06/18/05 LONDON (AP)
When Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief foreign
policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after
Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn't want
to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk
about ``regime change'' in Iraq, setting the stage for the
U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.
President Bush wanted Blair's support, but British
officials worried the White House was rushing to war,
according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos
that have renewed questions and debate about Washington's
motives for ousting Saddam Hussein.
In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political
director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush
administration had a clear and compelling military reason for
war.
``U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida
is so far frankly unconvincing,'' Ricketts says in the memo.
``For Iraq, `regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like
a grudge between Bush and Saddam.''
The documents confirm Blair was genuinely concerned about
Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, but also
indicate he was determined to go to war as America's top ally,
even though his government thought a pre-emptive attack may be
illegal under international law.
``The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of
Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, but our tolerance of them
post-11 September,'' said a typed copy of a March 22, 2002
memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press and written to
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
``But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not
show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or
CW/BW (chemical or biological weapons) fronts: the programs
are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been
stepped up.''
Details from Rice's dinner conversation also are included
in one of the secret memos from 2002, which reveal British
concerns about both the invasion and poor postwar planning by
the Bush administration, which critics say has allowed the
Iraqi insurgency to rage.
The eight memos all labeled ``secret'' or ``confidential''
were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has
written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday
Times.
Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he
had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on
plain paper and destroying the originals.
The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two
have circulated widely). A senior British official who
reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He
spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature
of the material.
The eight documents total 36 pages and range from 10-page
and eight-page studies on military and legal options in Iraq,
to brief memorandums from British officials and the minutes of
a private meeting held by Blair and his top advisers.
Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert who teaches at Queen Mary
College, University of London, said the documents confirmed
what post-invasion investigations have found.
``The documents show what official inquiries in Britain
already have, that the case of weapons of mass destruction was
based on thin intelligence and was used to inflate the
evidence to the level of mendacity,'' Dodge said. ``In going
to war with Bush, Blair defended the special relationship
between the two countries, like other British leaders have.
But he knew he was taking a huge political risk at home. He
knew the war's legality was questionable and its unpopularity
was never in doubt.''
Dodge said the memos also show Blair was aware of the
postwar instability that was likely among Iraq's complex mix
of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds once Saddam was defeated.
The British documents confirm, as well, that ``soon after
9/11 happened, the starting gun was fired for the invasion of
Iraq,'' Dodge said.
Speculation about if and when that would happen ran
throughout 2002.
On Jan. 29, Bush called Iraq, Iran and North Korea ``an
axis of evil.'' U.S. newspapers began reporting soon afterward
that a U.S.-led war with Iraq was possible.
On Oct. 16, the U.S. Congress voted to authorize Bush to go
to war against Iraq. On Feb. 5, 2003, then-Secretary of State
Colin L. Powell presented the Bush administration's case about
Iraq's weapons to the U.N. Security Council. On March 19-20,
the U.S.-led invasion began.
Bush and Blair both have been criticized at home since
their WMD claims about Iraq proved false. But both have been
re-elected, defending the conflict for removing a brutal
dictator and promoting democracy in Iraq. Both administrations
have dismissed the memos as old news.
Details of the memos appeared in papers early last month
but the news in Britain quickly turned to the election that
returned Blair to power. In the United States, however,
details of the memos' contents reignited a firestorm,
especially among Democratic critics of Bush.
It was in a March 14, 2002, memo that Blair's chief foreign
policy adviser, David Manning, told the prime minister about
the dinner he had just had with Rice in Washington.
``We spent a long time at dinner on Iraq,'' wrote Manning,
who's now British ambassador to the United States. Rice is now
Bush's secretary of state.
``It is clear that Bush is grateful for your (Blair's)
support and has registered that you are getting flak. I said
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. And you
would not budge either in your insistence that, if we pursued
regime change, it must be very carefully done and produce the
right result. Failure was not an option.''
Manning said, ``Condi's enthusiasm for regime change is
undimmed.'' But he also said there were signs of greater
awareness of the practical difficulties and political risks.
Blair was to meet with Bush at his ranch in Crawford,
Texas, on April 8, and Manning told his boss: ``No doubt we
need to keep a sense of perspective. But my talks with Condi
convinced me that Bush wants to hear your views on Iraq before
taking decisions. He also wants your support. He is still
smarting from the comments by other European leaders on his
Iraq policy.''
A July 21 briefing paper given to officials preparing for a
July 23 meeting with Blair says officials must ``ensure that
the benefits of action outweigh the risks.''
``In particular we need to be sure that the outcome of the
military action would match our objective... A postwar
occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly
nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the U.S.
military plans are virtually silent on this point.''
The British worried that, ``Washington could look to us to
share a disproportionate share of the burden. Further work is
required to define more precisely the means by which the
desired end state would be created, in particular what form of
government might replace Saddam Hussein's regime and the time
scale within which it would be possible to identify a
successor.''
In the March 22 memo from Foreign Office political director
Ricketts to Foreign Secretary Straw, Ricketts outlined how to
win public and parliamentary support for a war in Britain:
``We have to be convincing that: the threat is so
serious/imminent that it is worth sending our troops to die
for; it is qualitatively different from the threat posed by
other proliferators who are closer to achieving nuclear
capability (including Iran).''
Blair's government has been criticized for releasing an
intelligence dossier on Iraq before the war that warned Saddam
could launch chemical or biological weapons on 45 minutes'
notice.
On March 25 Straw wrote a memo to Blair, saying he would
have a tough time convincing the governing Labour Party that a
pre-emptive strike against Iraq was legal under international
law.
``If 11 September had not happened, it is doubtful that the
U.S. would now be considering military action against Iraq,''
Straw wrote. ``In addition, there has been no credible
evidence to link Iraq with OBL (Osama bin Laden) and al-Qaida.''
He also questioned stability in a post-Saddam Iraq: ``We
have also to answer the big question what will this action
achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than on
anything.''
On the Net:
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/fcolegal020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/manning020314.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/meyer020318.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ods020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ricketts020322.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/straw020325.pdf
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1648758,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html
(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights
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