The Baby Sitter

Since the leak of the original Downing Street Memo, there have been a number of other high-level British memos and documents detailing the conversations in London during the spring and summer of 2002.

I defy a reasonable person to read through them and not come away with the impression that the "smoking gun" interpretation of the original DSM is correct. Despite the creative parsing of administration defenders, and the implausible denial of Blair and Bush at the White House, it becomes clear that the British knew that the threat of Iraq, if any, was weak, the Al Qaeda connection doubtful, and the entire US posture unable to stand on its own merits. There was repeated discussion of tactics to create the climate and pretext for invasion, including stepped-up bombing, and UN resolutions designed so that Saddam would violate them.

Which leads to the question, if Blair and his team knew all this, why did they choose to support Bush? What could possibly be gained from going along in support of this agenda?

A hint can be found in the suggestions put forward in a document by Peter Ricketts, Blair's political director, dated 22 March 2002.

1. You invited thoughts for your personal note to the Prime Minister covering the difficult advice (we have put up a draft minute seperately). Here are mine.
2. By sharing Bush's broad objective the Prime Minister can help shape how it is defined, and the approach to achieving it. In the process, he can bring home to Bush some of the realities which will be less evident from Washington. He can help Bush make good decisions by telling him things his own machine probably isn't.
3. By broad support for the objective brings two real problems which need discussing.
4. First, the THREAT. The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programmes, but our tolerance of them post-11 September. This is not something we need to be defensive about, but attempts to claim otherwise publicly will increase scepticism about our case. I am relieved that you decided to postpone publication of the unclassified document. My meeting yesterday showed that there is more work to do to ensuer that the figures are accurate and consistent with those of the US. But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW fronts: the programmes are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.
5. US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Aaida (sic) is so far frankly unconvincing. To get public and Parliamentary support for military operations, we have to be convincing that:
   • the threat is so serious/imminent that it is worth sending our troops to die for;
   • it is qualitatively different from the threat posed by other proliferators who are closer to achieving nuclear capability (including Iran).

There it is then, he can bring home to Bush some of the realities which will be less evident from Washington. He can help Bush make good decisions by telling him things his own machine probably isn't.

By standing alongside Bush, Blair, it was hoped, could perhaps provide a connection to reality for the disconnected, sycophant-swaddled Most Powerful Man in the World. Blair could help the good ol' boy from Texas not make a total bollocks of it, and provide some adult supervision of the neocon drive to war.

And, if that required them to pretend that "WMD programmes" were far more threatening then they were known to be, and allow the myth of a Saddam-Al Qaeda connection to be spread widely, and concoct schemes to lure Saddam into giving W. a pretext, and allow Bush to ignore far more credible threats from actual proliferators like Iran, well, so be it.

For more analysis, I suggest the new article by David Corn, in The Nation.