Someone should collect the transcripts of all these meetings and make a book out of them, of course they’ll be jailed but they would be doing a great service to the world and to history. I don’t know of anything that has been as valuable to history (or revealing) since the McMahon-Hussein documents (correspondence). But then again, how often has the human race ever paid attention to history or history in the making?
It seems every time information about some meeting these two had in the oval office years ago is released we find out more and more about intentions and plans. Bombing AlJazeera for example.
Here’s another…
â??Citing a confidential British memorandum, the newspaper (new york times) said the president was certain that war was inevitable and made his view known during a private two-hour meeting with Blair in the Oval Office on January 31, 2003.
Information about the meeting was contained in the memo written by Blair’s top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The Times.
“Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,” the paper quotes David Manning, Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser at the time, as noting in the memo.
” ‘The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,’ Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. ‘This was when the bombing would begin’,” the paper continued.
The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment, the paper said.
Five days after the Bush-Blair meeting, then US secretary of state Colin Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to present evidence that Iraq posed a threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons.
Stamped “extremely sensitive,” the five-page memorandum had not been made public, according to the report. Several highlights were first published in January in the book “Lawless World,” which was written by British lawyer and international law professor Philippe Sands.
In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast excerpts from the memo. But since then, The New York Times has been able to review the five-page memo in its entirety.
The document indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable, the paper said.
Bush predicted that it was “unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.” Blair agreed with that assessment.
The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq, The Times noted.
Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a US surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. [source]â?Â
It’s kind of sad really. Do you remember where you were 3 years ago when Colin Powell was showing “satellite photos” of WMDs being transported? Do you remember what you were thinking or saying to yourself?
Questions your children will pose when they ask what you were doing when all of this happened, and why the world did nothing. How the UN got it’s teeth knocked out on the world stage like Japan invading Manchuria in 1931 and walking all over the UN’s predecessor the League of Nations. History is a broken record; and it took less than a century for it to come full circle.
…and thousands of people have died for this.