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?
