Bush-Blair memo shows war penciled in early

Meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Jan. 31, 2003, President Bush suggested disguising a U.S. plane with United Nations markings and flying it over Iraq to see if Saddam Hussein would shoot at it. That doesn’t sound as if Mr. Bush was trying to avoid a war.

In fact, a five-page memo on the meeting, written by a top adviser to Mr. Blair and obtained by The New York Times and others, makes it sound as though Mr. Bush had made up his mind to invade. “The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,” the memo noted. The war began on March 19. The author, David Manning, who was at the meeting, also said it was evident that “our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning.”

Such an attack by Hussein could have led the U.N. to pass a second resolution specifically authorizing an invasion - a resolution Mr. Bush wanted but never got. At that Jan. 31 meeting, though, he made clear to Mr. Blair that he intended to invade even without another resolution.

If the decision to invade had been made, the seeds for mismanaging the aftermath also had been planted. Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair, according to the memo, thought it was “unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups” after U.S. and British forces had ousted Hussein.

The latest memo confirms conclusions from the Downing Street memo. Written in July 2002, it reported that top British officials thought President Bush already had decided to invade and that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of going to war. The latest memo again underscores the need for a congressional investigation into possible misuse of intelligence prior to the Iraq invasion.

The Senate has promised such an investigation but has not followed through. The memo shows that President Bush was willing to deceive Saddam Hussein to start a war. The question now is whether he also was willing to deceive Congress and the American people.

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