BUSH ADMINISTRATION officials telephoned Downing Street repeatedly during 2002 to encourage then prime minister Tony Blair to dissuade George Bush from invading Iraq, Mr Blair’s chief of staff told the Iraq inquiry yesterday.
Meanwhile, Mr Blair will give public evidence on Friday week to the inquiry, which will be attended by up to 60 members of the public whose names were drawn in a lottery for tickets yesterday.
“We had calls even from people in the White House saying, ‘Get the prime minister on the phone to the president: there’s a danger of him going ahead’,” Jonathan Powell told the five-member inquiry team.
However, Mr Powell rejected charges made by the former British ambassador to Washington that Mr Blair had “signed up” for invasion when he met Mr Bush in Crawford, Texas, in March 2002.
“I was at Crawford. Sir Christopher [Meyer] wasn’t. He was at Waco, 30 miles away. There was no undertaking in blood to go to war in Iraq. There was no firm discussion to go to war,” he said, reflecting the anger now felt towards Sir Christopher shared by some in Mr Blair’s circle.
“In fact, the record which was sent to Sir Christopher said the president acknowledged that weapons inspectors should go in and we had to give Saddam the chance to comply,” Mr Powell went on.
Mr Blair and close aides were worried after the Crawford meeting and before they met journalists about the need to cover the gap that existed, he said, between Mr Blair and Mr Bush.
Mr Blair had said to Mr Bush that “Britain will be there” if the Iraqi leader could not be disarmed and had to be forced out militarily so that he would have influence with the US president thereafter.
Intelligence on Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction was not pivotal in Mr Blair’s decision finally to support the Iraq invasion, but the “assumption” was that he had them.
“When our forces went in, we were absolutely amazed to discover there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction,” he said, adding that the British had been “confident” that he had them because no concrete evidence existed that he had destroyed them.
“We had that assumption because Saddam Hussein had lied about using WMD and he had lied about getting rid of them. We had bombed Iraq in 1998 on that basis and it would have taken some quite strong evidence to suggest he had got rid of them.”
The international efforts to contain Saddam imposed after the Kuwait invasion were “no longer viable” by 2001. The UK was concerned that sanctions in place would gradually decline in effectiveness and not be replaced by anything.
Mr Powell disagreed with evidence given by former diplomats Sir Jeremy Greenstock and Sir Christopher Meyer that suggested that Mr Blair had wanted more time for a UN-orchestrated solution. They were wrong, he said.
More time for inspections led by UN weapons inspector Hans Blix or renewed UN attempts to force greater disclosure from Saddam “would have achieved nothing”.
