http://www.truthout.org/062209J?n
US Plan to Provoke the Invasion of Iraq
by: Jamie Doward, Gaby Hinsliff and Mark Townsend
original @ The Observer UK: Sunday 21 June 2009
A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair
before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without
a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the
official inquiry into the UK's role in toppling Saddam Hussein.
The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the
invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became
increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might
trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.
Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2
reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover".
Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader
in breach of UN resolutions.
The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be "brought
out" to give a public presentation on Saddam's WMD or that someone might
assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second
resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair
told Bush he was "solidly with the president".
The five-page document, written by Blair's foreign policy adviser, Sir
David Manning, and copied to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK ambassador to the
UN, Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, the chief of the defence staff,
Admiral Lord Boyce, and the UK's ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher
Meyer, outlines how Bush told Blair he had decided on a start date for the
war.
Paraphrasing Bush's comments at the meeting, Manning, noted: "The start
date for the military campaign was now pencilled in for 10 March. This was
when the bombing would begin."
Last night an expert on international law who is familar with the memo's
contents said it provided vital evidence into the two men's frames of mind
as they considered the invasion and its aftermath and must be presented to
the Chilcott inquiry established by Gordon Brown to examine the causes,
conduct and consequences of the Iraq war.
Philippe Sands, QC, a professor of law at University College London who
is expected to give evidence to the inquiry, said confidential material such
as the memo was of national importance, making it vital that the inquiry is
not held in private, as Brown originally envisioned.
In today's Observer, Sands writes: "Documents like this raise issues of
national embarrassment, not national security. The restoration of public
confidence requires this new inquiry to be transparent. Contentious matters
should not be kept out of the public domain, even in the run-up to an
election."
The memo notes there had been a shift in the two men's thinking on Iraq
by late January 2003 and that preparing for war was now their priority. "Our
diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,"
Manning writes. This was despite the fact Blair that had yet to receive
advice on the legality of the war from the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith,
which did not arrive until 7 March 2003 - 13 days before the bombing
campaign started.
In his article today, Sands says the memo raises questions about the
selection of the chair of the inquiry. Sir John Chilcott sat on the 2004
Butler inquiry, which examined the reliability of intelligence in the run-up
to the Iraq war, and would have been privy to the document's contents - and
the doubts about WMD running to the highest levels of the US and UK
governments.
Many senior legal experts have expressed dismay that Chilcott has been
selected to chair the inquiry as he is considered to be close to the
security services after his time spent as a civil servant in Northern
Ireland.
Brown had believed that allowing the Chilcott inquiry to hold private
hearings would allow witnesses to be candid. But after bereaved families and
antiwar campaigners expressed outrage, the prime minister wrote to Chilcott
to say that if the panel can show witnesses and national security issues
will not be compromised by public hearings, he will change his stance.
Lord Guthrie, a former chief of the defence staff under Blair, described
the memo as "quite shocking". He said that it underscored why the Chilcott
inquiry must be seen to be a robust investigation: "It's important that the
inquiry is not a whitewash as these inquiries often are."
This year, the Dutch government launched its own inquiry into its
support for the war. Significantly, the inquiry will see all the
intelligence shared with the Dutch intelligence services by MI5 and MI6. The
inquiry intends to publish its report in November - suggesting that
confidential information about the role played by the UK and the US could
become public before Chilcott's inquiry reports next year.
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/opinion/22krugman.html?th&emc=th
Health Care Showdown
"But the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health
insurance - even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion
cost of the Bush tax cuts. Furthermore, Democratic leaders know that
they have to pass a health care bill for the sake of their own survival.
One way or another, the numbers will be brought in line."
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed: June 22, 2009
America's political scene has changed immensely since the last time a
Democratic president tried to reform health care. So has the health care
picture: with costs soaring and insurance dwindling, nobody can now say with
a straight face that the U.S. health care system is O.K. And if surveys like
the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication,
voters are ready for major change.
The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get that change,
because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like
it's 1993.
And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible
exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration
a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers
who keep shouting the old slogans - Government-run health care! Socialism!
Europe! - hoping that someone still cares.
The polls suggest that hardly anyone does. Voters, it seems, strongly favor
a universal guarantee of coverage, and they mostly accept the idea that
higher taxes may be needed to achieve that guarantee. What's more, they
overwhelmingly favor precisely the feature of Democratic plans that
Republicans denounce most fiercely as "socialized medicine" - the creation
of a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers.
Or to put it another way, in effect voters support the health care plan
jointly released by three House committees last week, which relies on a
combination of subsidies and regulation to achieve universal coverage, and
introduces a public plan to compete with insurers and hold down costs.
Yet it remains all too possible that health care reform will fail, as it has
so many times before.
I'm not that worried about the issue of costs. Yes, the Congressional Budget
Office's preliminary cost estimates for Senate plans were higher than
expected, and caused considerable consternation last week. But the
fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance - even
those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax
cuts. Furthermore, Democratic leaders know that they have to pass a health
care bill for the sake of their own survival. One way or another, the
numbers will be brought in line.
The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by "centrist"
Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on
watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around "centrist,"
by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans,
the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.
What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public
option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch,
replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record,
neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of
which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability
and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.
Whatever may be motivating these Democrats, they don't seem able to explain
their reasons in public.
Thus Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska initially declared that the public
option - which, remember, has overwhelming popular support - was a
"deal-breaker." Why? Because he didn't think private insurers could compete:
"At the end of the day, the public plan wins the day." Um, isn't the purpose
of health care reform to protect American citizens, not insurance companies?
Mr. Nelson softened his stand after reform advocates began a public campaign
targeting him for his position on the public option.
And Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota offers a perfectly circular
argument: we can't have the public option, because if we do, health care
reform won't get the votes of senators like him. "In a 60-vote environment,"
he says (implicitly rejecting the idea, embraced by President Obama, of
bypassing the filibuster if necessary), "you've got to attract some
Republicans as well as holding virtually all the Democrats together, and
that, I don't believe, is possible with a pure public option."
Honestly, I don't know what these Democrats are trying to achieve. Yes, some
of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the
medical-industrial complex - but who in politics doesn't? If I had to guess,
I'd say that what's really going on is that relatively conservative
Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating
the bipartisan center that used to run America.
But this fantasy can't be allowed to stand in the way of giving America the
health care reform it needs. This time, the alleged center must not hold.
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