March 2001: Blair adviser -'UK will support US toppling Saddam "when the circumstances were right"'

[muriel_volestrangler]

Last night declassified documents released by Downing Street revealed that Mr Blair had already indicated Britain’s support for regime change in Iraq six months before the 9/11 attacks. The memo is from Sir John Sawers, foreign policy adviser to Mr Blair at the time and now head of MI6, to a senior diplomat. Dated March 7, 2001, it said that Britain would support the US in toppling Saddam “when the circumstances were right”.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7009090.ece

That document was declassified just after Blair finished giving his evidence, though the Chilcot panel had already seen it:

We heard Tony Blair deny that he "signed in blood" with George W Bush at the Crawford summit in Easter 2002. Yet we already know, from memos leaked long ago, that both his ambassador in Washington and his senior adviser on foreign policy explicitly told the Americans a year before the war that Tony Blair backed "regime change".

We further know, thanks to a declassified document released by Downing Street on Friday evening which the panel had already seen, that Tony Blair was offering support to remove Saddam "when the circumstances were right" even before 9/11. The inquiry failed to grasp the opportunity to find out precisely what he signed up to during the many private hours he spent with George Bush at his Prairie Chapel Ranch in Texas. As a result, they never identified the moment – an absolutely crucial question – when he concluded that he would join the war.

The invasion was launched on a misleading prospectus constructed from intelligence which was flaky when it was not simply fake. We heard the former prime minister lightly dismiss this by saying that the infamously wrong dossier about WMD had "assumed a vastly exaggerated importance later".

Yet it was Mr Blair – as the panel did not remind him – who invested that document with such importance by recalling Parliament for an emergency session so that he could fanfare the dossier to MPs and the nation. He had been told by his own officials that the intelligence was "sporadic and patchy" and yet he represented it to the Commons as "detailed and authoritative". Asked why he had not asked essential questions about the nature of the so-called intelligence, he was allowed to escape with the insouciant shrug: "I didn't focus on it a great deal."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/31/rawnsley-blair-iraq-chilcot

Complete failure by the Chilcot inquiry. They allowed Blair to claim that his attitude to Iraq changed after Sept 11, when they knew he officially wanted regime before it. Blair was as bad as Rumsfeld.

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[blm]

2. Invading Iraq was a goal of the powers that be before Bush2 became the US figurehead

Bush2 didn't HAVE TO TRY to get Blair on board. Blair had been on board since 1998, as was Clinton. They just didn't want to do it without the other allies who refused them then. So they waited till circumstances gave them the COVER.

[blm]

3. So, Blair was ready in March 2001, he was obviously PREPARED by Bill Clinton in previous years.

That's a fact that too many Dems want to ignore. Bill Clinton was Bush1 and 2's top SALESMAN on war with Iraq. Lieberman became the lightning rod when it was BILL who was actually doing the damage.