British Documents Portray Determined US March to War
the British memos seem almost prophetic.
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI-6 spy service, told Blair and his top advisers after talks in Washington, according to the first memo to be leaked. It was dated July 23, 2002.
"US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al (Qaida) is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts reported earlier in his March 2002 letter to Straw.
In his own letter to Blair three days later, Straw also seemed to question the scale of the threat. "In the documents so far presented, it has been hard to glean whether the threat from Iraq is so significantly different from that of Iran and North Korea as to justify military action," he wrote.
All of the documents leaked thus far - by persons unknown - date before Bush's August 2002 decision to take his case against Saddam to the United Nations, as recommended by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell.
While Bush continues to assert that he tried diplomacy, things looked different in the spring and summer of 2002, at least as seen through the prism of the British government.
Blair's advisers found a deep distrust of the United Nations in Washington.
The National Security Council, led by Rice, "has no patience with the U.N. route," according to Dearlove's report to Blair and his advisers at the July 23, 2002, meeting.
In yet another memo, Christopher Meyer, then Blair's ambassador to Washington, said he met with Wolfowitz on March 17, 2002, and discussed how to build support for military action. "I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors," Meyer reported to London.
The two governments discussed ways to craft an ultimatum to Saddam on U.N. weapons inspectors that he would be sure to reject, providing an excuse for war and a path to building international support.
Said Mann: "Going to the U.N. was always a box to be checked and a necessity for winning the support of the British government."
- posted by geoff @ #