False Drama, True Lies: How US and Britain Decided on the 2003 Iraq War...in March/April 2002

The headline in the Daily Mail of London is dramatic: "Britain Held Secret War Talks with U.S. General 11 Months Before Iraq Invasion".

The article continues breathlessly, "Details of the classified meeting" between General Tommy Franks, the US commander for the Iraq operation, and Britain's Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon and top officers, "suggest Tony Blair’s Government was involved in detailed discussions about toppling the Iraqi dictator earlier than previously disclosed".

The paper is wrong, however. The revelation is not dramatic. Instead the significance is that, 7 1/2 years after the invasion of Iraq, it seems so mundane. For those who have watched the US-UK story closely during the time, the Franks meetings only confirms what we have known for a long time.

Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Britain, had decided in April 2002 that the United Kingdom would join the Bush Administration in "regime change" in Baghdad. The choice of method would be new: it would occur not through attempts at an internal coup, supported by international economic pressure, but through military action. 

That decision would not be made public. For the next eleven months, the Blair Government would maintain the line that diplomacy would be preferred, that Saddam's concessions over the weapons of mass destruction he held would bring a resolution. The Prime Minister would cover his tracks with the insistence that Washington and London had to go through the United Nations for endorsement. He would lay on the fig-leaf of justification that, as Iraq was "solved", the US and Britain would also renew efforts at a settlement between Israel and Palestine.

But the decision at the centre --- if it was necessary to take out Saddam by military action, so be it --- had been made.

Indeed, the episode selected by the Daily Mail is only one of the latest set of US declassified documents published by the National Security Archive in Washington. The lengthy summary by John Prados and Christopher Amos, as well as the documents, is in the style of cold bureaucratic narrative rather than hot banner-headline declaration, but it ruthlessly re-tells the "mundane" truth:

1. By early March, weeks after President George W. Bush made his "Axis of Evil" speech and as Washington was despatching Vice President Dick Cheney to tell European and Middle Eastern partners that Saddam had to go, the British Government had concluded that the US "had lost faith in containment".

2. Two days later, Blair told Cheney in London, “If you are going to deal with something like Iraq, you have to think ahead about what might happen . . . that you do not expect."

3. On 12 March, Blair's foreign policy advisor learned in Washington that the resolve for regime change was not just Cheney's but that of most of the Administration, including National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice: “Condi’s enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed."

4. If there was a key moment, it came two weeks before General Franks flew to London as Blair visited Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. The Prime Minister set up his political condition that "UN diplomacy had to be a prerequisite of British participation in the Iraq invasion", but the endpoint was clear. As British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw summarised, "[The US], as it happened, was for regime change."

5. The cold significance of the Franks meetings is that it is another red flag that Tony Blair --- as he has done from 2002 to 2010 --- walked the borderline of truth. The Prime Minister declared last January that "there was nothing actually decided at Crawford" and that the aim "was to get a real sense from the Americans as to what they wanted to do".

The latter claim is for the naive: Blair already knew what the Americans wanted to do. If "there was nothing actually decided", it was because the Prime Minister put down the contingency: we will act, provided that you join us in going through the United Nations.

And "act" now meant with force. That is why Franks was in Britain from 19-26 April, holding the discussions --- then framed as "military contingencies" --- that began rolling the stone of planning towards the goal of invasion.

The only issue was how fast the stone rolled. At the end of July, Blair wrote Bush and then his officials to Washington, "insisting on progress on Middle East peace and application of UN diplomacy to put Iraq in the wrong in the world’s eye". The officials returned with an answer: the Bush Administration was going to war, whether or not London tacked on its two ribbons. A month later, Vice President Cheney unveiled the campaign: Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, he was close to nuclear weapons, and only his overthrow would remove the imminent danger.

And thus "history". Not as breathless as a British tabloid's highlighting of a snippet as the new story. "History", met not with anger but with a shrug of the shoulders. "History" --- not of truth but of lies, not of honesty but of deception --- shuffling rather than marching on.