Claim Blair ‘deliberately’ linked Iraq and al-Qaida

TONY BLAIR deliberately conflated the threats from Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida following the 9/11 attacks, an Iraq War inquiry was told yesterday.

British Foreign Office officials have repeatedly told the official inquiry, sitting in London, that British intelligence had no evidence of any connection between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaida.

But former British ambassador to the US, Christopher Meyer, said Mr Blair had directly linked the two following a private meeting with President George W Bush at his Texas ranch.

The next day Mr Blair had spoken publicly for the first time about the case for “regime change” in Iraq.

Meyer said it appeared agreement on a new approach to Iraq had been “signed in blood” between Mr Blair and Mr Bush.

He said that when the Bush administration came to power in January 2001, there had been little talk of regime change in Iraq, even though it had been official US policy since 1998.

“It was like a grumbling appendix,” he said.

However, after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers “everything changed”.

By the time Mr Blair met Mr Bush in April 2002, Meyer said there would have been no point in “banging on” about “regime change” only to say Britain would not support it.

It was still unclear exactly what the two leaders discussed in private, but afterwards there was an apparent shift in the British position. “I took no part in any of the discussions and there was a large chunk of that time when no adviser was there.

“To this day I am not entirely clear what degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford ranch,” he said.

The following day Mr Blair made a speech in which he spoke publicly for the first time about regime change in Baghdad.

“What he was trying to do was to draw the lessons of 9/11 and apply them to the situation in Iraq which led – I think not inadvertently but deliberately – to a conflation of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

“When I heard that speech, I thought that this represents a tightening of the UK/US alliance and a degree of convergence on the danger Saddam Hussein presented.”

Meyer said Mr Blair had been a “true believer about the wickedness of Saddam Hussein” having spoken on the subject in 1998.

However, Britain’s Foreign Office ruled there was no legal basis for seeking to oust the Iraqi dictator.

Unlike the British, key US figures like the influential deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz were convinced there was a “strong connection” between Saddam and al-Qaida.

Although they had won support of a new Security Council resolution in November 2002, the strategy was ultimately a failure because Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors had not been given enough time to complete their work.

Meyer said the “real problem” was that US military was planning an invasion in March 2003 which left the British and Americans “scrambling” to find proof that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction in time.

“It was impossible to see how Blix could bring the inspection process to a conclusion, for better or worse, by March,” he said.

“Because you cannot synchronise the programmes, you had to short-circuit the process by finding the notorious ’smoking gun’.

“We have got to try to prove that he is guilty and we – the British and Americans – have never recovered from that because, of course, there was no smoking gun."