Protesters outside the inquiry dressed (left to right) as Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Gordon Brown.
Yesterday, a British inquiry investigating the 2003 invasion of Iraq heard statements that UN officials were "scrambling" for evidence of Wepaons of Mass Destrcution (WMDs) as British and American troops massed for an invasion. Former British ambassador to the U.S. Sir Christopher Meyer testified that former U.S. President George W. Bush had pushed former British Prime Minister Tony Blair for regime change in Iraq as early as 2002.
According to the BBC, Meyer stated that he supported the 2003 invasion's removal of Saddam Hussein, though he critiziced the way that the U.S. and U.K. "let the military strategy wag the diplomatic and political strategy," adding that "it should have been the other way around." He went on to say that he felt it was "pointless" to resist U.S. plans for an Iraq invasion, which he claimed Prime Minister Blair and President Bush had first discussed in a 2002 meeting at Bush's Texas ranch. Meyer highlighted the British government's feelings that the United States was "powerful enough" to handle Iraq on its own, but insisted that he had always emphasized the need for careful planning, stating
I didn't say just we are with you on regime change, now let's go get the bastard. We didn't do that. What we said was 'let's do it cleverly and let's do it with some skill'. That means, apart from anything else, go to the UN and get a security council resolution.
He also compared post-war planning to a "black hole," and argued that U.S. officials were not properly pepared to handle post-war Iraq "until very late in the day."
Today, Sir Jeremy Greenstock (2003 British Ambassador to the United Nations) testified that "what [the U.K. was] left with by the failure of diplomacy was the U.S. set of reasons for going to war with Iraq, not the British ones." But those reasons, Sir Jeremy said, were still "sufficient legal cover" for military action. He mentioned that he felt that a peaceful resolution to the WMD issue may have been found if weapons inspectors had been given more time, but that he believed that "we successfully established legality in the UN....to the degree, at least, that we were never challenged in the UN or International Court of Justice for those actions."
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