How Blair dressed regime
change up as disarmament
There is compelling
evidence that, by March 2002, Tony Blair had given President Bush a commitment to
support the
Evidence for this emerged in
September 2004, when 6 official documents from March 2002 were leaked to the
Daily Telegraph and came into the public domain. Facsimiles of them can be read on my website [1].
One of these was a memo to Tony
Blair, dated 14 March 2002, from his Foreign Policy Adviser, Sir David Manning [2]. The memo reported on Sir David’s discussions
in
“I said [to
Condoleezza Rice] that you would not
budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a
Parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in
the States.”
In other words, by March 2002, the
Bush administration was given an assurance that Tony Blair was unflinching in
his commitment to regime change in
His commitment was confirmed by another leaked document,
this one a memo from Sir Christopher Meyer, the British Ambassador in
“I opened by
sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice. We backed regime change, but the plan
had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us
domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in
Later,
in November 2005, Sir Christopher published an account of his time in
“By
this stage, Tony Blair had already taken the decision to support regime change,
though he was discreet about saying so in public.” (p241)
The stage in question was
prior to the meeting between Bush and Blair in
So, in my view, there is
little doubt that, by March 2002, Tony Blair was committed to supporting the
The
“clever plan” was to persuade the Security
Council to pass a resolution demanding that Iraq readmit UN inspectors, but on
terms that would make it impossible for Saddam Hussein to accept – in which
case, there would be a good possibility that the Security Council would
authorise military action, ostensibly to disarm Iraq, and, as a byproduct, the
Iraqi regime would be overthrown.
Evidence that this was the
strategy to be employed is to be found in Sir Christopher Meyer’s memo, where
he wrote that if the US “wanted to act with partners, there had to be a
strategy for building support for military action against Saddam”. He continued: “I then went through the need
to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors … ”.
The leaked minutes of a
high powered meeting on
“… it would make a big
difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN
inspectors. … If the political context were right, people would support regime
change.” [4]
Clearly, Tony Blair was
looking forward to Saddam Hussein keeping UN inspectors out, even though the
peaceful disarmament of
In early October
2002, the US/UK proposed a draft resolution to the Security Council, which, in
keeping with the “clever plan”, was designed to set terms for the re-admission of UN
inspectors that
However, the US/UK
draft resolution wasn’t passed. Instead,
it was amended to remove the terms that would have been unacceptable to
The “clever plan” to “wrongfoot
Saddam on the inspectors” had failed – and the military action planned by the
US/UK to overthrow his regime had to proceed without authorisation by the
Security Council.
David
Morrison
15
December 2009
References:
[1] www.david-morrison.org.uk/iraq/leaked-documents-index.html
[2] www.david-morrison.org.uk/other-documents/manning020314.pdf
[3] www.david-morrison.org.uk/other-documents/meyer020318.pdf
[4] www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article387374.ece