More proof Blair lied about the Iraq war

By DarkPolitricks

An article in today’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reports on a newly released document that proves that during 2002 when Tony Blair was repeatedly asked in parliament and by the press whether he had plans for an invasion of Iraq, which he denied, he was lying. He had already agreed to help Bush’s plans for invasion and had secretly committed British troops early in 2002.

However he knew the British public had to be “persuaded” to support a very unpopular decision to go to war. Therefore during this period of time in 2002 the British public were bombarded with anti-Iraq propaganda such as the infamous Iraq dossier which was published in September of 2002 which claimed Iraq could attack British troops with biological and chemical weapons within 45 minutes.

The following link is very useful as it shows the actual stages of data manipulation that the Blair government used when sexing up the Iraq dossier to make the few facts they did know about Saddam’s regime into a more frightening and conclusive assessment. The link is in a form of a table with the original Joint Intelligence Committee report on the far left and the released dossier document on the right with all draft versions in between.

http://iraqdossier.com/sexing/table.pdf

You can see that for example the JIC reported on Iraqs nuclear weapons the following:

We judge but cannot confirm that Iraq is conducting nuclear related research and development into the enrichment of uranium and could have longer term plans to produce enriched uranium for a weapon. (10.5.01)

Key Judgement:
Iraq is pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. But it will not be able to indigenously produce a nuclear weapon while sanctions remain in place, unless suitable fissile material is purchased from abroad.(15.3.02)

Although there is very little intelligence, we continue to judge that Iraq is pursuing a nuclear weapons programme …but we do not know if large scale development work has yet recommenced. (15.3.02)

However the final dossier had turned these statements that show any intention by Saddam Hussien to carry on a nuclear weapons programme was being successfully prevented by the sanctions into:

What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

We already knew that Tony Blair was perfectly happy lying to the public and within the house of commons and the Iraq war hangs like an albatross around his neck as one of his greatest mistakes in the eyes of the British public. However the recent documents seem to put to rest once and for all the suspicion that he had already personally agreed to George Bush to support the war in Iraq much earlier than he admitted to the British public and the house of commons. All the time he was trying to make out that any war could have been stopped by compliance with UN resolutions was lies and he was just trying to gain the perfect pretext to get the public support he so much wanted.

Not only were his lies an insult to the British public’s intelligence who always suspected him of lying about his desire for war but they cost our troops dearly. Due to his insistence on keeping the plans for the war top secret it meant the British army didn’t have adequate time to prepare for battle  and more importantly for the re-construction of Iraq afterwards.

Another Daily Telegraph article details claims by British army chiefs that soldiers were sent into battle with only 5 rounds of ammunition each and that there was only enough body armour for those men who sat at the front and rear of the vehicles. Therefore Blair’s desire to keep this secret undoubtedly cost young men their lives. However we know Blair a converted Catholic sleeps soundly at night I just hope he had to spend a few days confessing his many sins before his conversion was accepted.

The full article which can be accessed on the Daily Telegraph website is printed below:

Today’s leaked documents shed no new light on the most oft-rehearsed of those charges – that he lied about, or exaggerated, the threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But they will make uncomfortable reading for the former prime minister in the light of some of his other claims.

In President George W Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union address, fresh from what then looked like a victory in Afghanistan, he ratcheted up the rhetoric against Saddam Hussein. He named Iraq as one of three states in an “axis of evil”, promising: “I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer.”

It was seen, correctly, as a statement of intent. The American people backed a war on Iraq. But in sceptical Britain, the idea threatened to cause problems for President Bush’s closest foreign ally.

Throughout most of 2002, Mr Blair’s consistent line was that – though military action could not be ruled out – no decisions had been made, no British military preparations were in train, and any action had to be pursued through the UN. That, today’s documents make clear, was not correct.

On July 16, 2002, he was questioned by the chairmen of all the Commons select committees. Donald Anderson, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee, asked him directly: “Are we then preparing for possible military action in Iraq?” “No,” said Mr Blair. “There are no decisions which have been taken about military action.”

As the prime minister must have known, this answer was, at best, misleading. The leaked documents say that “formation-level planning for a deployment took place from February 2002”. By the time Mr Blair gave that denial, Britain had, in fact, been preparing for possible military action for five months.

The documents say the planning was described internally as “generic”, but they add that it was not “truly generic” and was, in fact, “detailed advance planning” with frequent changes to a proposed “orbat” or order of battle. The documents add: “From March 2002, or May at the latest, there was a significant possibility of a large-scale British operation.”

On June 28, 2002, the documents say – still two weeks before Mr Blair’s denial to Parliament – US Central Command (Centcom), the people who would run the war, held a special Iraq planning conference for Britain and the other coalition ally, Australia. And on Aug 13, according to the documents, Centcom’s commander, Gen Tommy Franks, held a discussion on assembling a massive contingent of British troops as a northern invasion force through Turkey. That, in fact, was then adopted as the battle plan.

But by the early autumn of 2002, opposition to British involvement in a war was stronger than before. If the public and the Labour Party had known about any of this planning, there could have been an outcry. Mr Blair didn’t tell them.

On Sept 24, launching the weapons of mass destruction dossier, the prime minister said: “No one wants military conflict … In respect of any military options, we are not at the stage of deciding those options but, of course, it is important, should we get to that point, that we have the fullest possible discussion of those options.”

As late as November, he was still saying that Britain’s objective was “disarmament, not regime change”. Today’s leak about the military planning complements the disclosure in an earlier leaked document that, whatever he claimed to Parliament and the public, Mr Blair made the decision to support “regime change,” and President Bush, from the beginning.

According to the so-called Downing Street Memo, leaked in 2005, Mr Blair signed on for regime change at an April 2002 summit with President Bush in Crawford, Texas. By the time the British public was finally told there would be a significant troop deployment – on Dec 18, 2002 – there were only weeks left before the war and it had too much momentum to stop.

Our disclosures show the serious consequences this situation had on the operation, code-named Telic, when it began. The documents say that the need for absolute secrecy about Britain’s true likely intentions badly affected the quality of the planning.

An operation as big as an invasion of a country would normally require equipment to be ordered and experts in reconstruction to be consulted well in advance. But because the planners couldn’t tell anyone, they couldn’t do that. “In Whitehall, the internal operational security regime, in which only very small numbers of officers and officials were allowed to become involved in Telic business, constrained broader planning for combat operations and subsequent phases effectively until Dec 23, 2002,” the documents say.

Partly for this reason, “the planning and preparation for this operation was more rushed than should have been the case … The time available to plan Op Telic was not well spent at the strategic [government] and operational levels. This had many implications for the operational and tactical conduct of the operation, including Phase 4 ops [the stabilisation/occupation phase]”.

In the war phase, those shortcomings included the now notorious problems with equipment. There was “very little time for in-theatre training”. A further spanner was thrown into the works by Turkey’s refusal to allow use of its territory — meaning that the British had to hurriedly retool for an invasion from Kuwait.

Ministers’ reluctance to announce publicly any troop deployments until the last minute had even more serious consequences for the post-war Iraq. It “caused serious difficulties for UK planners in US headquarters”, say the documents. British officers at Centcom, including the senior British land adviser, Brig Jeremy Robbins, had spotted “structural shortcomings” with the Americans’ plan for post-war Iraq – principally, that there wasn’t one.

But Brig Robbins and the rest of the British “were unable to influence US decision-makers until the UK committed major combat units – by which time the campaign had essentially been planned”. The penalty for failing to correct those “structural shortcomings”, the documents dolefully admit, “has proven expensive”.