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
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=615231
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.
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Such an honest Christian, our mr Blair.
--
Jez
'Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable
notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often
led to accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what
that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be
skeptical of someone else's description of reality.'-
Howard Zinn
NFS Underground2, Americas Army And MOH-PA
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