1 Boring Old Man

Confidential memo reveals US plan to provoke an invasion of Iraq
The Observer
21 June 2009

A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK’s role in toppling Saddam Hussein. The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction [WMD] they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions. The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be "brought out" to give a public presentation on Saddam’s WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was "solidly with the president".

The five-page document, written by Blair’s foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, and copied to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK ambassador to the UN, Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Lord Boyce, and the UK’s ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, outlines how Bush told Blair he had decided on a start date for the war. Paraphrasing Bush’s comments at the meeting, Manning, noted: "The start date for the military campaign was now pencilled in for 10 March. This was when the bombing would begin"…

The memo notes there had been a shift in the two men’s thinking on Iraq by late January 2003 and that preparing for war was now their priority. "Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," Manning writes. This was despite the fact Blair that had yet to receive advice on the legality of the war from the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, which did not arrive until 7 March 2003 – 13 days before the bombing campaign started. In his article today, Sands says the memo raises questions about the selection of the chair of the inquiry. Sir John Chilcott sat on the 2004 Butler inquiry, which examined the reliability of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, and would have been privy to the document’s contents – and the doubts about WMD running to the highest levels of the US and UK governments…

WHITEHOUSE:  And you have to get to a certain place before you go on.  And we‘re not quite at that place so that decision hasn‘t been made.  I hope it gets made.  I think it will be made.  There is, I think, justification for it to be made. But it does raise additional issues about getting beyond the purview of the intelligence committee and into what the Bush administration contended was protected by executive privilege. 

MADDOW:  Right.

WHITEHOUSE:  So conceivably, other investigations, executive branch investigations, might have gotten under way by that point and against an executive branch investigation, executive privilege doesn‘t apply.  So I guess, stand by.