… a meeting Bush held on January 31, 2003 with Tony Blair and six of Bush and Blair’s top aides to discuss the Iraq issue. According to a memo summarizing the meeting that was written by David Manning [then Blair’s foreign policy adviser and later British ambassador to Washington], Bush actually indicated that he was willing to provoke a confrontation with Saddam… Among the ways Bush proposed to provoke a confrontation was to paint U2s to look like UN airplanes. The theory was that if Saddam tried to fire on them, it would justify military action… This Manning memo got limited play in the press – it was mentioned only in passing in an NYT front-page story in March 2006. However, even without the plans to use U2 aircraft disguised in UN colors, the memo is absolutely damning…
But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair’s top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times."Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.
"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."It’s one thing for a president to mislead his own people about a threat to the nation. But if Bugliosi and this NYT story are to be believed, then the invasion of Iraq is an American war of aggression, and all of the deaths of the American soldiers up to this point amount at the very least to second-degree murder…
Bush "made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons." I suppose we knew [or suspected] that Bush was going to invade Iraq no matter what even back then. But having it written down on paper gives it a sharper edge. I don’t know if that Memo is in the public domain, though there are enough reports about it to be pretty clear about what happened at that meeting. It was the week before Powell was set to go to the U.N. and make an absolute fool of himself [and us], and only three days after Bush’s State of the Union message with the famous sixteen words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
According to documents provided by former US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, George W. Bush, ten days after taking office in January 2001, instructed his aides to look for a way to overthrow the Iraqi regime. A secret memo entitled "Plan for post-Saddam Iraq" was discussed in January and February 2001, and a Pentagon document dated March 5, 2001, and entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts", included a map of potential areas for petroleum exploration.
Mercifully, we had a window rattling windstorm last night, waking to a cold, dark, non-electric house and were media-free until the afternoon. So I had no temptation to watch/read the aftermath of Obama’s plans in Afghanistan. What I thought about in the dark, lit by a fire crackling in the fireplace, was the road that lead to this absolutely impossible situation. More and more, I’m suspicious that all the things that seemed so stupid along the way were actually preconceived way-points on the path to Iraq – ignoring warnings of an impending al Qaeda attack, Cheney’s secret Energy Conference, letting bin Laden escape at Tora Bora, the C.I.A. "torture program." Each of these may well have been elements in crafting the fictional rationale for the invasion of Iraq.
And the Manning Memo documents Bush’s finally coming clean about his intent. There’s no "why" mentioned in that meeting with Blair that I can find in any of the reports by people who have read it up close. Why go ahead without the U.N.’s approval? Why proceed even if there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction found by the inspectors? We suspect it was for oil, from paranoia, for power ["superpower"], for dominion in the Middle East, for revenge, for all kinds of things the neoconservatives liked to think about.
[…] for the invasion. They apparently had to convince us to even go through the U.N. at all. And in January 2003, before Powell’s speech, Bush told Blair that we were going to war no matter what happened in […]