Blair Invokes Cheney Defense on DSM

Cheney: Iraq will be 'enormous success story'

But, you have to recall that this is the guy who thinks GTMO is a tropical paradise. So, your mileage may vary.

Cheney said he had not read the so-called "Downing Street memo," a document written by a British official in the fall of 2002 suggesting that President Bush had already decided to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and that U.S. officials were over hyping intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to build support for the policy.

However, the vice president said the premise of the memo -- that a decision to go to war had been made months before the March 2003 invasion -- was "wrong."

"Remember what happened after the supposed memo was written. We went to the United Nations. We got a unanimous vote out of the Security Council for a resolution calling on Saddam Hussein to come clean," he said.

Tony Blair said:

The attacks, he said, made it necessary to "draw a line in the sand here, and the country to do it with was Iraq because they were in breach of U.N. resolutions going back over many years."

So, are you saying you cherrypicked your battlefield on the basis that Saddam was uncooperative?

Despite his strong linkage of the Iraq campaign to the Sept. 11 attacks, Blair denied that the decision to go to war had been fixed long before it was carried out. He said the so-called "Downing Street memos," which suggest the Bush administration had made up it mind to invade by 2002, painted a distorted picture.

"People say the decision was already taken. The decision was not already taken," he said.

Oh? So that meeting you had in July 2002 really blew chunks, huh? Dearlove was full of it, and the young pup Rycroft taking minutes did a terrible job when he wrote "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

Boy, who are these people briefing you, and why haven't they been fired for grossly misrepresenting the situation to you?


BBA | After Downing Street