Wednesday, September 29, 2004
With Friends Like These, Tony...
London Evening Standard: Allies secretly planned for Iraq war0 comments
You already knew this, of course. But it's still disgusting to finally see in print.
Britain was involved in planning for war in Iraq for at least nine months before MPs approved military action, according to a document apparently leaked from the Pentagon.
Details from the secret briefing paper suggest that military commanders took part in a war planning conference with US counterparts as early as June 2002.
At the time, Prime Minister Tony Blair was insisting that no decisions had been taken on military action.
Today's leak, on the eve of a crucial debate on Iraq at Labour's conference in Brighton, will fuel speculation that Mr Blair agreed in principle to join the US in military action at his April 2002 summit at President George Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas—something the Prime Minister has always denied.
Here's more.
Senior British and US commanders met at a war-planning session in June 2002 and orders to prepare actual military operations were given on October 7, 2002.
This was more than a month before a UN resolution giving a final warning to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the London Evening Standard reported.
Full battle plans were issued on October 31, 2002, eight days before UN Resolution 1441 called for the resumption of arms inspections in Iraq and warned Saddam of "serious consequences" if he were still seeking weapons of mass destruction, the paper said.
The document quoted in the report is a Pentagon chronology used by US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld in an August 2003 presentation on the "strategic lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom".
The chronology lists a "UK and Australia planning conference" on June 28, 2002.
But three weeks later, on July 16, the prime minister rejected the notion that Britain was gearing up for an invasion.
When asked by an MP whether Britain was "preparing for possible military action in Iraq", [Tony] Blair responded, according to the paper: "No, there are no decisions which have been taken about military action."
Yeah, foreign policy is Bush's strong suit.
This may be the most satisfying part of this story:
The newspaper report was written by defence and security journalist Andrew Gilligan, the former BBC radio reporter whose claim that Blair had "sexed up" his pre-war dossier with a claim about Iraqi weapons capability led to his ouster and a showdown between the government and public broadcaster [BBC, where the BBC caved in].
It's good to see some courageous journalists will stay with a story until the truth sees the light of day. And they achieve vindication. Listening, Wolf?
posted by Gotham 1:21 PM
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