Editorial: A Smoking Gun

http://forward.com/main/article.php?ref=200505181041

May 20, 2005

Among the embarrassing documents that surfaced during the mud-bath that was Great Britain's parliamentary election this month, one of the most disturbing was a memo indicating that President Bush had his mind firmly set on war with Iraq as early as July 2002, nearly a year before the shooting began, and that America's "intelligence and fact were being fixed around that policy."

The assessment of Bush came from Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service, who had just returned from talks in Washington. He briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair in a face-to-face meeting at No. 10 Downing Street on July 23, 2002, with other senior aides in attendance. The minutes of the meeting were contained in a memo published in the Times of London this past May 1, five days before the British elections.

The war began on March 20, 2003, nine months after the London briefing. In the intervening months, the Bush administration repeatedly insisted it was doing all it could to avert war, find the truth on Saddam Hussein's weapons and work with the United Nations Security Council to end the Iraq crisis peacefully.

According to the memo, Dearlove — referred to as C — had found that Bush's National Security had "no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record." Bush, he reported, simply wanted to go in and oust Saddam.

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