Someone is letting all the evils of the plotters hatch out.
After the Downing Street memo a string of new documents shows us how Bush Blair set about creating a false case for regime change in Iraq.
Campbell's charge against the BBC that it had not sexed up the case for war is now utterly untenable
Greg Dyke and/or the BBC of today shgould be suing the Government.
"Manning told Blair that given Bush's eagerness for British backing, the prime minister would have 'real influence' on the public relations strategy, on the issue of encouraging the United States to go first to the United Nations and on any U.S. military planning.
Manning said it could prove helpful if Hussein refused to allow renewed U.N. weapons inspections.
'The issue of weapons inspectors must be handled in a way that would persuade Europe and wider opinion that the U.S. was conscious of the international framework, and the insistence of many countries on the need for a legal basis. Renewed refusal by Saddam to accept unfettered inspections would be a powerful argument,' Manning wrote Blair.
Four days after the Manning memo, Christopher Meyer, then the British ambassador in Washington, wrote to Manning about a lunch he had with Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the U.S. deputy secretary of Defense and a leading proponent in the administration of confronting Hussein. Meyer said in the memo that he had told Wolfowitz that U.N. pressure and weapons inspections could be used to trip up Hussein.
'We backed regime change,' he wrote, 'but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe.'
Meyer wrote that he had argued that Washington could go it alone if it wanted to. 'But if it wanted to act with partners, there had to be a strategy for building support for military action against Saddam. I then went through the need to wrong-foot Saddam on the inspectors and the [U.N. Security Council resolutions] and the critical importance of the [Middle East peace process] as an integral part of the anti-Saddam strategy. If all this could be accomplished skillfully, we were fairly confident that a number of countries would come on board.'"
