The British press is running with a Vanity Fair article which alleges the Bush administration made it clear to Britain that Iraq would be next within days of 9/11:
President George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001.
According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after 11 September, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror’s initial goal – dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Bush, claims Meyer, replied by saying: ‘I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.’ Regime change was already US policy.
It was clear, Meyer says, ‘that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn’t be to discuss smarter sanctions’. Elsewhere in his interview, Meyer says Blair always believed it was unlikely that Saddam would be removed from power or give up his weapons of mass destruction without a war.
As Kevin Drum notes, this revelation won’t startle anyone who’s been following the news closely. But how about this paragraph:
[T]he implications for Blair may be still more explosive. The discussion implies that, even before the bombing of Afghanistan, Blair already knew that the US intended to attack Saddam next, although he continued to insist in public that ‘no decisions had been taken’ until almost the moment that the invasion began in March 2003. His critics are likely to seize on the report of the two leaders’ exchange and demand to know when Blair resolved to provide the backing that Bush sought.
Why single out Blair here? Bush played the “we don’t want to go to war” card just as much as Blair. Clear up until the eve of the invasion he continued to manufacture a phony sense of doubt, as if he would only invade if Saddam forced him to.
The administration decided it was going into Iraq in 2001. I suppose there was a theoretical possibility that armed conflict might have been avoided if Saddam had turned himself in and allowed U.S. forces to take over the country without resistance, but no one expected that to happen. The plan was for war. And the sole purpose of the next 17 months of “diplomacy” was to garner political support for the invasion.