After a set of White House memos were recently declassified in the wake of the Hilary Clinton email furor, it has been revealed that George Bush manipulated former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, into invading Iraq alongside the United States. The deal for this was allegedly made at the Crawford Summit, where Blair was invited to Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas from April 5-7, 2002.
A week before the Crawford summit, Bush had received an email from then Secretary of State, Colin Powell. In the email, it states:
“Blair continues to stand by you and the U.S. as we move forward on the war on terrorism in Iraq. He will present to you the strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause.”
This suggests that Bush had Blair playing spin doctor for the press in such a way that the world would believe that there was a credible and potential threat in Iraq which could not be ignored. A week after this email was sent, he gave Blair the “distinguished honour” of being the first world leader to be invited to his ranch home in Crawford, Texas. This was clearly done as a way of buttering Blair up. Flattering his ego into thinking he was a player in world affairs, when really he was just Bush’s puppet. Bush even had Tony Blair sit in on his daily CIA briefings, as well as driving him around the ranch in his truck for the two nights he stayed in Texas.
Another part of the memos which shows Bush’s underhand influence is the line that reads:
“Blair has readily committed to deploying 1700 commandos to Afghanistan, even though experts warn that British forces are overstretched.”
George Bush was really something! He was willing to jeopardise the security of an ally’s troops, just to get the backing for his Weapons of Mass Destruction wild goose chase in the Middle East! For real, Bush deserves a lot more props than he’s given.
Blair to this day continues to deny having made an agreement with Bush at Crawford, yet in September of 2002, four months after Crawford, Blair was pushing the story around the world that Saddam Hussein really did have WMDs that could be launched within 45 minutes. This was an attempt to get support from the U.N. on his ridiculous crusade into the Middle East.
Effectively, Bush made Blair use Britain as a front to gain international support for the invasion of Iraq. This invitation to his ranch in Crawford was simply bait which Blair swallowed wholeheartedly. During this Crawford visit, there were also no advisers present, so Bush had free rein to spout all the nonsense he needed into Blair’s ear without a voice of reason telling him how much of a crazy idea it was.
Featured image by U.S. National Archives on Flickr
