Iraq: The Proof Is In The Pudding - Or So They Say

As Britain's inquiry into the origins of the 2003 Iraq War goes ahead full steam, "shocking" revelations already abound.

I use the word shocking in quotes because, to be humbly honest, these revelations so far merely confirm what has been known for years: that the Bush administration had no valid reason to go to war with Iraq other than securing oil resources, and that the Blair government simply went along for the ride to get its fair share of said resources.

And everything else claimed by both governments as justifications for the Iraq war constituted nothing more than baseless sloganeering, propaganda, disinformation and lies.

Here's two such recent revelations that have come out of the Brisitsh inquiry. First, this (emphasis added):

Regime change 'may have been planned at ranch'

Tony Blair and George Bush may have agreed the need for regime change in Iraq in private discussions at the US president's ranch, the Iraq Inquiry heard today.

Sir Christopher Meyer, who was Britain's ambassador to the US between 1997 and 2003, said the April 2002 meeting in Crawford, Texas, appeared to be a major turning point.

He said in evidence: "I took no part in any of the discussions and there was a large chunk of that time when no adviser was there.

"I know what the Cabinet Office says were the results of the meeting but 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 the change in stance was evidenced in a speech given by the Prime Minister the following day.

"To the best of my knowledge, I might be wrong, this was the first time that Tony Blair had said in public 'regime change'," Sir Christopher said.

"What he was trying to do was to draw the lessons of 9/11 and apply them to the situation in Iraq. which led - I think not inadvertently but deliberately - to a conflation of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

"When I heard that speech, I thought that this represents a tightening of the UK/US alliance and a degree of convergence on the danger Saddam Hussein presented."

Sir Christopher said that although "regime change" had been formal US policy since the Iraq Liberation Act passed by the Clinton administration in 1998, that had been of little interest to the Bush administration before 9/11.

(...) "By the time the president and the Prime Minister met at Crawford, they weren't there to talk about containment or sharpening sanctions.

"There had been a sea change in US administration to which the British Government, from October onwards, had to adapt to and make up its mind where it stood on these various issues.

"It was a complete waste of time in these circumstances, if we were to be able to work with the Americans, to go to them and bang on about regime change and say we can't support it."

Sir Christopher said Mr Blair had always been convinced of the need to deal with Saddam's weapons of mass destruction - giving a speech on the issue as early as 1998 - but prior to Crawford he had been largely quiet on the issue.

"Tony Blair was a true believer about the wickedness of Saddam Hussein," he said.

He said that after Crawford the priority for Britain was to go down the "UN route" and secure international backing in the Security Council for the return of weapons inspectors.

He said he had to stress to the US administration that it was in their own interests to do so - particularly the hawkish deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who was "viscerally" opposed to the UN.

"I had to put in those cynical terms to persuade him that this was not a limp-wristed, pitiful, European lack of will, pathetic type thing of which Europeans are frequently accused by the Americans," he said.

Although they succeeded in getting a resolution in the UN Security Council, the "real problem" was that the US military timetable for an invasion in March 2003 had been set before Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors returned to Iraq.

"It was impossible to see how Blix could bring the inspection process to a conclusion, for better or worse, by March.

"Because you cannot synchronise the programmes, you had to short-circuit the process by finding the notorious 'smoking gun'.

"We have got to try to prove that he (Saddam) is guilty and we - the British and Americans - have never recovered from that because, of course, there was no smoking gun."

Sir Christopher suggested if the military planning had been done on a longer timetable, it was possible that war could have been avoided.

"If we had planned for military action in the cool autumnal season of 2003 rather than the cool spring season of 2003, a lot of things might have been able to have been unwound," he said.

"The key problem was to let the military strategy wag the political and diplomatic strategy. It should have been the other way round."

He said in Washington, he found that British support for the war was quickly being "taken for granted" and he had trouble in persuading the Americans of the need for a Security Council resolution.

"The way I put it was if we didn't make a serious effort to go down the UN route, the first instance of regime change will take place in London," he said.

He expressed irritation that Britain was unable to gain much diplomatic leverage from its position as the US's chief ally in terms of issues such as the liberalisation of transatlantic airline service, or the need for post-war planning in Iraq.

If the Ambasador would have taken into account that the Bush administration was dead-set to go to war in Iraq regardless, then all of it makes compete sense - doesn't it? Except, of course, for all the civilian and military deaths which resulted from this gratuitous war of choice - now this will never make sense. Hence why it is important to fully expose the mendacity behind the origins of the war in Iraq: because in the end, it amounts to nothing less than criminal warmongering.

And then, there is this (emphasis added):

Blair knew Iraq had no WMD before war, inquiry hears
UK considered Iran, Libya, North Korea bigger threats than Iraq

British Prime Minister Tony Blair was told ten days before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs likely remained "dismantled," but the prime minister continued to insist that Iraq was producing chemical and biological weapons, a British inquiry heard Wednesday.

"With British and US troops massed on the border, the new intelligence was dismissed," reports the Times of London.

Sir William Ehrman, the director of international security at the UK's Foreign Office from 2000 to 2002, told the British government's inquiry into the Iraq invasion that "on March 10 we got a report saying that the chemical weapons might have remained disassembled and that Saddam hadn’t yet ordered their re-assembly and he might lack warheads capable of effective dispersal of agents."

The US and Britain led the Iraq invasion on March 20, 2003, ten days after that report. As the Guardian notes, "in the government's dossier on Iraqi weapons, published that month, Blair wrote that he believed intelligence assessments had established "beyond doubt" that Saddam was continuing to produce chemical and biological weapons – an assertion repeated up to the invasion."

(...) Among the things the Chilcot Inquiry, as it is known, is to determine is whether Blair misled the British public in the run-up to the war. Yesterday's testimony from Sir William increases the chances that the answer to that question will be yes.

The inquiry was also told that the UK's Foreign Office didn't consider Saddam Hussein's Iraq to be the biggest threat to global security.

"The inquiry was told that Iraq was ranked by the Foreign Office as only the fourth most dangerous of rogue states trying to develop weapons of mass destruction in 2001," reports the UK's Daily Telegraph. "Iran, North Korea and Libya were of greater concern to officials, who were confident that weapons inspections during the 1990s had dismantled Iraq’s nuclear capability."

According to the Times, the inquiry also heard that UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told the British government in February, 2003, that "Saddam might not have weapons of mass destruction. Mr Blair continued to say there was a risk to national security from WMD without mentioning the new intelligence."

Bush's poodle indeed ...

I can only imagine what else we would learn of the duplicity of the Bush administration should the Americans actually have the cojones to mount up a similar inquiry ...

But who am I kidding? They won't even investigate the Bush administration for authorizing torture.

Unfortunately, and sadly, enough.