Downing Street secrets

MAYBE NOT A smoking gun, but this is surely another piece in the jigsaw puzzle.

The so-called Downing Street memos, which have been roiling Washington and London since the first one was published by The Times of London on May 1, can be interpreted in more than one way. They do not quite damn the Bush administration to perdition, as Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and other congressional Democrats had been hoping to show at a public hearing held in the US Capitol on Thursday, but then nor do they bring much joy to the White House.

In the first memo, minutes of a meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and some of his aides on July 23, 2002, recent meetings in Washington between the head of British foreign intelligence and various American officials are summarized. ''There was a perceptible shift in attitude," the memo reads. ''Military action was now seen as inevitable. 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 second memo is a briefing paper for Blair and his advisers written two days earlier (and published in The Times last weekend). It demonstrates concern both with the Bush administration's justification of the war and what they perceived as its lack of postwar planning. ''. . . The US military plans are virtually silent on this point," the memo reads. ''Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden."

What the memos do show clearly is the difference between Downing Street and the White House, with London taking a back seat as the war is prepared (and the ostensible reasons for it are rehearsed) but feeling much more apprehensive about the likely consequences after a military operation.

They also further explain Tony Blair's conduct and motives over the Iraq war - and cast a strange light on the so-called ''special relationship" between Washington and London. Anyone on the eastern side of the Atlantic - and maybe on the western side as well - who reads these memos must wonder what future that relationship has, if, indeed, it had much of a past.

. . .

Both memos were written after Blair's April visit to the president in Crawford, Texas, and less than three months before the September parliamentary session where Blair spoke of a conflict that was still not inevitable, he maintained, although it looked very likely. By contrast with the first leaked memo, which suggested that a decision to invade Iraq had already been made that summer, the second memo says that at that point ''no political decision" for an invasion had been made, words which have been seized on in vindication by defenders of the Bush-Blair axis. But the pattern of events seems clear enough.

In the summer of 2002 Downing Street knew, of course, what was generally recognized in both the British and the American press at the time - that American preparations for war were then far advanced - and to say that no precise decision for war had then been taken looks pretty much like a distinction without a difference. Nor are any bugging devices down on the ranch in Crawford needed to surmise the exchanges between the president and prime minister.

Whether or not Bush then told Blair in plain terms that a decision to invade had definitively been made, he had already told him immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks (as Sir Christopher Meyer, British ambassador in Washington at the time, has since recorded) that ''when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq" - something which was not vouchsafed to the British (or American) people at the time.

And yet what does seem quite certain is that at Crawford, as well as before and after, Blair told Bush that he could count on his unswerving support whatever decision was taken. Blair has even explained his rationale for this several times, though only to trusted journalistic interlocutors rather than in Parliament, where he would have to defend it.

As the war was beginning in March 2003, he told Peter Stothard, a former editor of the London Times, that the White House was set on war, and he believed that ''it would be more damaging to long-term world peace and security if the Americans alone defeated Saddam Hussein than if they had international support to do so." He had earlier told Philip Stephens of the Financial Times of his fear that Washington would throw off all constraints in the unilateral pursuit of its enemies, and that his mission was to get up close enough to Bush to ''keep the United States in the international system."

Not that this doctrine of effectively unconditional support for America is all Blair's own work. In recent years, you could hear it argued in the Foreign Office that our country's remaining, self-abnegating role is to support Washington at all times simply to show that the Americans are not alone. There are echoes there of Harold Macmillan, the prime minister from 1957 to '63, who liked to say of the Americans that ''we are the Greeks to their Romans." This was really a kind of patronizing national vanity (we worldly sophisticates will educate and guide the raw young barbarians across the ocean), and for all his Classical education Macmillan had forgotten that those wise Greek mentors in Roman households were in fact slaves.

Still, this doctrine does mark a drastic turn in British policy. A glance back at history, from 1776 to 1812 to 1895 (when the two countries very nearly went to war again as Grover Cleveland rattled his saber over a footling border dispute in South America), shows that Britain and the United States have by no means always been intimate buddies.

