From The London Times, 6/12/05:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1650565_1,00.html
The leak that changed minds on the Iraq war
Michael Smith
Six weeks ago The Sunday Times published the leaked minutes of a July
2002 Downing Street meeting in which Tony Blair committed Britain to
war in Iraq months before parliament was consulted.
They detailed a secret pledge to President George W Bush to help oust
Saddam, showed that Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, had warned
such action could be illegal and that Jack Straw, the foreign
secretary, had thought the case for war was "thin".
By any standards these were fascinating revelations.
Nothing, however, could have prepared us for what a worldwide impact
the story would have.
More than a month later it still features in the daily top 10 most
popular stories on our website, with 330,000 people estimated to have
logged on to read it.
Though it remains unclear to what extent the leaked documents had on
the general election (held four days after the story broke), anger
about the war is widely seen as the key reason for the government’s
severely reduced majority.
What is clearer is that they are having a strong effect on public
perception in America, where there has been a wave of interest in the
leak.
At least two websites, afterdowningstreet.org and
downingstreetmemo.com, have been set up to draw public attention to
the leaked minutes.
The former received more than 1.6 million hits on a single day last
week (it averages above 1million a day) while the latter has been
selling out of T-shirts bearing the legend:
"Did you get the Downing Street Memo?"
Last week the leaked documents stormed the mainstream US media when
they were raised at a White House news conference, forcing Tony Blair
and George Bush to address the issue.
The minutes showed that Sir Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, warned
Blair’s war cabinet that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed
around the policy".
The prime minister, who had chaired that July meeting, told the White
House briefing room that "the facts were not being fixed in any shape
at all".
The American public is not so sure. Last week a Washington Post-ABC
News poll found for the first time that a majority of Americans -- 52%
-- felt the war in Iraq had not made the United States safer.
Today we publish further revelations in the news section in the form
of a July 2002 Cabinet Office briefing paper.
It makes clear that both Blair and Bush have a lot to apologise for:
"When the prime minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at
Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to
bring about regime change," it states, adding that "regime change per
se is illegal".
As a prime minister had agreed to do something that was illegal under
British interpretation of international law, it was "necessary to
create the conditions in which we could legally support regime
change", the briefing paper says.
For Blair, "creating the conditions" meant going to the United Nations
to get a unanimous resolution warning Iraq to co- operate with the
inspectors or else.
Bush needed the backing of Congress and he didn’t get that until
October 11, 2002.
But as Geoff Hoon, then British defence secretary, said in that
Downing Street meeting in July 2002, the "US had already begun ‘spikes
of activity’ to put pressure on the regime".
No bombs were dropped on southern Iraq in March 2002 but by July, with
the "spikes of activity" in full flow, about 10 tons of bombs were
being dropped a month.
The problem was that the Iraqis didn’t retaliate.
They didn’t provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed.
So at the end of August the allies started the air war anyway.
The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq shot up to 54.6 tons in
September alone.
The authenticity of these figures is not in doubt.
They were obtained from the government by parliamentary questions put
by the Liberal Democrats so they are up on the Hansard website for all
the internet bloggers to see.
They show that Bush and Blair began their war, not in March 2003 as
most believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Bush
received his congressional backing, and more than two months before
the UN vote.
That is why the wave of public awareness sweeping America is so
dangerous to Bush and why he has refused to answer a letter from 89
Democratic congressmen asking if the intelligence was "fixed" and
precisely when he and Blair actually agreed to go to war.
John Conyers, the Demo-cratic congressman who drafted the letter,
promised when downingstreetmemo.com was set up last week that once
250,000 people had signed the website’s petition demanding the same
answers he would deliver it to Bush.
By Friday more than 500,000 people had signed and it seems likely that
by next Thursday when Conyers carries the petition up to the White
House gates the names on it will number well over a million.
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Harry
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