Blair may have ‘signed in blood’ to topple Saddam a year before war

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6933284.ece

Tony Blair and President Bush might have secretly “signed in blood” a deal to overthrow Saddam Hussein a year before ordering the Iraq war, according to a former senior diplomat.

Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s Ambassador to Washington in the run-up to the war, said an agreement to aim for “regime change” may have been reached during a private meeting at the President’s Crawford ranch in April 2002.

He also said that, in his view, Baroness Thatcher would have had a clearer grip on Britain’s policy towards Iraq. Giving evidence on the third day of the Chilcot inquiry into the war yesterday, he criticised Mr Blair’s failure to defend Britain’s national interest and to insist on much tougher conditions for his support for the US-led invasion in March 2003.

Sir Christopher said the decision to overthrow Saddam had been taken in the absence of advisers by Mr Blair and President Bush during a meeting at the Texas ranch. Afterwards, Mr Blair referred to “regime change” in Iraq for the first time.

“To this day I am not entirely clear what degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford ranch.” he said. “They weren’t there to talk about containment or strengthening sanctions.”

Sir Christopher said that Mr Blair would have been more influential if he had attached more conditions to British support. “I think that would have changed the nature of American planning,” he said. “By the time you get to the end of the year it’s too late. I did say to London that we were being taken for granted.”

Once the US miliary had started planning its strategy for an invasion in the spring of 2003, it was impossible to delay, even though the diplomatic work for a possible peaceful solution had not finished, he told the inquiry.

Sir Christopher said that he was “not making a party political point”, but Lady Thatcher had been much tougher on the “special relationship” with the Americans. He expressed frustration over the failure of the allies to agree a diplomatic strategy to overthrow Saddam or to prepare properly for victory, which would have prevented the country’s descent into chaos.

“Quite often I think what would Margaret Thatcher have done,” Sir Christopher told the inquiry. “I think she would have insisted on a clear, coherent political-diplomatic strategy. I think she would have demanded the greatest clarity about what the heck happened if, and when, we removed Saddam Hussein.”

Even though refusing to send troops to Iraq would not have damaged British interests in America, said Sir Christopher, he could not envisage Mr Blair following the example of Harold Wilson, who refused to send British forces to Vietnam.

“I couldn’t conceive that Prime Minister Blair . . . would have done a Harold Wilson,” he said, “I can’t image in period post 9/11 that Tony Blair, like Harold Wilson, would put distance between himself and the White House.” Sir Christopher, Ambassador to Washington from 1997 to 2003, also compared John Prescott unfavourably with Dick Cheney, the American Vice-President.

“I remember saying to London ‘This may be the most powerful Vice-President ever’. I mean, his institutional opposite number was the Deputy Prime Minister,” said Sir Christopher. “This was an unbalanced relationship and probably didn’t reap the dividends that we might have expected.”

Sir Christopher said that the political strategy should have delayed the invasion until the autumn of 2003. But the “contingency military timetable” had been decided even before the UN inspectors went into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction.

His words will draw comparisons to suggestions by some historians that the start of the First World War was decided partly as a result of Germany’s need to prepare its railway timetables for troop movements.

Although President Bush agreed to wait for the UN to pass resolution 1441 on Iraqi disarmament and send Hans Blix to make inspections, there was no time to come up with the evidence required before the scheduled start of the invasion, said Sir Christopher.

“You found yourself in a situation in the autumn of 2002 where you could not synchronise the military timetable with the inspection timetable,” he said.

“We found ourselves scrabbling around for the smoking gun. And we — the Americans, the British — have never really recovered from that because, of course, there was no smoking gun. The key problem was to let the military strategy wag the political and diplomatic strategy. It should have been the other way round.”

Sir Christopher expressed frustration that Britain was unable to gain much diplomatic leverage from its position as America’s chief ally.

“I said to London the key thing now, quite apart from Iraq, is to translate this popularity into real achievement, which benefits the national interest.”

But Britain failed to persuade America to liberalise transatlantic air travel and, almost on the day when British commandos joined the fighting in Afghanistan, the US imposed tariffs on imports of specialised British steel.

The inquiry will continue today with evidence from Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s Ambassador to the UN at the time of the invasion.