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Today’s quote comes courtesy of teflon Tony Blair, all the way over in London. No, he’s not talking about forgetting to pay for his TV licence. He’s at the Chilcot Inquiry and he’s talking about forgetting to fact-check the intelligence dossier that convinced him we needed to invade Iraq. Despite gems like these (taken from the Daily Torygraph, I confess) surfacing online today in all the main papers, the headlines make out that he’s a man of decisive action, “not Bush’s poodle” – as if the internecine power dynamic between the two stooges was more important than whether the pair of them should be tried as war criminals. Other heinous admissions dressed up in diplomatic-speak include: “A second resolution was obviously going to make life a lot easier, politically and in every respect” – good to see his reverence for the UN as little more than a rubber-stamp for making life easier.
For more of the same, then why not check out this secret Downing Street Memo from July 2002 (later republished in the Sunday Times), in which Mssrs Blair, Campbell, the Attorney General and John Scarlett (then head of “Intelligence”) all talk more candidly about how they and the US can get the Iraq show on the road, evidence on not:
Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
Then there’s the small matter of Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, who wrote Blair a full letter in 2002 outlining the illegality of an Iraq invasion, stating that: there were only three justifications: self-defence, which he did not accept because he did not accept the new US doctrine of expanded pre-emption; averting a humanitarian crisis, which justified the no-fly zones but would not justify war; and UN authorisation, which would require a new resolution.
Blair’s reaction was not only to ignore him (obviously), but to gag and bar him from the Cabinet. Then deny everything. The Daily Mail (hey, at least the sources have some standing) had the full scoop here. Read a blow-by-blow account of Goldsmith’s turn on the stand at Chilcot here.
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