1 Boring Old Man

I haven’t yet fully watched Tony Blair’s second round of Testimony before the Chilcot Inquiry at the end of last week, but I wanted to comment on the 03/17/2002 Memo released right before this testimony.

Tony Blair at the Iraq inquiry: day of regret, day of reckoning
The Telegraph
By Andrew Gilligan
January 23, 2011

^{… For this committee of mandarins, the paperwork is the real evidence. Unlike politicians, memoranda cannot change their stories – and a small mountain of fundamentally damaging papers has now piled up. To Chilcot’s obvious anger, he cannot publish some of the most important ones, but other, enormously telling documents were fully released on Friday. Exhibit A is a personal minute written by Blair to his chief of staff on March 17, 2002. In it, the Prime Minister wrote that “the immediate WMD problems [posed by Iraq] don’t seem obviously worse than three years ago. So we have to re-order our story and message.”}

^{Only a few months later, at the launch of the famous dossier, Blair told Parliament that Iraq’s WMD programme was “growing”. He claimed in the dossier’s foreword that he was “increasingly alarmed” by the “progress” that Saddam Hussein had made on “building up” his WMD capability. The secret minute flatly contradicts that, going to the heart of the “sexing-up” charge against Mr Blair. It is quite true, as his supporters often protest, that most people in intelligence believed before the war that Iraq had some form of WMD. Even if there was relatively little evidence, it was a fair inference to draw from Saddam’s evasions of UN weapons inspectors.}

^{But the mere fact of Iraq’s WMD had been known, or assumed, for the previous 15 years. It had never been seen as reason to go to war. Blair’s deceit was not the statement that Saddam had WMD, but the claim that those weapons were becoming a “growing” threat, a threat so “current and serious” as to need military action. The “re-ordering our story and message” that Blair suggested in the March 17 memo was talking more about Saddam’s despotic nature. But the document is among the clearest proof yet that he also “re-ordered” the story and message given by the intelligence on WMD.}

^{The inquiry did not press this issue on Friday. They were much more interested in what the memo told them about Blair’s intent. The central charge Chilcot has brought into focus is that the decision on war was the beginning, not the end, of the process; that an agreement on “regime change” was made early and secretly with President Bush; and that it was done without factual justification, legal advice or proper military planning – all three of which were later twisted to fit. In the March 17 memo – written more than a year before the war, and around the time the secret agreement was allegedly made – Blair writes: “A political philosophy that does care about other nations – eg Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone – and is prepared to change regimes on the merits should be gung-ho about Saddam.”}

^{He had begun the memo by saying: “I do not have a proper worked-out strategy on how we would do it… I will need a meeting on this with military folk.” In his evidence on Friday, Blair claimed that the “it” in that sentence could have meant “getting Saddam to cease being a threat peacefully”. But it clearly couldn’t have. The references to military folk, being gung-ho and regime change, citing three previous military campaigns, are new and valuable evidence that he was committed to war from the start. No wonder Sir Martin Gilbert, one of the inquiry panel, described this memo as “very important”…}

This Memo is anything but benign. It essentially confirms what Tony Blair has denied forever. He was a "regime changer" even before he met with Bush at Crawford. Like Bush, and was already looking for a way to rationalize/justify the Invasion in March 2002. I wonder if it really ever occurred to either Bush or Blair how badly it could go. In the little bit of his testimony I did see, he was claiming that everything would’ve been just fine if there hadn’t been that pesky insurgency [which he blames on Al Qaeda].

So we’re going to have to reorder our story and message. Increasingly, I think it should be about the nature of the regime. We do intervene – as per the Chicago speech. We have no inhibitions – where we reasonably can – about nation building ie we must come to our own conclusion about Saddam from our own position, not the US position.

The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.