[Media-watch] Did Blair sign up for War at Bush's Ranch in 2002 -
Indpendent on Sunday - 27/02/2005
Julie-ann Davies
jadavies2004 at yahoo.co.uk
Sun Feb 27 22:41:18 GMT 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=615231
The Crawford Deal: did Blair sign up for war at Bush's Texas ranch in April
2002?
We know that arguments raged about the legality of the war right up to
a crucial cabinet meeting on 17 March 2003, two days before the attack
began. But now new evidence pieced together by the 'IoS' strongly backs the
suspicion that the PM had already made the decision to strike a year
earlier. By Raymond Whitaker
27 February 2005
It was one of the most tense cabinet meetings Downing Street had seen
in living memory. "We were on the brink of war," recalled Clare Short, who
was there. The consequences would be dramatic, not only for those round the
table, but for millions of Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of British and
American troops.
The date was 17 March 2003, only two days before the war to oust
Saddam Hussein was launched. "The atmosphere was very fraught by then," Ms
Short, then International Development Secretary, said last week. Experts in
international law were saying the impending conflict was illegal, her
officials were concerned, and the military was demanding a clear statement
of the legal position.
The issue of the war's legality has erupted back into the public arena
in the past week with the publication of a book, Lawless World, by Philippe
Sands QC, an international lawyer in Cherie Blair's Matrix Chambers.
According to his account, the Attorney General, Lord Gold- smith, had
delivered a 13-page opinion on 7 March 2003 which said that to be sure of
legal authority for the war, a UN Security Council resolution specifically
backing force was needed. Later, at a meeting at Downing Street, he said his
views had become "clearer", and it was that clarification that was presented
to Ms Short and her colleagues.
How that change came about has been the subject of intense
speculation, reviving the pressure on the Government to publish the full
text of the Attorney General's advice. But the lingering questions over the
war do not end there. Mr Sands and others also raise doubts about another
great mystery surrounding the conflict: when did Tony Blair first sign up to
President George Bush's crusade to oust Saddam Hussein?
Last September, highly embarrassing leaked documents showed that as
early as March 2002, the Prime Minister's foreign policy adviser, Sir David
Manning, was assuring Condoleezza Rice of Mr Blair's unbudgeable support for
"regime change". Days later, Sir Christopher Meyer, then British ambassador
to the US, sent a dispatch to Downing Street detailing how he repeated the
commitment to Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary. The
ambassador added that Mr Blair would need a "cover" for any military action.
"I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the
UN Security Council resolutions."
Throughout this period, and into 2003, Mr Blair was insisting in
public that war was not inevitable. In May 2002 he said Iraq would be "in a
far better position" without Saddam, but added: "Does that mean that
military action is imminent or about to happen? No. We've never said that."
Introducing the notorious WMD dossier in the Commons on 24 September that
year, he said: "Our case is simply this: not that we take military action
come what may, but that the case for ensuring Iraqi disarmament, as the UN
itself has stipulated, is overwhelming."
In the past week, however, it has not only emerged that Special Branch
officers questioned opposition parties as part of an investigation into the
leaks, but The Independent on Sunday has discovered further information
indicating that when Mr Blair met Mr Bush at his Texas ranch on 7 and 8
April 2002, he committed Britain to an assault on Iraq. The clue, contained
in an obscure row over the Government's refusal to answer an apparently
straightforward parliamentary question, shows that both at the beginning and
the end of the process which culminated in the invasion and occupation of
Iraq, the issue of legality was very much in the air.
As the Cabinet gathered on the eve of war, it was well known around
Whitehall that the Foreign Office's legal advisers saw no authority for the
conflict without a fresh UN resolution, and that Lord Goldsmith had
apparently supported their view in his written opinion 10 days earlier. The
scene should have been set for a ferocious debate, but that was not what
happened, according to Ms Short.
Lord Goldsmith, who is not a cabinet member, came in and sat in the
place previously occupied by Robin Cook, who had just resigned. If the
Attorney General was aware of the symbolism, he gave no sign of it. A
two-page document was circulated and Lord Goldsmith started to read it
aloud, but was told there was no need.
Until that day, the absence of any public statement had allowed doubts
about the legality of the war to multiply, but now Lord Goldsmith was saying
there was no problem. "I said this was odd, coming so late," Ms Short
recalled last week. "Everyone said, 'Oh Clare, be quiet.' No one would allow
any discussion ... I was stunned and surprised, because of all the other
information I had received."
