… Blair devotes a serious chunk to defending his decision to partner up with Bush for the Iraq war. "I can’t regret the decision to go to war," he writes. "…I can say that never did I guess the nightmare that unfolded." He adds, "I have often reflected as to whether I was wrong. I ask you to reflect as to whether I may have been right"…
But there’s no reference to the meeting Blair held with Bush in the Oval Office on January 31, 2003, less than two months before the war would be launched. During that conversation, Blair told Bush that he needed a second UN resolution that explicitly authorized military action against Iraq, having promised his Labour Party that he would seek one. Blair explained that the resolution — or, at least, an attempt to obtain the resolution — was necessary political cover for him and, according to a memo written by a Blair aide documenting the meeting, "international cover, especially with the Arabs." Bush agreed to try to twist arms at the UN, but he informed Blair that he had already selected a tentative start date for the war: March 10 [Ultimately, there would be no such UN resolution].
But more than politics was discussed. According to the memo, Bush and Blair each said they doubted any weapons of mass destruction would soon be discovered by the UN inspectors then searching for such arms in Iraq. With no WMDs, it could be harder to win support for the war. But Bush had an idea—or two. The memo notes that Bush raised the notion of provoking a confrontation with Saddam Hussein. "The US was thinking," the memo said, "of flying US reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach" of UN resolutions. A retaliatory attack would then be fully justified; the war could begin. Bush also discussed producing some "defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam’s WMD." At this meeting, the two men also agreed that it was unlikely that "internecine warfare" would break out between "different religious and ethnic groups" after an invasion of Iraq.
This memo was a startling revelation. Here was the US president hinting at mounting a giant con game to start a war: creating a phony incident to grease the path to an invasion. The memo — portions of which were published in the New York Times and in Philippe Sands’ Lawless World — does not record Blair objecting to this potential subterfuge. [I have read the entire memo]…
Confidential memo reveals US plan to provoke an invasion of Iraq
The Observer
by Jamie Doward, Gaby Hinsliff and Mark Townsend
21 June 2009A 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 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 penciled in for 10 March. This was when the bombing would begin."
Last night an expert on international law who is familar with the memo’s contents said it provided vital evidence into the two men’s frames of mind as they considered the invasion and its aftermath and must be presented to the Chilcott inquiry established by Gordon Brown to examine the causes, conduct and consequences of the Iraq war. Philippe Sands, QC, a professor of law at University College London who is expected to give evidence to the inquiry, said confidential material such as the memo was of national importance, making it vital that the inquiry is not held in private, as Brown originally envisioned.
In today’s Observer, Sands writes: "Documents like this raise issues of national embarrassment, not national security. The restoration of public confidence requires this new inquiry to be transparent. Contentious matters should not be kept out of the public domain, even in the run-up to an election"…
Admitting being wrong in public must be one of the hardest things in the world to do [and rarest] – maybe even harder than being wrong itself. Not the presentencing kind of admission like Bernie Madoff’s courtroom performance. That’s apparently a piece of cake because so many do it. But in non-courtroom situations, the usual version is to explain the circumstances that lead to the wrong decision and implying that it was a right decision at the time, or maybe that the wrong decision will turn out to have been right after all at some future date.
I’ve mentioned Medicine as an example. Few doctors make it through a career without making a fatal error. In my Internal Medicine Residency, there was a particularly dreaded event called "Death Conference" in which the Physicians involved in a case of unanticipated death, the pathologists who did the autopsy, and an attending physician who was anything but kind would meet and go over every detail from admission to death. The attending physician introduced the meeting with "let’s see how we killed this patient." It was a brutal, but incredibly useful exercise. There was, however, the unspoken contract that whatever mistakes were made were due to inexperience, and would be forgiven. And the moderator mercifully always said "we."
Is that what Blair thinks we might think he was right about – that changing the Regime in Iraq was right? Of course it wasn’t right! He and the Bush Neoconservatives wanted the world to return to the days of the Roman Empire, to the Ottoman Empire – a time when power ruled. We’re beyond that now. That’s why we fought two World Wars. That’s why we spent our time "containing" Communism. That’s why there’s a UN. What could possibly be right about a couple of guys deciding that the solution to the world’s problems was to depose and kill problematic leaders? While it’s not true that we’re safer without Hussein, even if we were, it’s not for Tony Blair and George Bush to push us back into the world we’ve tried to escape for centuries. His argument is ridiculous.
But there’s another not-rightness in the mix. They were cavalier and casual about making a decision that would kill thousands, maybe millions; that would cost trillions; that would be a major force in both countries flirting with bankruptcy; and would do irreparable harm to the UN and world politics. Yet their main thinking was about how to bring it off, not about the consequences of actually doing it. It’s like some doctor standing up at the "Death Conference" and saying, "He was just an old man and we didn’t think he was worth saving," or maybe a murderer in court saying, "You’ve got to understand, she was a really lousy wife."
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