Month: November 2005

Steve Clemons points to the first part in the serialisation of Sir Christopher Meyer, former British ambassador to the US. It looks like it might be explosive with regard to the Blair premiership. The Guardian has it as front page news. I liked this bit:

I told him [Wolfowitz] there had to be a strategy for building international support. What was needed was a clever plan that convinced people there was a legal basis for toppling Saddam. The UN had to be at the heart of such a strategy. One way was to demand the readmission of UN weapons inspectors into Iraq. If he refused, this would not only put him in the wrong but also turn the searchlight onto the security council resolutions of which he remained in breach. I also stressed the critical importance of making progress in defusing the violence between Israel and the Palestinians, to help carry Muslim opinion. Wolfowitz listened carefully, but he was noncommittal.

A similar list of conditions appears in another leaked document, drawn up following Tony Blair’s summit with Bush at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, a few weeks later in April 2002.

This Cabinet Office note recorded that Blair had told Bush that Britain would support military action “provided that certain conditions were met”. These conditions were that efforts were made to construct a coalition, that the Israel-Palestine crisis was “quiescent”, and that “options for action to eliminate Iraq’s WMD through UN weapons inspectors” were exhausted.

He continues:

Then, in November 2002, came a breakthrough – the passage of UN Resolution 1441, demanding a full and final disclosure of all Saddam’s weapons. Saddam agreed to comply and the weapons inspectors went back in. There was a brief period of hope that Saddam could be disarmed peacefully.

Against a backdrop of intensifying military preparations, anxiety gripped the Bush administration. It feared a prolonged inspection process that failed to reveal Saddam’s WMD; troops going stale as they kicked their heels; allies going off the boil; and a once-and-for-all opportunity to be rid of Saddam slipping through American fingers. The issue of the moment became how to find the “smoking gun” that would justify action against Saddam – the irrefutable proof that he had weapons of mass destruction.

The risk was that, through impatience and excessive pressure on the weapons inspectors, America would shatter any international coalition for war before it had even got started. I no longer thought that, in the event of opposition to war from most of the UN security council, Bush would blink. Yet he would still have an agonising decision to take early in 2003. And if it was agonising for him, it would be doubly so for Blair.

The advice the British prime minister then gave the US president would never have been more important in my time in Washington. It could even be the swing vote for war or peace. The pendulum never swung back again. If the president had left himself any space to step back from war, he closed it down early with his state of the union speech on January 29 2003.

Even by Bush’s standards the speech was unusually messianic in tone. The destruction of Saddam was a crusade against evil to be undertaken by God’s chosen nation: “This call of history has come to the right people.”

Blair now paid one more visit to Washington. The meeting with Bush on January 31 2003 took place against a deeply unpromising background. Transatlantic relations were in a trough. British attempts to overcome France and Germany’s vocal opposition to war were sinking beneath the waves. The prime minister’s best hope seemed to be to ensure that we and the US went to war in the best possible company. To do this, he needed to secure Bush’s solid support for a second UN resolution, explicitly sanctioning military action.

Heck, read the whole thing.