On July 23rd, 2002, the Brits held an important meeting. In attendence: Tony Blair, the Defence Secretary, the Foreign Secretary, the Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, and Alastair Campbell. ‘C’ refers to Richard Deerlove, the then head of MI6, the British equivalent to our Central Intelligence Agency. He had just returned from a trip to America to speak with Condi Rice and George Tenet. This was his report:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Dearlove had discovered something that some U.S. Senators had discovered four months earlier:

” F___ Saddam. we’re taking him out.” Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America’s Middle East allies. Bush wasn’t interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase. The Senators laughed uncomfortably; Rice flashed a knowing smile.

There is a lot to chew on on Dearlove’s report.

First: “Military action was now seen as inevitable”.

Let’s take a look at the situation back on April 6th, 2002, when Bush and Blair gave a joint press conference from the ranch:

Q Thank you. Mr. President, you have yet to build an international coalition for military action against Iraq. Has the violence in the Middle East thwarted your efforts? And Prime Minister Blair, has Bush convinced you on the need for a military action against Iraq?

THE PRESIDENT: Adam, the Prime Minister and I, of course, talked about Iraq. We both recognize the danger of a man who’s willing to kill his own people harboring and developing weapons of mass destruction. This guy, Saddam Hussein, is a leader who gasses his own people, goes after people in his own neighborhood with weapons of — chemical weapons. He’s a man who obviously has something to hide.

He told the world that he would show us that he would not develop weapons of mass destruction and yet, over the past decade, he has refused to do so. And the Prime Minister and I both agree that he needs to prove that he isn’t developing weapons of mass destruction.

I explained to the Prime Minister that the policy of my government is the removal of Saddam and that all options are on the table.

THE PRIME MINISTER: I can say that any sensible person looking at the position of Saddam Hussein and asking the question, would the region, the world, and not least the ordinary Iraqi people be better off without the regime of Saddam Hussein, the only answer anyone could give to that question would be, yes.

Now, how we approach this, this is a matter for discussion. This is a matter for considering all the options. But a situation where he continues to be in breach of all the United Nations resolutions, refusing to allow us to assess, as the international community have demanded, whether and how he is developing these weapons of mass destruction. Doing nothing in those circumstances is not an option, so we consider all the options available.

But the President is right to draw attention to the threat of weapons of mass destruction. That threat is real. How we deal with it, that’s a matter we discuss. But that the threat exists and we have to deal with it, that seems to me a matter of plain common sense.

Q Prime Minister, we’ve heard the President say what his policy is directly about Saddam Hussein, which is to remove him. That is the policy of the American administration. Can I ask you whether that is now the policy of the British government? And can I ask you both if it is now your policy to target Saddam Hussein, what has happened to the doctrine of not targeting heads of states and leaving countries to decide who their leaders should be, which is one of the principles which applied during the Gulf War?

THE PRIME MINISTER: Well, John, you know it has always been our policy that Iraq would be a better place without Saddam Hussein. I don’t think anyone can be in any doubt about that, for all the reasons I gave earlier. And you know reasons to do with weapons of mass destruction also deal with the appalling brutality and repression of his own people. But how we now proceed in this situation, how we make sure that this threat that is posed by weapons of mass destruction is dealt with, that is a matter that is open. And when the time comes for taking those decisions, we will tell people about those decisions.

But you cannot have a situation in which he carries on being in breach of the U.N. resolutions, and refusing to allow us the capability of assessing how that weapons of mass destruction capability is being advanced, even though the international community has made it absolutely clear that he should do so.

Now, as I say, how we then proceed from there, that is a matter that is open for us.

THE PRESIDENT: Maybe I should be a little less direct and be a little more nuanced, and say we support regime change.

Q That’s a change though, isn’t it, a change in policy?

THE PRESIDENT: No, it’s really not. Regime change was the policy of my predecessor, as well.

Q And your father?

THE PRESIDENT: You know, I can’t remember that far back. (Laughter.) It’s certainly the policy of my administration. I think regime change sounds a lot more civil, doesn’t it? The world would be better off without him. Let me put it that way, though. And so will the future.

