[Mb-hair] Ministers Were Told of Need for Gulf War 'Excuse'

[Michael Butler]

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    Ministers Were Told of Need for Gulf War 'Excuse'
    By Michael Smith
    The Sunday Times UK

    Sunday 12 June 2005

    "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."

    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.