7 Decision came nine days after 9/11
7 Ex-ambassador reveals discussion

Bush and Blair made secret pact for Iraq war

David Rose
Sunday April 4, 2004
The Observer

President George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of
Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days
after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001.

According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to
Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign
leader to visit America after 11 September, Blair told Bush he should
not get distracted from the war on terror's initial goal - dealing with
the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Bush, claims Meyer, replied by saying: 'I agree with you, Tony. We must
deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must
come back to Iraq.' Regime change was already US policy.

It was clear, Meyer says, 'that when we did come back to Iraq it
wouldn't be to discuss smarter sanctions'. Elsewhere in his interview,
Meyer says Blair always believed it was unlikely that Saddam would be
removed from power or give up his weapons of mass destruction without a war.

Faced with this prospect of a further war, he adds, Blair 'said nothing
to demur'.

Details of this extraordinary conversation will be published this week
in a 25,000-word article on the path to war with Iraq in the May issue
of the American magazine Vanity Fair. It provides new corroboration of
the claims made last month in a book by Bush's former counter-terrorism
chief, Richard Clarke, that Bush was 'obsessed' with Iraq as his
principal target after 9/11.

But the implications for Blair may be still more explosive. The
discussion implies that, even before the bombing of Afghanistan, Blair
already knew that the US intended to attack Saddam next, although he
continued to insist in public that 'no decisions had been taken' until
almost the moment that the invasion began in March 2003. His critics are
likely to seize on the report of the two leaders' exchange and demand to
know when Blair resolved to provide the backing that Bush sought.

The Vanity Fair article will provide further ammunition in the shape of
extracts from the private, contemporaneous diary kept by the former
International Development Secretary, Clare Short, throughout the months
leading up to the war. This reveals how, during the summer of 2002, when
Blair and his closest advisers were mounting an intense diplomatic
campaign to persuade Bush to agree to seek United Nations support over
Iraq, and promising British support for military action in return, Blair
apparently concealed his actions from his Cabinet.

For example, on 26 July Short wrote that she had raised her 'simmering
worry about Iraq' in a meeting with Blair, asking him for a debate on
Iraq in the next Cabinet meeting - the last before the summer recess.
However, the diary went on, Blair replied that this was unnecessary
because 'it would get hyped ... He said nothing [was] decided, and
wouldn't be over summer.'

In fact, that week Blair's foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning,
was in Washington, meeting both Bush and his National Security Adviser,
Condoleezza Rice, in order to press Blair's terms for military support,
and Blair himself had written a personal memorandum to the President in
which he set them out. Vanity Fair quotes a senior American official
from Vice-President Dick Cheney's office who says he read the transcript
of a telephone call between Blair and Bush a few days later.

'The way it read was that, come what may, Saddam was going to go; they
said they were going forward, they were going to take out the regime,
and they were doing the right thing. Blair did not need any convincing.
There was no, "Come on, Tony, we've got to get you on board". I remember
reading it and then thinking, "OK, now I know what we're going to be
doing for the next year".'

Before the call, this official says, he had the impression that the
probability of invasion was high, but still below 100 per cent.
Afterwards, he says, 'it was a done deal'.

As late as 9 September, Short's diary records, when Blair went to a
summit with Bush and Cheney at Camp David in order to discuss final
details, 'T[ony] B[lair] gave me assurances when I asked for Iraq to be
discussed at Cabinet that no decision [had been] made and [was] not
imminent.' Later that day she learnt from the Chancellor, Gordon Brown,
that Blair had asked to make 20,000 British troops available in the
Gulf. She still believed her Prime Minister's assurances, but wrote
that, if had she not done so, she would 'almost certainly' have resigned
from the Government. At that juncture her resignation would have dealt
Blair a very damaging blow.

But if Blair was misleading his own Government and party, he appears to
have done the same thing to Bush and Cheney. At the Camp David meeting,
Cheney was still resisting taking the case against Saddam and his
alleged weapons of mass destruction to the UN.

According to both Meyer and the senior Cheney official, Blair helped win
his argument by saying that he could be toppled from power at the Labour
Party conference later that month if Bush did not take his advice. The
party constitution makes clear that this would have been impossible and
senior party figures agree that, at that juncture, it was not a
politically realistic statement.

Short's diary shows in the final run-up to war Blair persuaded her not
to resign and repeatedly stated that Bush had promised it would be the
UN, not the American-led occupying coalition, which would supervise the
reconstruction of Iraq. This, she writes, was the clinching factor in
her decision to stay in the Government - with devastating consequences
for her own political reputation.

Vanity Fair also discloses that on 13 January, at a lunch around the
mahogany table in Rice's White House office, President Chirac's top
adviser, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, and his Washington ambassador,
Jean-David Levitte, made the US an offer it should have accepted. In the
hope of avoiding an open breach between the two countries, they said
that, if America was determined to go to war, it should not seek a
second resolution, that the previous autumn's Resolution 1441 arguably
provided sufficient legal cover, and that France would keep quiet if the
administration went ahead.

But Bush had already promised Blair he would seek a second resolution
and Blair feared he might lose Parliament's support without it.
Meanwhile, the Foreign Office legal department was telling him that
without a second resolution war would be illegal, a view that Lord
Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, seemed to share at that stage. When the
White House sought Blair's opinion on the French overture, he balked.

A Downing Street spokesman said last night: 'Iraq had been a foreign
policy priority for a long time and was discussed at most meetings
between the two leaders. Our position was always clear: that we would
try to work through the UN, and a decision on military action was not
taken until other options were exhausted in March last year.'