See, the worst thing that can happen is to allow this man to abrogate his promise, and hook up with a terrorist network. And then all of a sudden you’ve got one of these shadowy terrorist networks that have got an arsenal at their disposal, which could create a situation in which nations down the road get blackmailed. We can’t let it happen, we just can’t let it happen. And, obviously, the Prime Minister is somebody who understands this clearly. And that’s why I appreciate dealing with him on the issue. And we’ve got close consultations going on, and we talk about it all the time. And he’s got very good advice on the subject, and I appreciate that.

As you can see, back in April, Tony Blair was already on board with the rhetoric about WMD, non-compliance with U.N. resolutions, and desireability of regime change. But, at the same time, Blair was careful to say that the matter was ‘open’, and that they were in consultations over how best to effect regime change.

Dearlove’s report needs to be seen in this context. Three and half months later, he is reporting that ‘military action…is inevitable’. That means that Rice and Tenet told him that we were invading. No further consultations over that matter would be needed. All that remained was to make the case.

Which leads us to point two:

Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.

This is nothing new. We saw Bush make this case back in the April press conference, and in his axis-of-evil speech in January. Bush, deciding to let the anthrax do the talking, suggested that Saddam was likely to ‘hook up with a terrorist network’ and hand out a bag of toxins to kill innocent American citizens. Only there was a problem with that rhetoric:

But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

Translation? We were being led to believe that the prospect of Saddam handing off lethal germs and toxins to terrorists was likely. It was not. To see how the intelligence was being fixed, we have to go no further than a William Safire column from that June:

The New York Times
6 June 2002 Monday

“What Else Are We Missing?”, by William Safire

[snip]

In May and June of 2002, State Department officials were arguing strenuously for no military action to achieve “regime change” until Turkey was fully a part of a broad anti-Saddam coalition. Mid-level generals, fearful of comparisons with our cakewalk victory of a decade ago, were infuriating their Pentagon superiors with leaks downmouthing the whole operation.

The C.I.A., having failed previously in a Baghdad coup attempt, could not decide on which indigenous Iraqi dissidents to equip and train for an uprising to support our invasion. To restrain Bush’s hawks, C.I.A. doves denied any connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, despite hard intelligence linking Mohamed Atta, the leading suicide hijacker, with the Iraqi spymaster in Prague — a fact reaffirmed in June to The Prague Post by Hynek Kmonicek, the Czech ambassador to the U.N.

[snip]

Shocked Americans would be asking: Who knew what and when? Did the C.I.A. inform the president that Rihab Taha, “Dr. Germs,” had provided anthrax and other biological agents to Saddam’s Republican Guard? Did the president know that an untested atomic device could be detonated to punish invaders along with the Iraqi people? If so, should we have saved lives by going in earlier? Or knowing the cost later, should we have sought to appease the dictator?

So, here we see Safire delivering the talking points. The hijackers were agents of Saddam, Saddam had anthrax (remember that substance in our mail?) and had passed it out to his Republican Guard. Saddam has an atomic device.

Not only that, but Safire is waging a war against peaceniks in the CIA and the State Department. Do you now see why I accused him of working for military intelligence? It’s because he did, or does.

The reason the New York Times and the Washington Post don’t want to investigate the DSM leaks is because they were fully complicit in ‘fixing’ the intelligence. But let’s move on to the next point in Dearlove’s briefing:

The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record.

Translation? The Brits thought it would be a keen idea to make a PowerPoint presentation of all the evidence that we had about Saddam’s weapons programs and crimes against humanity. The Bush administration thought that was a very bad idea. They had no patience for that idea. And for good reason. The CIA was telling them that Saddam didn’t have squat. They were saying that Curveball was a liar, that Chalabi couldn’t be trusted, that there was no meeting between Atta and an Iraqi diplomat, that the aluminum tubes were not for centrifuges, that there were no links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, that no uranium from Niger had been sought, etc.

Eventually, Colin Powell would be forced to give a PowerPoint presentation. Every single word of it would turn out to be either wrong, or an outright lie.

And now to the last point:

There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

The case for removal from office is complete.