Testifying on Thursday, when many Americans would be otherwise occupied, the former British ambassador to the US, who served during the runup to the war in Iraq, dropped some official bombshells. None of it’s news, of course; every honest observer knew this at the time. But to have the ambassador testify to it openly is new.
The military timetable for an invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not give time for UN weapons inspectors in the country to do their job, the former British ambassador to Washington told the Iraq inquiry in London today.Sir Christopher Meyer said the “unforgiving nature” of the build-up after American forces had been told to prepare for war meant that “we found ourselves scrabbling for the smoking gun”.
He added: “It was another way of saying ‘it’s not that Saddam has to prove that he’s innocent, we’ve now bloody well got to try and prove he’s guilty.’ And we — the Americans, the British — have never really recovered from that because of course there was no smoking gun.”
Sir Christopher does give Blair the credit of not being a complete poodle. In fact, he thinks Blair believed Bush’s BS, and was willing to add his own.
Asked about Tony Blair’s meeting with Bush at Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, where, some observers believe, the decision to go to war was made, Meyer said: “To this day I’m not entirely clear what degree of convergence was signed in blood at the Texas range.”But a speech by Blair the following day was, he believed, the first time the prime minister had publicly said “regime change”. “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.”
