FORMER BRITISH prime minister Tony Blair should have pushed for greater concessions from the Americans before agreeing to back the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a former British ambassador to the US has told the Iraq inquiry.
Mr Blair appeared to have moved behind then-US president George Bush’s ambitions to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after a private meeting between the two at Mr Bush’s Texas ranch in April 2002.
The British would have been more influential over the Americans if Mr Blair had then and subsequently laid down preconditions on British support, Sir Christopher Meyer told a public hearing of the inquiry.
“I think that would have changed the nature of American planning. By the time you get to the end of the year it’s too late . . . I did say to London that we’re being taken for granted,” he said.
British influence over Washington amounted to “bugger all”, he said. “What would Margaret Thatcher have done? I think she would have insisted on a coherent diplomatic and political strategy.”
“To this day I am not entirely clear what degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford ranch, [but] they weren’t there to talk about containment or strengthening sanctions,” he went on. The outspoken contribution by Sir Christopher, who wrote an indiscreet memoir of his time in Washington in recent years, is likely to further strain his relations with former colleagues and political masters.
Mr Blair delivered a highly significant foreign policy speech on the day after the Crawford, Texas, meeting with Mr Bush in which he mentioned for the first time the words “regime change” in relation to Saddam Hussein.
“When I heard that speech, I thought that this represents a tightening of the UK/US alliance and a degree of convergence on the danger Saddam Hussein presented,” the former ambassador said.
The April 2002 Crawford meeting occurred six months before Sweden’s Hans Blix led a team of weapons inspectors, having finally received permission to search for chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.
However, the military timetable already being worked on in Washington by the Pentagon did not give enough time “to come up with the evidence required before the scheduled start of the invasion.
“The real problem, which I did draw several times to the attention of London, was that the contingency military timetable had been decided before the UN inspectors went in under Hans Blix,” he said.
The US had first prepared to invade in January, but then delayed until March, “[but] when you looked at the timetable for the inspections, it was impossible to see how Blix could bring the process to a conclusion, for better or for worse, by March.
“So you found yourself in a situation in the autumn of 2002 where you could not synchronise the military timetable with the inspection timetable. We found ourselves scrabbling around for the smoking gun,” Sir Christopher said.
“It was another way of saying ‘it’s not that Saddam has to prove that he’s innocent, we’ve now bloody well got to try and prove he’s guilty’. And we – the Americans, the British – have never really recovered from that because of course there was no smoking gun.”