The government of former British prime minister Tony Blair decided up to a year before the Iraq invasion that it was “a complete waste of time” to resist the US drive to oust former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, opting instead to offer advice on how it should be done, the former British ambassador to Washington said on Thursday.
Sir Christopher Meyer, testifying to the Chilcot inquiry into Britain’s role in the war, made it clear that once the administration of former US president George W. Bush decided to take military action, the Blair government never considered opting out or opposing it.
Meyer said that the timing of the invasion was dictated by the “unforgiving nature” of the military build-up rather than the outcome of diplomacy or UN weapons inspections. British officials were left scrabbling for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as preparations continued.
Meyer described a critical moment in March 2002, as Blair was preparing a visit to Bush’s ranch.
New instructions were brought to the embassy by the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, Sir David Manning.
The message from London was that the US was determined to oust Saddam, “and it was a complete waste of time ... if we were going to work with the Americans, to come to them and bang away about regime change and say: ‘We can’t support it.’”
He rejected the suggestion that British policy changed to stay in line with Washington.
“I wouldn’t say it was as extremely poodle-ish as that,” Meyer said, arguing Blair had long been a “true believer about the wickedness of Saddam Hussein.”
He conceded the conditions Blair put on supporting regime change — action on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and going through the UN on Iraq — “were a bit feeble.”
Meyer said there was a “sea change” in Washington’s attitude to Iraq in the months after Sept. 11, 2001. In his briefing notes before the Texas summit, Meyer advised Blair to focus on how to garner international support for regime change, how to go about ousting Saddam, and what to do in the aftermath.
At the meeting, he said Bush and Blair spent “a large chunk of time” together with no advisers present.
“To this day I’m not entirely clear what degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford ranch,” he said, adding that Blair provided a clue the next day when he mentioned “regime change” in Iraq for the first time.
“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,” Meyer said.
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