blies

Personally I did not share some of the emphases of the press conferences. The use of the word "genocide", which came up very often, I thought was quite misplaced because I do not think Mr Milosevic, whatever else he was doing, was engaged in genocide, he was just trying to kick people out. He used very unpleasant methods to do it but he was not actually trying to exterminate them all. That was unfortunate.

On March 5 2003, Robin Cook met Blair: “The most revealing exchange came when we talked about Saddam’s arsenal. I told him, ‘It’s clear from the private briefing I have had that Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction in a sense of weapons that could strike at strategic cities. But he probably does have several thousand battlefield chemical munitions. Do you never worry that he might use them against British troops?’”

Blair replied, “Yes, but all the effort he has had to put into concealment makes it difficult for him to assemble them quickly for use.”

Carne Ross, a key Foreign Office diplomat responsible for monitoring UN arms inspections in Iraq, said in 2005 that British government claims about Iraq's weapons programme had been "totally implausible". Ross told the Guardian:

"I'd read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there's no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too." (Richard Norton-Taylor, 'WMD claims were "totally implausible",' The Guardian, June 20, 2005)

Has the Iraq war been an oil war from the outset?

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan evidently thought so or so he indicated in a single sentence in his recent memoir: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." When asked, Gen. John Abizaid, former CENTCOM commander who oversaw three and a half years of the American occupation of Iraq, agreed. "Of course it's about oil, we can't really deny that," he said during a roundtable discussion at Stanford University.

A former Clinton Administration official told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false information about Iraq... “I knew that was going on,” the former Clinton Administration official said of the British efforts. “We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare.”

Over the next year... at least one member of the U.N. inspection team who supported the American and British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable intelligence reports and tips—data known as inactionable intelligence—to be funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London and elsewhere. “It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn’t move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world,”

Another operation - called Mass Appeal - was revealed by the press in late 2003. This was launched in the late 1990s by MI6 and aimed to gain public support for sanctions and war against Iraq and involved planting storied int he media about Iraqi WMD. Scott Ritter was personally involved in this operation in 1997 - 1998 after being approached by MI6. He said that 'the aim was to convince the public that Iraq was a far greater threat than it actually was', and that the operation involved the manipulation of intelligence material right up to the invasion of Iraq.