Bush's Paper Trail Grows

By John Prados, TomPaine.com. Posted April 4, 2006.

On March 27, The New York Times published an article based on access to the full British record of the Iraq policy conversation that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair held on January 31, 2003, as recorded by Blair's then-national security adviser David Manning.

British legal scholar Philippe Sands had already revealed this discussion in his book Lawless World, and the British television network Channel 4 had -- two months ago -- printed many of the same excerpts of Manning's memo, but the Times coverage focused new attention on the memo, previously ignored by the U.S. media.

The memo reveals that the two leaders agreed that military action against Iraq would begin on a stipulated date in March 2003 -- despite the fact that no weapons of mass destruction had been found there. The memo reveals how the two leaders mulled over ways to supply legal justification for the invasion. Indeed this record supplies additional evidence for the view that Bush planned all along to unleash this war.

Suddenly, the media descended upon the Bush White House demanding explanations. Spokesman Scott McClellan answered that "we were preparing in case it was necessary, but we were continuing to pursue a diplomatic solution." McClellan tried to turn the question around by insisting that the press had been covering Bush at the time chronicled in the memo, implying that if the truth were different the press should have known better.

He referred repeatedly to a December report from U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix to back his assertion that Iraq had failed to cooperate with the inspections. Evidently that cowed the reporters, for there has been little follow-up. But White House damage control should not be allowed to cover up this evidence that the president knew his case for war was based on faulty evidence.

First, the evidence is overwhelming that Bush hosted the January 31 meeting to manage his move to war, not as an occasion to review progress toward disarming Iraq. The record of the session shows this -- with talk of the war plan, the starting date, the justification and the securing of a second U.N. resolution as a legal cover, but there is more than that. Consider the context: the day the memo was taken U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell began the extensive review at the CIA of the allegations he would use to make his Security Council "briefing" -- already scheduled -- supposedly "bulletproof." It was also that same day that the codebreaking National Security Agency issued a directive to spy on the friendly nations who were members of the U.N. Security Council to divine their attitudes on the move to war.

The day before, according to Bob Woodward's account, Bush had told Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, "We will kick ass." By his account, Berlusconi tried to dissuade Bush from war. Woodward duly notes the president resorting to his standard line that no decision had yet been made on military action. The Manning memo suggests otherwise, with Bush revealing March 10 as the projected date for beginning bombing -- a campaign to hit 1,500 targets in four days, the "shock and awe" which U.S. officials bragged about at the time. Moreover, on January 24, the U.S. military commander, General Tommy Franks, had sent his final war plan up through Rumsfeld to the president. Bush's comment to Blair on January 31, that "he was not itching to go to war," is belied by the entire surrounding structure of events.

The other significant finding in the Manning memo concerns Tony Blair's intentions. The press reporting at the time -- regardless of what Scott McClellan says today -- was that the purpose of the Blair-Bush meeting was to decide whether there needed to be a second U.N. resolution. Postwar investigations in London show that in late January Blair received official advice from his attorney general Lord Goldsmith that such a resolution was necessary to fulfill the terms of the existing resolution 1441. At the meeting with Bush, however, the record shows Blair presented the project as a convenience. "If anything goes wrong... a second resolution would give us international cover, especially with the Arabs," Blair said, according to Manning's memo.

John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., and author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

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