Scott Ridder Had it Right

Would Bush have Gone to War Without Blair?
Patrick Seale Al-Hayat - 18/11/05//

As Iraq sinks deeper into disaster, the question people are asking is this: Was the Iraq war inevitable? Could it have been avoided? If Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair had refused to take part, would President George W Bush have gone to war alone?
If it can be established that Britain could have checked America's rush to war, but failed to do so, then Blair must share with Bush a heavy personal responsibility for the catastrophe that followed - for the vast number of civilian and military deaths, for the huge expenditure of resources, for the physical destruction of Iraq and the continuing misery of its people, for the attacks on London's transport system last July and, more generally, for the terrorist explosion which now threatens much of the world.
Most observers now agree that the war in Iraq was either a criminal enterprise or a tragic mistake. If it was waged for reasons which were known to be spurious at the time, then the war was criminal. This would be the case if Bush and Blair decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein even though they knew that Iraq posed no serious threat.
Regime change for its own sake is not allowed under international law, which is why UN Secretary General Kofi Annan declared the war illegal.
On this view, accusations that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was linked to Al-Qaida were no more than cynical fabrications hyped-up to conceal the true war aims, widely suspected to have been America's ambition to consolidate its control over Arab oil and improve Israel's strategic environment by smashing a major Arab power.
An alternative argument gives Bush and Blair the benefit of the doubt. It suggests that American and British decision-makers may have been duped into believing that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat because they were fed false intelligence, cooked up by Iraqi exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi and his pro-Israeli neocon friends in Washington. If this is indeed what happened, then Bush and Blair made a tragic mistake not entirely of their own making -- for which Iraqis, Americans and the world at large are paying a heavy price.
Unfortunately for Bush and Blair, the facts seem to support the view that their war was in fact a criminal conspiracy. The most damning piece of evidence is a document, known as the 'Downing Street Memo', which consists of minutes of a meeting chaired by Tony Blair on July 23, 2002 to discuss the coming war in Iraq - a war to which Blair is thought to have given his assent when he met Bush privately at his ranch at Crawford the previous April. The highly confidential document was leaked to The Sunday Times of London which published it on May 1, 2005.
The 'Downing Street Memo' contains the summary of a report by Britain's spy chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, who had just returned from Washington where he had talks with the CIA director George Tenet. Dearlove's conclusion was that 'Military action was now seen as inevitable…Bush wanted to remove Saddam … The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw agreed: 'It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action… But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran…' Britain, Straw suggested, should 'work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would help with the legal justification for the use of force.'
Extracts such as these from the minutes of the Downing Street meeting strongly suggest that Britain knew there was no real case for war. The problem for Blair and his colleagues was how to explain to their public opinion the naked act of aggression that was being planned. How was it to be justified in law? The record shows that they did a very poor job of it and are now being called to account.
Pressure is mounting for the British Parliament to conduct its own inquiry into the conduct of Tony Blair and his ministers in the run-up to the war.
In the meantime, two books by distinguished British public servants have dealt a severe blow to Blair's credibility. The first, entitled Not Quite the Diplomat, is by Chris Patten a former Conservative cabinet minister who was Britain's last governor of Hong Kong, and then, for five years, a robust European Union commissioner for external relations. In 2003 Patten was elected Chancellor of Oxford University and, in January 2005, he took his seat in the House of Lords as Lord Patten of Barnes.
A key theme of Patten's book is how Europe - and Britain - should persuade the United States to return to multilateralism after its recent, and disastrous, inclination to act alone, outside the framework of international law and the institutions of global governance.
'Supporting the Bush invasion of Iraq is probably the worst service we have paid America,' he writes. 'Is it really the role of a good friend to suppress real anxieties rather than express them candidly?'
The second book, entitled DC Confidential, by Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain's ambassador in Washington from 1997 to 2003, contains far sharper criticisms of Blair and his ministers. Meyer reveals many damaging details about the relationship between the British prime minister and the American president, a betrayal of trust which has earned him the bitter enmity of Blair and his loyalists.
Meyer takes the view that Blair is at least partly responsible for the present bloody chaos in Iraq because he failed to check Bush's aggressive intentions. 'We may have been the junior partner in the enterprise,' he writes, 'but the ace up our sleeve was that America did not want to go it alone.'
War was not inevitable, he argues, implying that Blair could have prevented it, if he had chosen to do so. 'Sitting in Washington,' he writes, 'the road to war looked to me at that time anything but straight or the destination preordained.'
Britain's support for the war was invaluable to America but, according to Meyer, Blair's unconditional support for Bush 'destroyed' this leverage. He claims the British prime minister was 'seduced' by American power and by the glamour of the White House. He did not engaged Bush in 'plain-speaking conversation' which might have allowed him to achieve a 'tough negotiating position' such as Churchill achieved with Roosevelt or Margaret Thatcher with Ronald Reagan. Instead, Meyer writes scornfully, 'Whatever Bush did, Blair wanted to be with him.'
Future historians will puzzle over Blair's decision to join Bush's war - in spite of opposition from senior officials at the Foreign Office, from service chiefs at the Ministry of Defence and from the great majority of the British public who demonstrated in their millions against the war. Why did Blair not pull the American president back from the brink?
No doubt an important factor was the very close ties, built up over many years between Britain and America. The two countries have much in common, not least world-wide intelligence gathering and cooperation over the nuclear weapons in Britain's arsenal. Blair did not wish to put these ties at risk. In his mind, preserving the intimate Anglo-American alliance was a vital British interest, overriding any other consideration.
But a mystery remains. Does the answer lie in Blair's personality? In his conviction of moral rectitude, now very much in question? Or was he attracted by the thought of sending British troops into battle alongside the world's superpower? Was he perhaps nostalgic for the days when Britain was itself the strongest power on earth, with an empire covering a fifth of the world's surface? end