Washington – More than two weeks after its publication in London, a previously secret British government memorandum that reported in July 2002 that President Bush had decided to “remove Saddam, through military action” is still creating a stir among administration critics.
The critics are portraying it as evidence that Bush was intent on war with Iraq earlier than the White House has acknowledged.
Eighty-nine House Democrats wrote to the White House to ask whether the memorandum, first disclosed by The Sunday Times on May 1, accurately reported the administration’s thinking at the time, eight months before the American-led invasion. The letter, drafted by Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said the British memorandum of July 23, 2002, if accurate, “raises troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war as well as the integrity of your own administration.”
The White House has always insisted that Bush did not finally decide to carry out the invasion of March 2003 until after Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the administration’s case to the U.N. Security Council in a speech on Feb. 5, 2003.
Among other things, the memorandum reported that Richard Dearlove, the chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, reporting back from talks in Washington, had told other senior British officials that Bush “wanted to remove” Hussein, “through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,” or weapons of mass destruction.
“But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” Dearlove was reported to have said in the memorandum.
Foreign Minister Jack Straw was reported to have described the case for war as “thin” because “Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”
The British government has not disputed the authenticity of the British memorandum.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Tuesday that the White House saw “no need” to respond to the Democratic letter.