UK Inquiry: Blair Conspired with Bush as Early as February 2002 to Plot Iraq Invasion

By Dave Lindorff

Most Americans are blissfully in the dark about it, but across the
Atlantic in the UK, a commission reluctantly established by Prime
Minister Gordon Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in Britain
is beginning hearings into the actions and statements of British
leaders that led to the country’s joining the US invasion of Iraq in
2003.

Even before testimony began in hearings that started yesterday,
news began to leak out from documents obtained by the commission that
the government of former PM Tony Blair had lied to Parliament and the
public about the country’s involvement in war planning.

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper over the weekend published
documents from British military leaders, including a memo from British
special forces head Maj. Gen. Graeme Lamb, saying that he had been
instructed to begin “working the war up since early 2002.”

This means that Blair, who in July 2002, had assured members of a
House of Commons committee that there were “no preparations to invade
Iraq,” was lying.

Things are likely to heat up when the commission begins hearing
testimony. It has the power, and intends to compel testimony from top
government officials, including Blair himself.

While some American newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, have run an Associated Press report on the new disclosures and on the commission, key news organizations, including the New York Times, have not. The Times ignored
the Telegraph report, but a day later ran an article about the British
commission that focused entirely on evidence that British military
leaders in Iraq felt “slighted” by “arrogant” American military leaders
who, the article reported, pushed for aggressive military action
against insurgent groups, while British leaders preferred negotiating
with them.

While that may be of some historical interest, it hardly compares
with the evidence that Blair and the Bush/Cheney administration were
secretly conspiring to invade Iraq as early as February and March 2002.

Recall that back in the fall of 2002, the Bush/Cheney argument to Congress and the American people for initiating a war against Iraq was that Iraq was allegedly behind the 9-11 attacks and that it posed an
“imminent” danger of attack against the US and Britain with its alleged
weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, such arguments, which have subsequently been shown to
have been bogus, would have had no merit if the planning began a year
earlier, and if no such urgency was expressed by the two leaders at
that time. Imminent, after all, means imminent, and if Blair, Bush and
Cheney had genuinely thought an attack with WMDs was imminent back in
the early days of the Bush administration, they would have been acting
immediately, not secretly conjuring up a war scheduled for a year
later. (The actual invasion began on March 19, 2003).

As I documented in my book, The Case for Impeachment (St.
Martin’s Press, 2006), there is plenty of evidence that Bush and Cheney
had a scheme to put the US at war with Iraq even before Bush took
office on Jan. 20, 2001. Then Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in his
own tell-all book, The Price of Loyalty, written after he was
dumped from the Bush Administration, recounts that at the first meeting
of Bush’s new National Security Council, the question of going to war
and ousting Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was on the agenda. Immediately
after the 9-11 attacks, NSC anti-terrorism program czar Richard Clark
also recalled Bush ordering him to “find a link” to Iraq. Meanwhile,
within days, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was ordering top
generals to prepare for an Iraq invasion. Gen. Tommy Franks, who was
heading up the military effort in Afghanistan that was reportedly
closing in on Osama Bin Laden, found the rug being pulled out from
under him as Rumsfeld began shifting troops out of Afghanistan and to
Kuwait in preparation for the new war.

It is nothing less than astonishing that so little news of the
British investigation into the origins of the illegal Iraq War is being
conveyed to Americans by this country’s corporate media—yet another
example demonstrating that American journalism is dead or dying. It is
even more astonishing that neither the Congress nor the president here
in America is making any similar effort to put America’s leaders in the
dock to tell the truth about their machinations in engineering a war
that has cost the US over $1 trillion (perhaps $3 trillion eventually
when debt payments and the cost of veterans care is added in), and over
4000 lives, not to mention as many as one million innocent Iraqi lives.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net