A Criminal Conspiracy

You may recall about a week ago, when the President was talking about the tough decision he was forced to make to attack Iraq.

And the world said, Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences. And therefore, we worked with the world. We worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world.

And when he chose to deny the inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did.

This morning the New York Times is reporting that it has seen a British government memo that was first reported in the British press weeks ago. That memo paints a different picture.

NEW YORK (AFP) - US
President George W. Bush made clear to British Prime Minister
Tony Blair in January 2003 that he was determined to invade
Iraq without a UN resolution and even if UN arms inspectors failed to find weapons of mass destruction in the country, The New York Times reported.

Citing a confidential British memorandum, the newspaper said the president was certain that war was inevitable and made his view known during a private two-hour meeting with Blair in the Oval Office on January 31, 2003.

Information about the meeting was contained in the memo written by Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The Times.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," the paper quotes David Manning, Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, as noting in the memo.

" 'The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,' Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. 'This was when the bombing would begin'," the paper continued.

The memo reports on what must have been quite a meeting. Bush also discussed the idea of painting a US spy plane in UN colors, and flying it over Iraq hoping for it to be shot at, providing a pretext for invasion, and Bush saying that it was unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between different religious and ethnic groups. Apparently Mr. Blair agreed.

Mr. Bush was not a noble leader who had war forced upon him when Saddam prevented international inspectors from doing their work. Bush was a man intent on attacking, to the point of concocting a scheme to fly under false colors, hoping to create a pretext, a fig-leaf, to cover his act of aggression. Both Blair and Bush knew that no WMDs had been found, but were ready to attack whether or not any were. Both Blair and Bush were willfully ignoring intelligence suggesting there were no WMD to be found, and both were tragically ignorant of the likely post-war consequences.

Three years later, those consequences are spinning out of control, as American forces are reported to have been become involved in fighting between Shiite factions.