LONDON — Reports in the British
press this month based on documents indicating that President Bush and Prime
Minister Tony Blair had conditionally agreed by July 2002 to invade Iraq appear
to have blown over quickly in Britain.
But in the United States, where
the reports at first received scant attention, there has been growing
indignation among critics of the Bush White House, who say the documents help
prove that the leaders made a secret decision to oust Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein nearly a year before launching their attack, shaped intelligence to
that aim and never seriously intended to avert the war through diplomacy.
The documents, obtained by Michael Smith, a defense specialist writing for the
Sunday Times of London, include a memo of the minutes of a meeting July 23, 2002,
between Blair and his intelligence and military chiefs; a
briefing paper for that meeting and a Foreign Office legal opinion prepared
before an April 2002 summit between Blair and Bush in Texas.
The picture that emerges from the documents is of a British government
convinced of the U.S. desire to go to war and Blair's agreement to it, subject
to several specific conditions.
Since Smith's report was published May 1, Blair's Downing Street office has not
disputed the documents' authenticity. Asked about them Wednesday, a Blair
spokesman said the report added nothing significant to the much-investigated
record of the lead-up to the war.
"At the end of the day, nobody pushed the diplomatic route harder than the
British government…. So the circumstances of this July discussion very quickly
became out of date," said the spokesman, who asked not to be identified.
The leaked minutes sum up the July 23 meeting, at which Blair, top security
advisors and his attorney general discussed Britain's role in Washington's plan
to oust Hussein. The minutes, written by Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy
aide, indicate general thoughts among the participants about how to create a
political and legal basis for war. The case for military action at the time was
"thin," Foreign Minister Jack Straw was characterized as saying,
and Hussein's government posed little threat.
Labeled "secret and strictly personal — U.K. eyes only," the
minutes begin with the head of the British intelligence service, MI6, who is
identified as "C," saying he had returned from Washington, where
there had been a "perceptible shift in attitude. Bush wanted to remove
Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and
[weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and the facts were being
fixed around the policy."
Straw agreed that Bush seemed determined to act militarily, although the timing
was not certain.
"But the case was thin," the minutes say. "Saddam was not
threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capacity was less than that of Libya,
North Korea or Iran."
Straw then proposed to "work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam" to
permit United Nations weapons inspectors back into Iraq. "This would also
help with the legal justification for the use of force," he said, according
to the minutes.
Blair said, according to the memo, "that it would make a big difference
politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the U.N.
inspectors."
"If the political context were right, people would support regime
change," Blair said. "The two key issues were whether the military
plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan
the space to work."
In addition to the minutes, the Sunday Times report referred to a Cabinet
briefing paper that was given to participants before the July 23 meeting. It
stated that Blair had already promised Bush cooperation earlier, at the April
summit in Texas.
"The U.K. would support military action to bring about regime
change," the Sunday Times quoted the briefing as saying.
Excerpts from the paper, which Smith provided to the Los Angeles Times, said
Blair had listed conditions for war, including that "efforts had been made
to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine crisis was
quiescent," and options to "eliminate Iraq's WMD through the U.N.
weapons inspectors" had been exhausted
.
The briefing paper said the British government should get the
U.S. to put its military plans in a "political framework."
"This is particularly important for the U.K. because it is necessary to
create the conditions in which we could legally support military action,"
it says.
In a letter to Bush last week, 89 House Democrats expressed shock over the
documents. They asked if the papers were authentic and, if so, whether they
proved that the White House had agreed to invade Iraq months before seeking
Congress' OK.
"If the disclosure is accurate, it raises troubling new questions
regarding the legal justifications for the war as well as the integrity of our
own administration," the letter says.
"While the president of the United States was telling the citizens and the
Congress that they had no intention to start a war with Iraq, they were working
very close with Tony Blair and the British leadership at making this a foregone
conclusion," the letter's chief author, Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan,
said Wednesday.
If the documents are real, he
said, it is "a huge problem" in terms of an abuse of power. He said
the White House had not yet responded to the letter.
Both Blair and Bush have denied
that a decision on war was made in early 2002. The White House and Downing
Street maintain that they were preparing for military operations as an option,
but that the option to not attack also remained open until the war began March 20,
2003.
In January 2002, Bush described Iraq as a member of an "axis of
evil," but the sustained White House push for Iraqi compliance with U.N.
resolutions did not come until September of that year. That month, Bush
addressed the U.N. General Assembly to outline a case against Hussein's
government, and he sought a bipartisan congressional resolution authorizing the
possible use of force.
In November 2002, the U.N. Security Council approved a resolution demanding
that Iraq readmit weapons inspectors.
An effort to pass a second
resolution expressly authorizing the use of force against Iraq did not succeed.
Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.