http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1650822,00.html
The Sunday
Times - Britain
June 12,
2005
Ministers
were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’
Michael
Smith
MINISTERS
were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an
American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of
making it legal.
The warning,
in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed
to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas
ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.
The briefing
paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002,
said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the
conditions” which would make it legal.
This was
required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an
invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would
automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.
“US plans
assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia,” the
briefing paper warned. This meant that issues of legality “would arise
virtually whatever option ministers choose with regard to UK participation”.
The paper
was circulated to those present at the meeting, among whom were Blair, Geoff
Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir
Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The full minutes of the meeting were
published last month in The Sunday Times.
The document
said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam
Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum
ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this
would be difficult.
“It is just
possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,”
the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they
would be “most unlikely” to obtain the legal justification they needed.
The
suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by
Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they
turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq
finally began in March 2003.
The briefing
paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American
president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on
regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it.
There has
been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication
of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet
bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to
“the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media.
The White
House has declined to respond to a letter from 89 Democratic congressmen asking
if it was true — as Dearlove told the July meeting — that “the intelligence and
facts were being fixed around the policy” in Washington.
The Downing
Street memo burst into the mainstream American media only last week after it
was raised at a joint Bush-Blair press conference, forcing the prime minister
to insist that “the facts were not fixed in any shape or form at all”.
John
Conyers, the Democratic congressman who drafted the letter to Bush, has now
written to Dearlove asking him to say whether or not it was accurate that he
believed the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy. He also asked
the former MI6 chief precisely when Bush and Blair had agreed to invade Iraq
and whether it is true they agreed to “manufacture” the UN ultimatum in order
to justify the war.
He and other
Democratic congressmen plan to hold their own inquiry this Thursday with witnesses
including Joe Wilson, the American former ambassador who went to Niger to
investigate claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium ore for its nuclear
weapons programme.
Frustrated
at the refusal by the White House to respond to their letter, the congressmen
have set up a website — www.downingstreetmemo.com — to collect signatures on a
petition demanding the same answers.
Conyers
promised to deliver it to Bush once it reached 250,000 signatures. By Friday
morning it already had more than 500,000 with as many as 1m expected to have
been obtained when he delivers it to the White House on Thursday.
AfterDowningStreet.org,
another website set up as a result of the memo, is calling for a congressional
committee to consider whether Bush’s actions as depicted in the memo constitute
grounds for impeachment.
It has been
flooded with visits from people angry at what they see as media self-censorship
in ignoring the memo. It claims to have attracted more than 1m hits a day.
Democrats.com,
another website, even offered $1,000 (about £550) to any journalist who quizzed
Bush about the memo’s contents, although the Reuters reporter who asked the
question last Tuesday was not aware of the reward and has no intention of
claiming it.
The
complaints of media self-censorship have been backed up by the ombudsmen of The
Washington Post, The New York Times and National Public Radio, who have
questioned the lack of attention the minutes have received from their
organisations.
Copyright
2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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