a war-planning session in June 2002 and orders to prepare actual military operations were given on October 7 2002.

This was more than a month before a UN resolution giving a final warning to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the London Evening Standard reported.

Full battle plans were issued on October 31 2002, eight days before UN Resolution 1441 called for the resumption of arms inspections in Iraq and warned Saddam of "serious consequences" if he were still seeking weapons of mass destruction, the paper said.

The document quoted in the report is a Pentagon chronology used by US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld in an August 2003 presentation on the "strategic lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom".

The chronology lists a "UK and Australia planning conference" on June 28 2002.

But three weeks later, on July 16, the prime minister rejected the notion that Britain was gearing up for an invasion.