We’ve heard this stuff before, but it is good to have it confirmed by another Downing Street Memo. Bush and Blair knew very well that it was unlikely that the UN inspectors would find WMD nearly two months before they launched the invasion in Iraq. It’s not entirely clear whether they thought this was because Saddam Hussein was incredibly clever or because he actually had no WMD. But, we had provided a list of suspect sites to the inspectors that was presumably based on our best intelligence, including the debriefings of Ahmed Chalabi’s defectors. When all those sites wound up turning up no weapons, it should have made Bush and Blair do a reassessment of their assumptions about both the threat posed by Hussein’s Iraq and the quality of Chalabi’s intelligence. But, by then, things had gone too far. British and American troops were mobilzed in Kuwait, and the two leaders were unwilling to contemplate the possibility of backing down. Even worse, having concluded that the UN inspectors would probably never find anything, they had to deal with the prospect of the inspectors giving Hussein a clean bill of health. And, that would have undermined the sanctions and the whole containment strategy.
That’s when (January 31, 2003) Bush made the following proposition:
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.
It’s not clear why this plan was not attempted (or if it was, and simply didn’t work). But it’s now clear that Blair did not object.
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”.
It’s interesting that Bush was holding out hope that a defector might provide information on Saddam’s WMD on January 31, 2003. It was about a month later (March 1, 2003) that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured and brutally tortured. Was that part of a desperate last-ditch effort to prove a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq?
“Was that part of a desperate last-ditch effort to prove a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq?”
Simple answers to simple questions: See Marcy
A valid and effective foreign policy and geopolitical strategy would have been for Bush to push for a muscular inspection regime to rip off the lid on every program which Saddam Hussein had running to show the total bankruptcy of his policy in the hope that Hussein’s own generals would realize they needed to get rid of him and launch a coup. Just getting rid of Saddam Hussein would have bought the world at least ten years worth of time in which to do something as the new regime tried to sort itself out and play internal politics. Unfortunately, Bush needed the war in order to get himself reelected in 2004 after the 9/11 debacle. That’s why he needs to cleansing power of a war crimes trial.
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Gordon Brown and Tony Blair face being questioned in public over their roles in the run-up to the Iraq war after the chairman of the independent inquiry indicated that he is to summon the prime minister and his predecessor to give evidence.
In a setback for Brown, who had hoped the inquiry would be held in private, Sir John Chilcot has ruled that all witnesses will be expected to give evidence in public.
Cartoon: PM reveals the truth about the war in Iraq (The Independent)"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
cartoon from The Guardian… not The Independent.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."And yet nothing changes. The wars go on without end.
All US forces must be removed from Iraqi cities. I believe the Iraqi government has said that this deadline cannot and should not be extended.
Should be very interesting.
The United States and Great Britain have waged aggressive and illegitimate war upon the nation of Iraq. The leaders of both nations at the time have committed war crimes and should be brought to trial. This is the supreme moment of truth for both countries. Failure to act now whatever the costs, and they may be very, very high, signals that the Americans and the Brits have abandoned the rule of law, at least as it applies to certain wars in the Middle East.
It is, I am afraid, a most significant turning point in our civilization and the future trajectory for both countries is downhill. Bush and Blair are destined to be the ultimate losers, and I think the clown from Texas will be cursed by innumerable generations. Can this dreadful fate be avoided?
Perhaps. If we can summon almost superhuman powers of conscience and fortitude married to the determination to see justice done. But, I wouldn’t hold my breath until such self recognition occurs. Much more likely, IMHO, is a continuation of the moral rot that is sweeping throughout the United States where everything seems to have a price especially our national leadership. What a pity that a nation of such promise should succumb to ancient avarice and the intoxicating power of money, truly, the root of all evil.
As the Eisenhower administration rolled to a close the President had plans to meet with Khrushchev in Paris for peace talks to diffuse the Cold War. In anticipation he sent out orders that all of the CIA’s U-2 flights over Soviet territory be halted until after the talks.
Weeks before the talks a U-2 flied by Francis Gary Powers crashed in the Soviet Union. The uproar over this caused the cancellation of the peace talks.
There are a number of things about the crash to suggest that this was a deliberate attempt to sabotage the talks. First, the flight was against the President’s orders. Second, U-2 pilots were spies and at the time were provided cyanide pills in order to commit suicide to prevent capture. Powers didn’t take his pill when his plane went down. Against rules he carried military identification to positively link him as an American military pilot. Finally, according to the military technology at the time the U-2 flew higher than the range of any anti-aircraft weapon that the Soviets had at the time and yet the story was that he had been “shot down”. At the time Lee Harvey Oswald and several other “curious” U.S. defectors were in the Soviet Union. As part of the created legend of Oswald it was suggested in the media that he gave the Soviets the knowledge and ability to shoot down the U-2. Unless Oswald was designing high-altitude anti-aircraft weapons for the Russians that didn’t happen.
