From The Sun Herald, 6/18/05:
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/thesunherald/news/world/11925683.htm
Paper trail mounts
More documents call march to war into question
By WARREN P. STROBEL
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -
Highly classified documents leaked in Britain appear to provide new
evidence that President Bush and his national security team decided to
invade Iraq much earlier than they have acknowledged and marched to
war without dwelling on the potential perils.
The half-dozen memos and option papers, written by top aides to
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, buttress previous on-the-record
accounts that portray Bush and his advisers as predisposed to oust
Saddam Hussein when they took office - and determined to do it at all
costs after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Blair is Bush's closest global partner, and the documents, startlingly
frank at times, were never meant to become public.
Now they have rocketed around the Internet and been seized on by
opponents of the Iraq war as evidence that the president and his
administration were not leveling with the American people about their
war preparations.
By mid-March 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, top British
officials were already so resigned to a war that they seemed
preoccupied mostly with building international support and finding a
legal justification.
That was just six weeks after Bush declared Iraq a member of the "axis
of evil."
Britain concerned
But Blair's advisers repeatedly expressed concern that the case
against Saddam was weak and that the White House wasn't giving nearly
enough attention to what would happen after he was toppled.
"The U.S. government's military planning for action against Iraq is
proceeding apace. But as yet, it lacks a political framework. In
particular, little thought has been given to creating the political
conditions for military action, or the aftermath and how to shape it,"
stated a July 21, 2002, briefing paper prepared for a meeting of
Blair's advisers two days later.
"A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly
nation-building exercise," it stated.
Bush and Blair forcefully denied in a news conference this month that
they were fixated on war.
"There's nothing farther from the truth. My conversations with the
prime minister were how can we do this peacefully," Bush said.
"We worked hard to figure out how we could do this peacefully."
Neither the U.S. government nor the British government has disputed
the memos' authenticity.
The release of the documents comes at a bad time for Bush.
He faces growing congressional and public unease after 27 months of
war in Iraq.
Opinion polls show public support for the Iraq war at or near all-time
lows.
"It's not collapsing... . (But) there are signs people are becoming
uneasy," said Christopher Gelpi, a Duke University political science
professor who studies public opinion and the use of force.
Gelpi said the impact of the British memos is unclear, since they
haven't received wide media attention until recently.
"The notion that the public has been lied to could have a very toxic
effect on public support," he said.
Precisely when Bush made an irrevocable decision to invade Iraq
remains murky.
"We still don't know - and this is not unusual - exactly when the
presidential decision was made," said journalist James Mann, author of
"Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet."
The White House maintains it tried to avert war almost until the last
minute.
What all was known
Despite the outcry over the British documents, which have come to be
known as the "Downing Street memos," much of what they say was known -
or knowable - at the time, Mann said.
It's well documented that Bush began looking at military options for
overthrowing Saddam's regime as early as November 2001, with formal
military planning beginning early in 2002.
Knight Ridder, for example, reported on Feb. 13, 2002, that the
president had decided in principle on overthrowing the Iraqi leader
and ordered "a combination of military, diplomatic and covert steps"
to achieve that goal.
Six days later, then-Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., visited U.S. Central
Command headquarters and, Graham said in a memoir, was told by Gen.
Tommy Franks that despite ongoing operations in Afghanistan, "military
and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an
action in Iraq."
Franks denied making the comment.
'Sounds like a grudge'
Richard Haass, the State Department's director of policy planning,
told an interviewer that in an early July 2002 chat with then-National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, he questioned putting Iraq at the
center of the U.S. war against terrorism.
He said Rice advised him "essentially, that that decision's been made,
don't waste your breath."
In a March 22, 2002, letter to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw,
Blair political adviser Peter Ricketts advised steering the public
rationale for war away from "regime change."
"'Regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between
Bush and Saddam," Ricketts wrote.
Bush came into office with aides, including Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who believed that the United States erred
gravely by allowing Saddam to remain in power after the 1991 Gulf War.
Four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, during a crisis meeting at Camp
David, Wolfowitz argued for attacking Iraq in response, as first
recounted in journalist Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack."
Later that month, Wolfowitz helped arrange a trip by former CIA
Director James Woolsey to the United Kingdom to look for evidence of
an Iraqi role in Sept. 11.
Richard Clarke, at the time a veteran White House counterterrorism
official, has written that Bush ordered him to look for the same
evidence the day after the attacks.
The search for evidence, along with claims about Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction programs, continued for more than a year.
No Iraqi link to Sept. 11 has been found, and most of the intelligence
about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction has since proved to be
bogus.
In that sense, the British memos seem almost prophetic.
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by
the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy," Sir Richard Dearlove, head of
Britain's MI-6 spy service, told Blair and his top advisers after
talks in Washington, according to the first memo to be leaked.
It was dated July 23, 2002.
"US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al (Qaida) is so
far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts reported earlier in his March 2002
letter to Straw.
In his own letter to Blair three days later, Straw also seemed to
question the scale of the threat.
"In the documents so far presented, it has been hard to glean whether
the threat from Iraq is so significantly different from that of Iran
and North Korea as to justify military action," he wrote.
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The paper trail mounts.
Harry
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