www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1592724,00.html
The Times and The Sunday Times electronic paper The Times and The Sunday Times electronic paper The Sunday Times - Britain May 01, 2005 Blair planned Iraq war from start Michael Smith INSIDE Downing Street Tony Blair had gathered some of his senior minister s and advisers for a pivotal meeting in the build-up to the Iraq war. It was 9am on July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion began and lo ng before the public was told war was inevitable. As minutes of the pr oceedings, headed Secret and strictly personal UK eyes only, state: This record is extremely sensitive. I t should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents . In the room were the prime minister, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, G eoff Hoon, the defence secretary, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, and military and intelligence chiefs. Also listed on the minutes are Ala stair Campbell, then Blairs director of strategy, Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, and Sally Morgan, director of government relations. What they were about to discuss would dominate the political agenda for y ears to come and indelibly stain Blairs reputation; and last week the i ssue exploded again on the political scene as Blair campaigned in the ho pe of winning a third term as prime minister. For the secret documents seen by The Sunday Times reveal that on that Tuesday in 2002: Blair was right from the outset committed to supporting US plans for r egime change in Iraq. The attorney-general was already warning of grave doubts about its lega lity. So Blair and his inner circl e set about devising a plan to justify invasion. If the political context were right, said Blair, people would support regime change. By the end of the meeting, a possible path to invasion was agreed and it was noted that Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the defence staff, w ould send the prime minister full details of the proposed military campa ign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week. Outside Downing Street, the rest of Britain, including most cabinet minis ters, knew nothing of this. True, tensions were running high, and fears of terrorism were widespread. But Blairs constant refrain was that no decisions had been taken about what to do with Iraq. The following day in the House of Commons, Blair told MPs: We have not g ot to the stage of military action . It was typical lawyers cleverness, if not dissembling: while no actual o rder had been given to invade, Blair already knew Saddam Hussein was goi ng to be removed, sooner or later. AS a civil service briefing paper specifically prepared for the July meet ing reveals, Blair had made his fundamental decision on Saddam when he m et President George W Bush in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002. When the prime minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford i n April, states the paper, he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change. Blair set certain conditions: that efforts were first made to try to elim inate Iraqs weapons of mass destruction (WMD) through weapons inspector s and to form a coalition and shape public opinion. But the bottom lin e was that he was signed up to ousting Saddam by force if other methods failed. The Americans just wanted to get rid of the brutal dictator, whe ther or not he posed an immediate threat. This presented a problem because, as the secret briefing paper made clear , there were no clear legal grounds for war. US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the internati onal community, says the briefing paper. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law. To compound matters, the US was not a party to the International Criminal Court, while Britain was. The ICC, which came into force on 1 July, 200 2, was set up to try international offences such as war crimes. Military plans were forging ahead in America but the British, despite Bla irs commitment, played down talk of war. In April, Straw told MPs that no decisions about military action are lik ely to be made for some time. That month Blair said in the Commons: We will ensure the house is proper ly consulted. On July 17 he told MPs: As I say constantly, no decision s have yet been taken. Six days later in Downing Street the man who opened the secret discussion of Blairs war meeting was John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelli gence committee. A former MI6 officer, Scarlett had become a key member of Blairs sofa cabinet. He came straight to the point Saddams reg ime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it wa s likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was expecting an attack, said Scarlett, but was not convinced it w ould be immediate or overwhelming. His assessment reveals that the primary impetus to action over Iraq was n ot the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction as Blair later told the country but the desire to overthrow Saddam. The next contributor to the meeting, according to the minutes, was C, a s the chief of MI6 is traditionally known. Sir Richard Dearlove added nothing to what Scarlett had said about Iraq: his intelligence concerned his recent visit to Washington where he had h eld talks with George Tenet, director of the CIA. Military action was now seen as inevitable, said Dearlove. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD The Americans had been trying to link Saddam to the 9/11 attacks; but the British knew the evidence was flimsy or non-existent. Dearlove warned t he meeting that the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. It was clear from Dearloves brief visit that the US administrations att itude would compound the legal difficulties for Britain. The US had no p atience with the United Nations and little inclination to ensure an inva sion was backed by the security council, he said. Nor did the Americans seem very interested in what might happen in the af termath of military action. Yet, as Boyce then reported, events were alr eady moving swiftly. CDS (chief of the defence staff) said that military planners would brief (Donald) Rumsfeld (US defence secretary) on 3 August and Bush on 4 Augu st. One was a full-blown re prise of the 1991 Gulf war, a steady and obvious build-up of troops over several months, followed by a large-scale invasion. Seizing on an Iraqi casus belli, US and RAF patrols over the southern no-fly zone would knock out the Iraqi air defences. Allied special forces would then carry out a series of small-s cale operations in tandem with the Iraqi opposition, with more forces jo ining the battle as they arrived, eventually toppling Saddams regime. In either case the US saw three options for British involvement. The firs t allowed the use of the bases in Diego Garcia and Cyprus and three squa drons of special forces; the third threw in 40,000 ground troops perhaps with a discrete ro le in northern Iraq entering from Turkey. At the least the US saw the use of British bases as critical, which pos ed immediate legal problems. And Hoon said the US had already begun spi kes of activity to put pressure on the regime. AMID all this talk of military might and invasion plans, one awkward voic e spoke up. Straw warned that, though Bush had made up his mind on milit ary action, the case for it was thin. A few weeks later the government would paint Saddam as an imminent threat to the Middle East and the world. But that morning in private Straw sai d: Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability wa s less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. If Saddam was not an immediate threat, could war be j ustified legally? The attorney-general made his position clear, telling the meeting that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. Right from the outset, the minutes reveal, the governments legal adviser had grave doubts about Blairs plans; he would only finally conclude un equivocally that war was legal three days before the invasion, by which time tens of thousands of troops were already on the borders of Iraq. There were three possible legal bases for military action, ...
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