UK Inquiry: Blair Conspired with Bush as Early as February 2002 to Plot Iraq Invasion
james g. keegan jr.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/UK-Inquiry-Blair-Conspire-by-Dave-Lindor
ff-091124-323.html
November 24, 2009
UK Inquiry: Blair Conspired with Bush as Early as February 2002 to Plot
Iraq Invasion
By Dave Lindorff
Most Americans are blissfully in the dark about it, but across the
Atlantic in the UK, a commission reluctantly established by Prime
Minister Gordon Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in Britain
is beginning hearings into the actions and statements of British leaders
that led to the country's joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Even before testimony began in hearings that started yesterday, news
began to leak out from documents obtained by the commission that the
government of former PM Tony Blair had lied to Parliament and the public
about the country's involvement in war planning.
Britain's Telegraph newspaper over the weekend published documents from
British military leaders, including a memo from British special forces
head Maj. Gen. Graeme Lamb, saying that he had been instructed to begin
�working the war up since early 2002.�
This means that Blair, who in July 2002, had assured members of a House
of Commons committee that there were �no preparations to invade Iraq,�
was lying.
Things are likely to heat up when the commission begins hearing
testimony. It has the power, and intends to compel testimony from top
government officials, including Blair himself.
While some American newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer,
have run an Associated Press report on the new disclosures and on the
commission, key news organizations, including the New York Times, have
not. The Times ignored the Telegraph report, but a day later ran an
article about the British commission that focused entirely on evidence
that British military leaders in Iraq felt �slighted� by �arrogant�
American military leaders who, the article reported, pushed for
aggressive military action against insurgent groups, while British
leaders preferred negotiating with them.
While that may be of some historical interest, it hardly compares with
the evidence that Blair and the Bush/Cheney administration were secretly
conspiring to invade Iraq as early as February and March 2002.
Recall that back in the fall of 2002, the Bush/Cheney argument to
Congress and the American people for initiating a war against Iraq was
that Iraq was allegedly behind the 9-11 attacks and that it posed an
�imminent� danger of attack against the US and Britain with its alleged
weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, such arguments, which have subsequently been shown to have
been bogus, would have had no merit if the planning began a year
earlier, and if no such urgency was expressed by the two leaders at that
time. Imminent, after all, means imminent, and if Blair, Bush and Cheney
had genuinely thought an attack with WMDs was imminent back in the early
days of the Bush administration, they would have been acting
immediately, not secretly conjuring up a war scheduled for a year later.
(The actual invasion began on March 19, 2003).
As I documented in my book, The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's
Press, 2006), there is plenty of evidence that Bush and Cheney had a
scheme to put the US at war with Iraq even before Bush took office on
Jan. 20, 2001. Then Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in his own tell-all
book, The Price of Loyalty, written after he was dumped from the Bush
Administration, recounts that at the first meeting of Bush's new
National Security Council, the question of going to war and ousting
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was on the agenda. Immediately after the
9-11 attacks, NSC anti-terrorism program czar Richard Clarke also
recalled Bush ordering him to �find a link� to Iraq. Meanwhile, within
days, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was ordering top generals to
prepare for an Iraq invasion. Gen. Tommy Franks, who was heading up the
military effort in Afghanistan that was reportedly closing in on Osama
Bin Laden, found the rug being pulled out from under him as Rumsfeld
began shifting troops out of Afghanistan and to Kuwait in preparation
for the new war.
It is nothing less than astonishing that so little news of the British
investigation into the origins of the illegal Iraq War is being conveyed
to Americans by this country's corporate media�yet another example
demonstrating that American journalism is dead or dying. It is even more
astonishing that neither the Congress nor the president here in America
is making any similar effort to put America's leaders in the dock to
tell the truth about their machinations in engineering a war that has
cost the US over $1 trillion (perhaps $3 trillion eventually when debt
payments and the cost of veterans care is added in), and over 4000
lives, not to mention as many as one million innocent Iraqi lives.