Weapons of mass deception: that Bush-Blair transcript

A transcript of a crucial conversation between Tony Blair and George Bush just before the invasion of Iraq seems certain to be suppressed by the Coalition government, despite a ruling that it should be published.

But a leaked copy has made its way to our virtual office. Here’s is a transcript of the telephone conversation between the White House and Downing Street that took place on March 12, 2003, just a week before the invasion began:

GB: Hiya Tony. How’s it going with that pesky Parliament of yours? I thought you were a kinda president like me and didn’t have to do with all that democracy stuff. I hear some guys in your cabinet are even talking about something called international law when it comes to invading some other country like Iran, err Iraq.

TB: George, we’re nearly good to go. You know, we made our decision last year that Saddam had to go, come what may, no matter what the weapons inspectors reported, and I’m going to stand shoulder to shoulder with you on this one. Don’t worry about Parliament. The Tories love a good war and they’ll be voting with me. As for my cabinet, I’ve got it sorted.

GB: That French guy, what’s his name, Durac, BigMac, Chirac? I can’t remember.

TB: Jacques Chirac, Mr President.

GB: He’s sort of saying we need another resolution at the UN before we can go in and find them nukes and chemical weapons our boys say are out there somewhere in Iran. Then he says he’ll block it. So what the shit is he on about?

TB: George, don’t worry! We’ve had all the UN offices bugged for some time and he’s talking bullshit, err no offence George. Anyway, my legal team says we can do more or less what we want, you know, given the breaches of UN resolution Saddam is already guilty of. One guy was a bit iffy on the legality issue, but he’s since come round to my way of thinking and his advice is just what we wanted. Some in the cabinet questioned whether the weapons of mass destruction actually existed. So I got this guy in from intelligence to put the frighteners on them. So it’s sorted.

GB: That’s great Tone, Y’know, Don [Rumsfeld, defence secretary] was saying we didn’t need the Brits if push came to shove because all the firepower was ours. But I told him: “Don, I know that you think there are known knowns and there are known unknowns and that we don’t know what we don’t know. But these guys are our only allies. Let’s invite them to the show.”

TB: Great! Just one more thing, George.

GB: What’s that Tone?

TB: Can we leave Al Qaeda out of this one. I know you guys think that Saddam had a hand in 9.11 but not everyone is convinced. Why don’t we keep it to just WMDs?

GB: I can’t do that Tone. My people want justice for those who planned the attack on 9.11. They gotta be out there somewhere. We didn’t find them in Afghanistan so it seems like Iraq is the next place to look. W’dya think?

TB: If you say so, George.

GB: I gotta a great name for it: Operation Iraqi Freedom. Great, isn’t it?

TB: Wonderful, George.

GB: So when y’all ready?

TB: In a week, once I get it through Parliament we should just get on with it.

GB: What about a week today, March 19?

TB: That’s fine. History will show that when it mattered, we did the right thing.

GB: Too right, Tone. Too right. That’s it for now. Love to Cherie.

TB: Speak soon. Tell your boys I’m with them all the way.

Iraq: America's nightmare

Exactly five years ago, US and British forces embarked on an illegal pre-emptive war on Iraq with the stated aim of bringing “freedom and democracy” to the country. Instead, they have destroyed Iraq, turning it into a country of mutually hostile ghettoes, presiding over the deaths of over one million Iraqis, driving more than two million into exile, with another 1.9 million internally displaced.

This constitutes a ghastly mass social experiment using live and unwilling subjects. By any count, the governments in Washington and London, to put it bluntly, stand guilty of massive war crimes against humanity. If we actually lived in a democracy, then Bush, Cheney, Brown and Blair and everyone in their regimes who endorsed the invasion and occupation, would be behind bars. The fact that they are still at large speaks volumes for the real nature of present-day politics.

The charge sheet is endless. Driven by corporate greed to turn Iraq from a state-run to a market economy, the occupying powers have dismembered and sold off industries and withdrawn government subsidies for food and power. This “shock therapy”, which was the real objective of the invasion, has added to the untold misery of the Iraqi people. The oil industry, however, was left in state hands so that its resources could be divided up between the oil corporations through contracts so generous that no other country in the world would have agreed to their conditions.

As anyone who cared to investigate at the time knew, the invasion was prepared and launched on a pretext. It followed a softening-up process in relation to international law, when pre-emptive military action was taken against former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan to effect regime change. The United Nations was reduced to a pathetic onlooker as Washington and London prepared the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It took former general secretary Kofi Anan until September 2004 to say that the war was contrary to international law, when a word or two at the time might have made a difference.

As to the fabled “Weapons of Mass Destruction” – they were, of course, essentially weapons of mass disinformation. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said in an interview: “All this talk about Iraq having chemical weapons is no longer valid. Most of it is based on speculation that Iraq could have hidden some of these weapons from UN inspectors. I believe we did a good job of inspecting Iraq.” The UN blew up the main manufacturing plant and Ritter says that anything hidden would by now be “useless sludge”. He adds: “If Iraq was producing weapons today, we’d have definitive proof, plain and simple.”

The lies about WMD were known in London, where dodgy dossiers cobbled together from the Internet and reworked by press officers tried to build the case for war. On May 1, 2005 the "Downing Street memo" was leaked. It contained an overview of a secret July 23, 2002 meeting between New Labour ministers, defence and intelligence figures who discussed the build-up to the Iraq war. The memo stated: "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." According to the Center for Public Integrity, Bush's administration made a total of 935 false statements between 2001 and 2003 about Iraq's alleged threat to the United States.

History will come to see the invasion as a desperate act by desperate politicians on behalf of a greedy corporate elite. Far from demonstrating the all-powerful nature of the US, the war has exposed its Achilles heel – the massive indebtedness of the country, which is bringing down its banking system and depriving millions of people of their homes. The true cost of the invasion and occupation of Iraq is put at a staggering $3 trillion – or $3,000,000,000,000. That has helped bankrupt the US Treasury, weaken the dollar and deprive America itself of much-needed public investment. In this way, the cost of the war has contributed to the recession now hitting the US economy. The war, paradoxically, has weakened the US where it hurts most. No wonder that most Americans are now opposed to the continued occupation of Iraq.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor