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ブレアは２００２年４月にブッシュのイラク侵攻計画に同意していた 「インディペンデント」
The Crawford Deal: did Blair sign up for war at Bush's Texas ranch in
April 2002?
We know that arguments raged about the legality of the war right up to
a crucial cabinet meeting on 17 March 2003, two days before the attack
began. But now new evidence pieced together by the 'IoS' strongly
backs the suspicion that the PM had already made the decision to
strike a year earlier.
By Raymond Whitaker
02/27/05 "The Independent" - - It was one of the most tense cabinet
meetings Downing Street had seen in living memory. "We were on the
brink of war," recalled Clare Short, who was there. The consequences
would be dramatic, not only for those round the table, but for
millions of Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of British and American
troops.
The date was 17 March 2003, only two days before the war to oust
Saddam Hussein was launched. "The atmosphere was very fraught by
then," Ms Short, then International Development Secretary, said last
week. Experts in international law were saying the impending conflict
was illegal, her officials were concerned, and the military was
demanding a clear statement of the legal position.
The issue of the war's legality has erupted back into the public arena
in the past week with the publication of a book, Lawless World, by
Philippe Sands QC, an international lawyer in Cherie Blair's Matrix
Chambers. According to his account, the Attorney General, Lord Gold-
smith, had delivered a 13-page opinion on 7 March 2003 which said that
to be sure of legal authority for the war, a UN Security Council
resolution specifically backing force was needed. Later, at a meeting
at Downing Street, he said his views had become "clearer", and it was
that clarification that was presented to Ms Short and her colleagues.
How that change came about has been the subject of intense
speculation, reviving the pressure on the Government to publish the
full text of the Attorney General's advice. But the lingering
questions over the war do not end there. Mr Sands and others also
raise doubts about another great mystery surrounding the conflict:
when did Tony Blair first sign up to President George Bush's crusade
to oust Saddam Hussein?
Last September, highly embarrassing leaked documents showed that as
early as March 2002, the Prime Minister's foreign policy adviser, Sir
David Manning, was assuring Condoleezza Rice of Mr Blair's unbudgeable
support for "regime change". Days later, Sir Christopher Meyer, then
British ambassador to the US, sent a dispatch to Downing Street
detailing how he repeated the commitment to Paul Wolfowitz, the US
Deputy Defence Secretary. The ambassador added that Mr Blair would
need a "cover" for any military action. "I then went through the need
to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UN Security Council
resolutions."
Throughout this period, and into 2003, Mr Blair was insisting in
public that war was not inevitable. In May 2002 he said Iraq would be
"in a far better position" without Saddam, but added: "Does that mean
that military action is imminent or about to happen? No. We've never
said that." Introducing the notorious WMD dossier in the Commons on 24
September that year, he said: "Our case is simply this: not that we
take military action come what may, but that the case for ensuring
Iraqi disarmament, as the UN itself has stipulated, is overwhelming."
In the past week, however, it has not only emerged that Special Branch
officers questioned opposition parties as part of an investigation
into the leaks, but The Independent on Sunday has discovered further
information indicating that when Mr Blair met Mr Bush at his Texas
ranch on 7 and 8 April 2002, he committed Britain to an assault on
Iraq. The clue, contained in an obscure row over the Government's
refusal to answer an apparently straightforward parliamentary
question, shows that both at the beginning and the end of the process
which culminated in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the issue of
legality was very much in the air.
As the Cabinet gathered on the eve of war, it was well known around
Whitehall that the Foreign Office's legal advisers saw no authority
for the conflict without a fresh UN resolution, and that Lord
Goldsmith had apparently supported their view in his written opinion
10 days earlier. The scene should have been set for a ferocious
debate, but that was not what happened, according to Ms Short.
Lord Goldsmith, who is not a cabinet member, came in and sat in the
place previously occupied by Robin Cook, who had just resigned. If the
Attorney General was aware of the symbolism, he gave no sign of it. A
two-page document was circulated and Lord Goldsmith started to read it
aloud, but was told there was no need.
Until that day, the absence of any public statement had allowed doubts
about the legality of the war to multiply, but now Lord Goldsmith was
saying there was no problem. "I said this was odd, coming so late," Ms
Short recalled last week. "Everyone said, 'Oh Clare, be quiet.' No one
would allow any discussion ... I was stunned and surprised, because of
all the other information I had received."
