The Real News in the Downing Street Memos
By Michael Smith
Michael Smith writes on defense issues for the Sunday Times of London.
June 23, 2005
It is now nine months since I obtained the first of the "Downing Street
memos," thrust into my hand by someone who asked me to meet him in a
quiet watering hole in London for what I imagined would just be a
friendly drink.
At the time, I was defense correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph,
and a staunch supporter of the decision to oust Saddam Hussein. The
source was a friend. He'd given me a few stories before but nothing
nearly as interesting as this.
The six leaked documents I took
away with me that night were to change completely my opinion of the
decision to go to war and the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair and
President Bush.
They focused on the period leading up to the
Crawford, Texas, summit between Blair and Bush in early April 2002, and
were most striking for the way in which British officials warned the
prime minister, with remarkable prescience, what a mess post-war Iraq
would become. Even by the cynical standards of realpolitik, the
decision to overrule this expert advice seemed to be criminal.
The second batch of leaks arrived in the middle of this year's British
general election, by which time I was writing for a different
newspaper, the Sunday Times. These documents, which came from a
different source, related to a crucial meeting of Blair's war Cabinet
on July 23, 2002. The timing of the leak was significant, with Blair
clearly in electoral difficulties because of an unpopular war.
I did not then regard the now-infamous memo — the one that includes the
minutes of the July 23 meeting — as the most important. My main article
focused on the separate briefing paper for those taking part, prepared
beforehand by Cabinet Office experts.
It said that Blair agreed
at Crawford that "the UK would support military action to bring about
regime change." Because this was illegal, the officials noted, it was
"necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support
military action."
But Downing Street had a "clever" plan that
it hoped would trap Hussein into giving the allies the excuse they
needed to go to war. It would persuade the U.N. Security Council to
give the Iraqi leader an ultimatum to let in the weapons inspectors.
Although Blair and Bush still insist the decision to go to the U.N. was
about averting war, one memo states that it was, in fact, about
"wrong-footing" Hussein into giving them a legal justification for war.
British officials hoped the ultimatum could be framed in words
that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it
outright. But they were far from certain this would work, so there was
also a Plan B.
American media coverage of the Downing Street
memo has largely focused on the assertion by Sir Richard Dearlove, head
of British foreign intelligence, that war was seen as inevitable in
Washington, where "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around
the policy."
But another part of the memo is arguably more
important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying
that "the U.S. had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure
on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B.
Put simply,
U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot
more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the
allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air
war, the first stage of the conflict.
British government
figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show
that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average
of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.
But
these initial "spikes of activity" didn't have the desired effect. The
Iraqis didn't retaliate. They didn't provide the excuse Bush and Blair
needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified
the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.
The
number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to
54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into
2003.
In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in
March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six
weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.
The way in which the intelligence was "fixed" to justify war is old
news.
The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war, the cynical
use of the U.N. to provide an excuse, and the secret, illegal air war
without the backing of Congress.