But Ms Short went along with her colleagues and voted for war. "The
Attorney General is the legal authority for Britain, for civil servants, the
military and ministers," she said. "But now it looks to me that [the revised
legal opinion] was stitched together, it wasn't properly done. Not only are
there questions over how we went to war, but about the reliability of the
Attorney General in the British constitution. Our constitutional
arrangements are breaking down."
Reacting to last week's controversy, Lord Goldsmith has denied being
"leaned on" by the Government to change his view, or that the two people he
met at Downing Street, Baroness Morgan and Lord Falconer, were involved "in
any way" with the document circulated to the Cabinet on 17 March, and issued
the same day as a written parliamentary answer. Following reports that he
told last year's Butler inquiry that Lady Morgan and Lord Falconer had set
out his view, Lord Goldsmith asked for the record to be corrected to "I set
out my view".
"As I have always made clear, I set out in the [parliamentary] answer
my own genuinely held, independent view that military action was lawful
under the existing Security Council resolutions," he said on Friday night.
"The answer did not purport to be a summary of my confidential legal advice
to Government."
Lord Goldsmith did not mention the insistent demands that his
"confidential legal advice" should be published, to clear up the many
questions about it. But the speed of his reaction to news reports, coupled
with the near-unprecedented use of the Special Branch to question
politicians and their aides, indicates an atmosphere close to panic in
government circles that the whole issue of Iraq could be reopened just as an
election campaign is about to begin.
That consideration seems to apply to the refusal to answer a simple
question: when did it first seek legal advice on whether an invasion of Iraq
would be lawful? The Liberal Democrats, who asked the question, stressed
that they did not want to know what the advice was, simply the date it was
requested, but the Foreign Office has rejected a ruling by the Parliamentary
Ombudsman that it has no good reason to withhold the information.
Sir Michael Jay, permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, argued
that the date on its own would be "misleading". It was already in the public
domain that advice was first sought in the spring of 2002; "it was not his
view that the public interest required the release of anything more specific
beyond that", in the words of the Ombudsman, Ann Abraham.
To put the date in context, the FO said, it would have to release a
confidential internal minute and a press release. Ms Abraham said there was
no need to disclose the minute, but stated: "I find it difficult to
understand what harm might be caused by the department, in releasing the
date of this minute, saying that it had been written because statements made
in a particular press release ... suggested to them that it might be
sensible to obtain legal advice in respect of those statements."
Most FO press releases are anodyne announcements of am- bassadorial
appointments and guests received by the Foreign Secretary. From March to May
2002, there are only two that stand out, both on 9 April, the day after Mr
Blair left Mr Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Both concern armed incursions
by Israeli forces into the Palestinian areas. In one, the Foreign Secretary,
Jack Straw, calls on Israel to abide by Security Council resolutions,
saying: "Like every other country, Israel has a right to security, but the
Israeli government must respect inter- national law ..." Britain's then
ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, makes the same point even more
forcefully, saying: "I think everybody understands that the political and
moral authority of the United Nations is not to be cast aside lightly or to
be trodden on lightly."
The potential hostage to fortune in those words is emphasised in
another press statement the same day by Ben Bradshaw, then a Foreign Office
minister, who condemns Saddam for exploiting the Israeli "invasion" of
Palestinian areas while ignoring the suffering of his own people.
Did someone in the Foreign Office realise that in the light of these
statements, it might be wise to seek legal advice if Britain proposed an
invasion of Iraq? According to Philippe Sands, interdepartmental advice had
already been circulated the month before, "stating that regime change of
itself had no basis in international law".
On the eve of Mr Blair's visit to Texas, Downing Street dismissed
suggestions that he was going for a "council of war". It might be
embarrassing rather than misleading to admit that, days later, the
Government was seeking to establish the legal justification for war -
especially since, according to Robin Cook, Mr Blair told the Cabinet on his
return from Crawford that "the time to debate the legal basis for our action
should be when we take that action".
In the view of Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign
affairs spokesman, the Government's refusal to give the date it sought legal
advice "can be seen as a refusal to admit that the commitment to George Bush
was made very much earlier than the Prime Minister has so far been willing
to say". But on this point, as on so much else to do with the war in Iraq,
the Government remains mute.
27 February 2005 22:34
Search this site:
Printable Story
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 108 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.stir.ac.uk/mailman/private/media-watch/attachments/20050227/eef93bc5/attachment-0003.gif
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 43 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.stir.ac.uk/mailman/private/media-watch/attachments/20050227/eef93bc5/attachment-0004.gif
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 15477 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.stir.ac.uk/mailman/private/media-watch/attachments/20050227/eef93bc5/attachment-0005.gif
More information about the Media-watch
mailing list