But Ms Short went along with her colleagues and voted for war. "The
Attorney General is the legal authority for Britain, for civil
servants, the military and ministers," she said. "But now it looks to
me that [the revised legal opinion] was stitched together, it wasn't
properly done. Not only are there questions over how we went to war,
but about the reliability of the Attorney General in the British
constitution. Our constitutional arrangements are breaking down."
Reacting to last week's controversy, Lord Goldsmith has denied being
"leaned on" by the Government to change his view, or that the two
people he met at Downing Street, Baroness Morgan and Lord Falconer,
were involved "in any way" with the document circulated to the Cabinet
on 17 March, and issued the same day as a written parliamentary
answer. Following reports that he told last year's Butler inquiry that
Lady Morgan and Lord Falconer had set out his view, Lord Goldsmith
asked for the record to be corrected to "I set out my view".
"As I have always made clear, I set out in the [parliamentary] answer
my own genuinely held, independent view that military action was
lawful under the existing Security Council resolutions," he said on
Friday night. "The answer did not purport to be a summary of my
confidential legal advice to Government."
Lord Goldsmith did not mention the insistent demands that his
"confidential legal advice" should be published, to clear up the many
questions about it. But the speed of his reaction to news reports,
coupled with the near-unprecedented use of the Special Branch to
question politicians and their aides, indicates an atmosphere close to
panic in government circles that the whole issue of Iraq could be
reopened just as an election campaign is about to begin.
That consideration seems to apply to the refusal to answer a simple
question: when did it first seek legal advice on whether an invasion
of Iraq would be lawful? The Liberal Democrats, who asked the
question, stressed that they did not want to know what the advice was,
simply the date it was requested, but the Foreign Office has rejected
a ruling by the Parliamentary Ombudsman that it has no good reason to
withhold the information.
Sir Michael Jay, permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, argued
that the date on its own would be "misleading". It was already in the
public domain that advice was first sought in the spring of 2002; "it
was not his view that the public interest required the release of
anything more specific beyond that", in the words of the Ombudsman,
Ann Abraham.
To put the date in context, the FO said, it would have to release a
confidential internal minute and a press release. Ms Abraham said
there was no need to disclose the minute, but stated: "I find it
difficult to understand what harm might be caused by the department,
in releasing the date of this minute, saying that it had been written
because statements made in a particular press release ... suggested to
them that it might be sensible to obtain legal advice in respect of
those statements."
Most FO press releases are anodyne announcements of am- bassadorial
appointments and guests received by the Foreign Secretary. From March
to May 2002, there are only two that stand out, both on 9 April, the
day after Mr Blair left Mr Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Both
concern armed incursions by Israeli forces into the Palestinian areas.
In one, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, calls on Israel to abide by
Security Council resolutions, saying: "Like every other country,
Israel has a right to security, but the Israeli government must
respect inter- national law ..." Britain's then ambassador to the UN,
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, makes the same point even more forcefully,
saying: "I think everybody understands that the political and moral
authority of the United Nations is not to be cast aside lightly or to
be trodden on lightly."
The potential hostage to fortune in those words is emphasised in
another press statement the same day by Ben Bradshaw, then a Foreign
Office minister, who condemns Saddam for exploiting the Israeli
"invasion" of Palestinian areas while ignoring the suffering of his
own people.
Did someone in the Foreign Office realise that in the light of these
statements, it might be wise to seek legal advice if Britain proposed
an invasion of Iraq? According to Philippe Sands, interdepartmental
advice had already been circulated the month before, "stating that
regime change of itself had no basis in international law".
On the eve of Mr Blair's visit to Texas, Downing Street dismissed
suggestions that he was going for a "council of war". It might be
embarrassing rather than misleading to admit that, days later, the
Government was seeking to establish the legal justification for war -
especially since, according to Robin Cook, Mr Blair told the Cabinet
on his return from Crawford that "the time to debate the legal basis
for our action should be when we take that action".
In the view of Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign
affairs spokesman, the Government's refusal to give the date it sought
legal advice "can be seen as a refusal to admit that the commitment to
George Bush was made very much earlier than the Prime Minister has so
far been willing to say". But on this point, as on so much else to do
with the war in Iraq, the Government remains mute.
c2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving the included information for research and
educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation
whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information
Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
****
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