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.

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.

Raymond Whitaker
©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

The Anti-Conservatives

Who convinced the president that our democracy depends on a worldwide crusade?

That George W. Bush would seek to embed the Iraq War in the higher cause of global democracy was to be expected. That is the way of wartime presidents.

By late 1863, Lincoln’s war to crush Southern secession was about whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall ... perish from the earth.” By 1917, the European war whose causes Wilson professed not to understand in 1916 had become “the war to end all wars” and to “make the world safe for democracy.”

Leaders alchemize wars begun over lesser interests into epochal struggles for universal principles because only thus can they justify demands for greater sacrifices in blood and treasure. But Bush has gone Wilson one better. He is not only going to make the world safe for democracy, he is going to make the world democratic. Where Lincoln abolished slavery in the South, Bush is going to abolish tyranny from the earth: “So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”




A conservative knows not whether to laugh or weep, for Mr. Bush has just asserted a right to interfere in the internal affairs of every nation on earth. Why? Because the “survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” But this is utterly ahistorical. The world has always been afflicted with despots. Yet America has always been free. And we have remained free by following the counsel of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams and staying out of foreign quarrels and foreign wars.

Who is feeding the president this interventionist nonsense?

The president now plans to hector and badger foreign leaders on the progress each is making toward attaining U.S. standards of democracy. “We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and nation—the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.” This is a formula for “Bring-it-on!” collisions with every autocratic regime on earth, including virtually every African and Arab ruler, all the “outposts of tyranny” named by Secretary Rice, most of the nations of Central Asia, China, and Russia. This is a prescription for endless war. Yet as Madison warned, “No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Who and what converted a president who came to office with no knowledge of the world to the idea that only a global crusade for democracy could keep us secure? Answer: 9/11—and the neoconservatives.

In his inaugural address, Mr. Bush calls 9/11 the day “when freedom came under attack.” This is sophomoric. Osama did not send fanatics to ram planes into the World Trade Center because he hates the Bill of Rights. He sent the terrorists here because he hates our presence and policies in the Middle East. He did it for the same reason FLN rebels blew up cafes in Paris and Hamas suicide bombers blow up pizza parlors in Jerusalem.

From the Battle of Algiers to the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, from the expulsion of the Red Army by the mujahideen of Afghanistan to the expulsion of Israel from Lebanon by Hezbollah, guerrilla war and terror tactics have been the means Muslims have used to expel armies they could not defeat in conventional war.

The 9/11 killers were over here because we are over there. We were not attacked because of who we are but because of what we do. It is not our principles they hate. It is our policies. U.S. intervention in the Middle East was the cause of the 9/11 terror. Bush believes it is the cure. Has he learned nothing from Iraq?

In 2003, we invaded a nation that had not attacked us, did not threaten us, and did not want war with us to disarm it of weapons it did not have. Now, after plunging $200 billion and the lives of 1,400 of our best and bravest into this war and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, we have reaped a harvest of hatred in the Arab world and, according to officials in our own government, have created a new nesting place and training ground for terrorists to replace the one we lately eradicated in Afghanistan.

Among those who have converted President Bush to the notion that without Arab democracy there can be no Mideast peace is Natan Sharansky, and much of what the famed Soviet dissident writes is undeniably true. Even inside the darkest despotism, people yearn for freedom. They hate tyranny and love liberty. They wish to live in lands that allow them to choose their own leaders. And as democratic rulers must return to the people for renewal of their mandates in free elections, they are more likely to seek the peace and prosperity their people desire. Thus, only democracy can pave the way to true peace and security. This is the message of Sharansky’s Case for Democracy, which the president has embraced and encouraged all to read.

But what is often true is not always true, and U.S. foreign policy, which is to protect U.S. vital interests and the peace and freedom of Americans, cannot be rooted in the idealism of an ex-Soviet dissident or the ideology of neoconservatives who promised us a “cakewalk” in Iraq and assured us we would be welcomed with flowers. Sharansky notwithstanding, democracy is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of America’s peace and security, nor even of Israel’s.

In 1967, David Ben-Gurion told Richard Nixon and this writer he hoped Nasser would survive Egypt’s humiliation in the Six-Day War because only Nasser had the prestige to lead the Arabs to accept peace with Israel. Sadat was no democrat when Israel gave him back the Sinai and signed a peace. Arafat was no democrat when Rabin and Peres agreed to the Oslo Accords and shared a Nobel Prize with him. Assad was no democrat when Israel negotiated a truce with him on the Golan Heights. That truce has held. Nor was Khadafi a democrat when Bush agreed to lift sanctions imposed on Libya for the massacre of Pan Am 103 if Khadafi would surrender his weapons of mass destruction. Khadafi did, and Bush rightly claims this as a diplomatic success of his first term.

While it is true that the dictatorships of Franco, Pinochet, and Marcos gave way to democracies, that was not true of Batista, Somoza, or the Shah. When Carter undermined the Peacock Throne, we got the Ayatollah.

Urging Bush not to press Israel into making peace with the Palestinians until Palestine embraces democracy is a clever way to postpone peace indefinitely and let Israel expand its settlements and consolidate its hold over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That may be in Israel’s interest. But it is not in America’s interest. Sharansky’s idealism just happens to coincide with Sharon’s agenda. Can President Bush not see this?

America has old friendships and important interests in the Middle East that cannot await the dawn of democracy in the 22 Arab states where it currently does not exist. We cannot make the best the enemy of the good. And if democracy means rule by the people, how enthusiastic should we be about its introduction into the Middle East? In 1991, Algerians were given a democratic vote—and elected an Islamist regime. The army intervened, igniting a civil war that left 100,000 dead. President Bush might ask his father why he did not speak up for Algerian democracy then.

Unlike Eastern Europe, where communism was imposed on Christian countries with traditions of self-rule, democracy never took root in the Arab lands of the caliphate. Thus King Farouk’s ouster gave us Nasser. King Idris’s ouster gave us Khadafi. And King Feisal’s ouster gave us Saddam Hussein. How certain are we that if the kings of Morocco, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia fall, democracies will arise?

Given that the neocons were wrong on every count about Iraq, does Bush truly wish to gamble the Middle East on their confident predictions that, once the Arab monarchies fall, Western democracy will flourish among people who seem to revile Bush and revere Osama bin Laden?

After the shocked reaction in many quarters to the president’s inaugural address, the White House, George H.W. Bush, and later the president himself hastened to explain that there was nothing new or radical in the speech. Perhaps a sense of reality has already begun to manifest itself.

We are simply not going to stop buying Saudi oil or cut off our $2 billion in annual aid to Egypt or sever relations with Musharraf or sanction a China that could sink the dollar because these regimes refuse to make the reforms Bush demands. It is not going to happen. President Bush will either wind up eating his overblown rhetoric or following it over the cliff and taking us with him.

America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” said John Quincy Adams, “She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Under the tutelage of Jacobins who call themselves idealists, Bush has repudiated this wise core doctrine of U.S. foreign policy to embrace Wilsonian interventionism in the internal affairs of every autocratic regime on earth. We are going to democratize the world and abolish tyranny.

Giddy with excitement, the neocons are falling all over one another to hail the president. They are not conservatives at all. They are anti-conservatives, and their crusade for democracy will end as did Wilson’s, in disillusionment for the president and tragedy for this country.

February 28, 2005 Issue
Patrick J. Buchanan
The American Conservative