Tony Blair sent President Bush a series of secret notes in the run-up to the Iraq war in which he promised that Britain would "be there" if it came to military action against Saddam Hussein, it emerged today.
The existence of the letters, sent from Downing Street in 2002, was revealed by Mr Blair's chief spin-doctor, Alastair Campbell, as he gave evidence to an independent inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war.
The former director of communications at No 10 was the biggest name yet to testify before Sir John Chilcot's panel, where he was questioned for almost five hours – two hours more than originally scheduled.
Mr Blair will appear before the panel at a later date, as will Gordon Brown, who Mr Campbell said today had been part of Mr Blair's "inner circle" on Iraq.Mr Campbell stubbornly defended his old boss, insisting that Mr Blair had done his best to resolve the stand-off over Iraqi chemical and biological weapons "without a shot being fired".
He pointed out that that it was Mr Blair who insisted that the Americans turn to the UN Security Council for a diplomatic solution to the row.
He also dismissed as misguided earlier testimony from Sir Christopher Meyer, the then British Ambassador in Washington, that Mr Blair had undergone a major change of heart during a summit at Mr Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April, 2002.
Sir Christopher told the panel last year that a deal had been "signed in blood" at Crawford to oust Saddam by force.
But under persistent questioning from Sir Roderic Lyne, who was British Ambassador in Moscow at the time, Mr Campbell was forced to admit that Mr Blair had made it clear to the White House that the US would not be left to go it alone in an eventual invasion.
Asked whether Mr Blair had ever written to Mr Bush as the crisis gathered pace in 2002 and, if so, what he had said, Mr Campbell replied, "the Prime Minister wrote quite a lot of notes to the President".
"I would say the tenor of them was that... we share the analysis, we share the concern, we are going to be with you in making sure that Saddam Hussein is faced up to his obligations and that Iraq is disarmed," Mr Campbell added.
"If that cannot be done diplomatically and it is to be done militarily, Britain will be there. That would be the tenor of the communication to the President."
Sir Roderic was quick to jump on the existence of the notes, prodding the veteran spin-doctor as to who would have seen them. Mr Campbell said that he himself had done so, as had the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, and several others.
He said that the Chilcot panel must also have seen them, adding: "They were very frank and advisory."
The main thrust of Mr Campbell's testimony was to insist that Mr Blair had hoped for a peaceful resolution right until the eve of the invasion, even if his "instinct" had been that Britain should stand by its ally.
He said that right up to the Commons vote on March 18, 2003, authorising military action, Mr Blair had held out the hope that President Saddam could be disarmed through the United Nations."His instinct was that we should be with the Americans. Does that mean that you tailor your policy to suit theirs? No," Mr Campbell said.
"The Prime Minister made clear throughout this was disarmament of Saddam Hussein through the United Nations."
Questioned about his own role, Mr Campbell denied that he had sought to "beef up" the Government’s now notorious dossier on Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction, insisting that he had given only "presentational" advice on the drawing up of the document published in September 2002.
He said that he never sought to override the intelligence judgments of the report’s author — Sir John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).
"At no time did I ever ask him to beef up, to override, any of the judgments that he had," he said. "At no point did anybody from the Prime Minister down say to anybody within the intelligence services ’You have got to tailor it to fit this judgment or that judgment’. It just never happened.
"The whole way through, it could not have been made clearer to everybody that nothing would override the intelligence judgments and that John Scarlett was the person who, if you like, had the single pen."
Mr Campbell said Sir John insisted throughout that he was "100 per cent in charge" of the process of compiling the dossier. But, early in September 2002, Mr Campbell confirmed that he chaired two meetings in No 10 to discuss the publication of the report.
"John Scarlett said to me, ’This is a document the Prime Minister is going to present to Parliament, there are massive global expectations around it, and I need a bit of presentational support’, and that is what I gave him," Mr Campbell said."I think it entirely not just appropriate but absolutely necessary that I should have done that. I was the person who was charged by the Prime Minister to advise him on all the presentational aspects to do with the dossier."
Mr Campbell insisted that the dossier had never been intended to make the case for war against Saddam, but was simply meant to show why Mr Blair was becoming increasingly concerned about his WMD programme.
Mr Campbell said he drafted Mr Blair’s foreword to the dossier, in which he said that intelligence showed "beyond doubt" that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, although the Prime Minister at the time had "almost certainly" re-written it.
He rejected Sir John’s earlier evidence to the inquiry that he did not believe that he could have changed the foreword as it was a "political statement" by Mr Blair.If John Scarlett or any of his team had had any concerns of real substance about the foreword, then they know they could have raised those directly with the Prime Minister," he said.
"I don’t believe that if any of the JIC thought that the foreword in any sense over-stated the case to a degree that would impact the work that they had done — hit its credibility — they didn’t feel they had the opportunity to say something."
But Mr Campbell admitted that a second intelligence dossier published in February 2003, which also included material taken from an academic journal on the Middle East, had been a "mistake".
He said the intention had been to expose Saddam’s efforts to undermine the UN weapons inspections process in the light of new intelligence from MI6. However when it became known how it was put together — leading it to be dubbed the "dodgy dossier" — he acknowledged that it was damaging to public trust.
"That did not help, let’s put it that way," he said. "That was a really difficult episode."
Mr Campbell said that Mr Blair always shared the American analysis that Saddam led an "awful, brutal, dictatorial" regime that posed a threat to the stability of the region.
He insisted that even at the Crawford meeting Mr Bush had not been talking about military action, although he disclosed that there was a small planning team at US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, that was looking at the military options.
"The context that I am trying to give you is not that George Bush is saying to Tony Blair, ’We have got to go to war’. It was not like that at all," he said.
Source: The times
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