There were no peace talks and the Cold War continued into the Kennedy administration.
The old “shoot down a U-2” trick had been used before. Bush and Blair were just going through the old playbook.
very interesting! what are the theories about the backstory? if the plane wasn’t shot down, how did it happen to “crash”? what was the role of Powers? who would have been behind sabotaging the talks?
Does complicity just eventually… diffuse?
The discussion of this subject always seems to willfully neglect the very interesting reports that the Clinton’s CIA and the Brits had flipped Saddam’s head of intelligence, defense minister and foreign minister pre-War and we/they all knew full well the Saddam’s truly minimal capacities in regards to WMD.
Have those stories ever been debunked? To me they seem much more telling and implicating than this memo jazz.
If any of those reports are true – they’ve even bubbled up on NPR and other supposedly reputable news sources – The WMD argument of an imminent and gathering danger was conclusively a planned, false ‘failure’ they were willing to suffer in order to get us into war and not just some ‘only-human’ intelligence or decision-making stumble. The famous ‘slam dunk’ was in regards to the American public’s credulity, not the actual quality of intelligence.
The overwhelming intelligence against an impending WMD threat was hidden from sight because it is evidence of a crime against humanity that the Anglo-Americans planned to commit and in fact did.
Crime. Perpetrators. Overwhelming evidence. Trial?
Their argument against such a prosecution was that ‘the best intelligence’ pointed to some imminent and gathering danger. Now we know they always knew that was BS. Without that justification – the Right to Defend the Nation – what stands between Bush, Blair and a date in The Hague?
Where or When does complicity end?
Why are people seemingly sticking their necks out for these guys even still?
Now, pardon and be patient with some Devil’s advocacy:
If the Bushies would just say that they DID in fact also know about the eventuality of an economic collapse and they wanted to sit on the Oil production regions until it passed, then I think we’d have an erosion of domestic public ire on this subject.
If you accept economic foreknowledge (and drop any sort of moral filter) you can see the practical sense of it: Surviving the economic collapse was made a higher priority than establishing a more elegant and morally consistent foreign policy.
Then again there are probably a few cans of angry foreign policy worms that would follow such a revelation.
I am not saying that anything excuses mass murder, I am just saying that our old administration lies outside of the usual image of fools subject to uncontrollable evil impulses.
I am saying I understand what they were thinking. I am saying that there is some precedent for committing a crime to prevent a catastrophe, which is ultimately the Bush regime’s best defense.
But they failed to commit the crime well or to prevent the disaster.
Perhaps we are all better off for having soldiers parked over the oil. I guess the question is ‘Was it worth it?’ I for one don’t think so, but I’m not supposed to be defending the nation.
I don’t know exactly the right thing to do from that position, but I do know what I’d like to think I wouldn’t do in their shoes: kill a few hundred thousand people along the way.
The Iraqi dead are (among so much else) the spent currency of American moral standing. We’ve made our daily bread from the blood of generations never to be born. That is not-justifiable.
Bush/Blair/etc. deserve trial because they deserve the chance to defend their actions and the world deserves to say that they lacked the certainty of humane success and just went ahead anyway, fully aware of the potential for civilian death and dislocation, the likelihood of civil if not regional war, etc., etc.
We voted for it too. We re-elected Bush and we re-elected almost any Democrat willing to contort for us: vote for war and torture and spying while complaining that it was all so horrific. Complaint, of course, having a stellar history of stopping war and torture and spying. Complicity doesn’t end at stupid.
So, in the end, to protect ourselves from the truth of our own complicity, we need scapegoats and/or a redeemer. Obama is trying his best to be the latter, redeeming our nation’s image, but I think we still need some sacrificial blood on the alter of justice so we can sleep at night and to disarm those abroad who still cannot.
In other words: until justice is served, complicity flows through us all. This is what puts the target on our heads in the first place, no?
Come, let’s take our spanking and our war spoils and everyone go home happy.
Right???
by then, things had gone too far. British and American troops were mobilized in Kuwait, and the two leaders were unwilling to contemplate the possibility of backing down.
Indeed. In December 2002, on a flight to Germany from the US, I sat next to a girl who was in the Air Force. She told me that she and her fellow soldiers (or whatever they’re called in the Air Force) had been told by their superiors that the invasion of Iraq was a done deal: the only question was precisely when it would start.
If I could have found out about this so easily, it must have been an open secret in military circles. And yet I heard not once about this in the press, which, until the very end, kept up the fiction that whether the invasion would happen was still up in the air.