Indignation Grows in U.S. Over British Prewar Documents
Critics of Bush call them proof that he and Blair never
saw
diplomacy as an option with Hussein.
By John Daniszewski
Times Staff Writer
May 12, 2005
LONDON — Reports in the British press this month based on documents
indicating that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair had
conditionally agreed by July 2002 to invade Iraq appear to have blown
over quickly in Britain.
But in the United States, where the reports at first received scant
attention, there has been growing indignation among critics of the Bush
White House, who say the documents help prove that the leaders made a
secret decision to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein nearly a year
before launching their attack, shaped intelligence to that aim and
never seriously intended to avert the war through diplomacy.
The documents, obtained by Michael Smith, a defense specialist writing
for the Sunday Times of London, include a memo of the minutes of a
meeting July 23, 2002, between Blair and hisintelligence
and military chiefs; a briefing paper for that meeting and a Foreign
Office legal opinion prepared before an April 2002 summit between Blair
and Bush in Texas.
The picture that emerges from the documents
is of a British government convinced of the U.S. desire to go to war
and Blair's agreement to it, subject to several specific conditions.
Since Smith's report was published May 1, Blair's Downing Street office
has not disputed the documents' authenticity. Asked about them
Wednesday, a Blair spokesman said the report added nothing significant
to the much-investigated record of the lead-up to the war.
"At the end of the day, nobody pushed the diplomatic route harder than
the British government…. So the circumstances of this July discussion
very quickly became out of date," said the spokesman, who asked not to
be identified.
The leaked minutes sum up the July 23 meeting,
at which Blair, top security advisors and his attorney general
discussed Britain's role in Washington's plan to oust Hussein. The
minutes, written by Matthew Rycroft, a foreign
policy aide, indicate general thoughts among the participants about how
to create a political and legal basis for war. The case for military
action at the time was "thin," Foreign Minister Jack Straw was
characterized as saying,and Hussein's government
posed little threat.
Labeled
"secret and strictly personal — U.K. eyes only," the minutes begin with
the head of the British intelligence service, MI6, who is identified as
"C," saying he had returned from Washington, where there had been a
"perceptible shift in attitude. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through
military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and [weapons
of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and the facts were being
fixed around the policy."
Straw agreed that Bush seemed determined to act militarily, although
the timing was not certain.
"But the case was thin," the minutes say. "Saddam was not threatening
his neighbors, and his WMD capacity was less than that of Libya, North
Korea or Iran."
Straw then proposed to "work up a plan for an
ultimatum to Saddam" to permit United Nations weapons inspectors back
into Iraq. "This would also help with the legal justification for the
use of force," he said, according to the minutes.
Blair said,
according to the memo, "that it would make a big difference politically
and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the U.N. inspectors."
"If the political context were right, people would support regime
change," Blair said. "The two key issues were whether the military plan
worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military
plan the space to work."
In addition to the minutes, the
Sunday Times report referred to a Cabinet briefing paper that was given
to participants before the July 23 meeting. It stated that Blair had
already promised Bush cooperation earlier, at the April summit in
Texas.
"The U.K. would support military action to bring about regime change,"
the Sunday Times quoted the briefing as saying.
Excerpts from the paper, which Smith provided to the Los Angeles Times,
said Blair had listed conditions for war, including that "efforts had
been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the
Israel-Palestine crisis was quiescent," and options to "eliminate
Iraq's WMD through the U.N. weapons inspectors" had been exhausted.
The briefing papersaid the British government should
get the U.S. to put its military plans in a "political framework."
"This is particularly important for the U.K. because it is necessary to
create the conditions in which we could legally support military
action," it says.
In a letter to Bush last week, 89 House
Democrats expressed shock over the documents. They asked if the papers
were authentic and, if so, whether they proved that the White House had
agreed to invade Iraq months before seeking Congress' OK.
"If
the disclosure is accurate, it raises troubling new questions regarding
the legal justifications for the war as well as the integrity of our
own administration," the letter says.
"While the president of
the United States was telling the citizens and the Congress that they
had no intention to start a war with Iraq, they were working very close
with Tony Blair and the British leadership at making this a foregone
conclusion," the letter's chief author, Rep. John Conyers Jr. of
Michigan, said Wednesday.
If the documents are real, he said,
it is "a huge problem" in terms of an abuse of power. He said the White
House had not yet responded to the letter.
Both Blair and Bush
have denied that a decision on war was made in early 2002. The White
House and Downing Street maintain that they were preparing for military
operations as an option, but that the option to not attack also
remained open until the war began March 20, 2003.
In January
2002, Bush described Iraq as a member of an "axis of evil," but the
sustained White House push for Iraqi compliance with U.N. resolutions
did not come until September of that year. That month, Bush addressed
the U.N. General Assembly to outline a case against Hussein's
government, and he sought a bipartisan congressional resolution
authorizing the possible use of force.
In November 2002, the U.N. Security Council approved a resolution
demanding that Iraq readmit weapons inspectors.
An effort to pass a second resolution expressly authorizing the use of
force against Iraq did not succeed.
*
Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington
contributed to this report.