The years 1941 to '45 were the foundation of the ''special relationship" - as reality and as myth - and the wartime alliance was reaffirmed when NATO was born in 1949 and British troops went to fight in Korea. And yet even during the heyday of the Atlantic Alliance, outside of the Europe which NATO existed to protect the United States and Great Britain were very far from automatically backing each other's every venture.

In 1956 you Americans did not support England in the Suez adventure (and you were right). A decade later we British did not support America in Vietnam (and we were right). However plausible Blair's arguments for giving armed support in Iraq may seem to him, they would have been just as plausible in the case of Vietnam. The Johnson administration badly wanted British troops there (''just one battalion of the Black Watch," Dean Rusk said), not for military reasons but to show that America led what might have been called a coalition of the willing.

The truth - which the Downing Street Memos illuminate with painful clarity - is that all along this ''special relationship" was painfully unequal and one-sided, not to say (as one wag here has) that it was special mainly in that only one party knew it existed, ''and relationships don't come more special than that." What we have now surely seen in Iraq is in truth the nemesis of the special relationship.

Looked at coolly, there is something very curious about Blair's argument that it would be more dangerous if the Americans were seen to act alone. Either Washington was doing something wise and virtuous, in which case it should have been supported for that reason, or it wasn't, in which case a true friend would have counseled caution. ''My country right or wrong" is bad enough, but ''their country right or wrong" is barely sane. As to binding the present administration into the international system, judge for yourself.

In this month's bitter disputes among the members of the European Union, especially between London and Paris, there has been a tendency, not only in his own country, to say that Blair has won the latest round with President Jacques Chirac. But has he won anything at all in his dealings with President George Bush?

At a joint press conference with Bush in Washington on June 7, when asked about the passage in the first memo stating that ''facts were being fixed round the policy" Blair again defiantly insisted that ''the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form." What he has now learned in the valleys of Mesopotamia is that there are some facts that simply cannot be fixed, even by the most persuasive of politicians.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His books include ''The Controversy of Zion" and, most recently, ''The Strange Death of Tory England."MAYBE NOT A smoking gun, but this is surely another piece in the jigsaw puzzle.

The so-called Downing Street memos, which have been roiling Washington and London since the first one was published by The Times of London on May 1, can be interpreted in more than one way. They do not quite damn the Bush administration to perdition, as Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and other congressional Democrats had been hoping to show at a public hearing held in the US Capitol on Thursday, but then nor do they bring much joy to the White House.

In the first memo, minutes of a meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and some of his aides on July 23, 2002, recent meetings in Washington between the head of British foreign intelligence and various American officials are summarized. ''There was a perceptible shift in attitude," the memo reads. ''Military action was now seen as inevitable. 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 second memo is a briefing paper for Blair and his advisers written two days earlier (and published in The Times last weekend). It demonstrates concern both with the Bush administration's justification of the war and what they perceived as its lack of postwar planning. ''. . . The US military plans are virtually silent on this point," the memo reads. ''Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden."

What the memos do show clearly is the difference between Downing Street and the White House, with London taking a back seat as the war is prepared (and the ostensible reasons for it are rehearsed) but feeling much more apprehensive about the likely consequences after a military operation.

They also further explain Tony Blair's conduct and motives over the Iraq war - and cast a strange light on the so-called ''special relationship" between Washington and London. Anyone on the eastern side of the Atlantic - and maybe on the western side as well - who reads these memos must wonder what future that relationship has, if, indeed, it had much of a past.

. . .

Both memos were written after Blair's April visit to the president in Crawford, Texas, and less than three months before the September parliamentary session where Blair spoke of a conflict that was still not inevitable, he maintained, although it looked very likely. By contrast with the first leaked memo, which suggested that a decision to invade Iraq had already been made that summer, the second memo says that at that point ''no political decision" for an invasion had been made, words which have been seized on in vindication by defenders of the Bush-Blair axis. But the pattern of events seems clear enough.

In the summer of 2002 Downing Street knew, of course, what was generally recognized in both the British and the American press at the time - that American preparations for war were then far advanced - and to say that no precise decision for war had then been taken looks pretty much like a distinction without a difference. Nor are any bugging devices down on the ranch in Crawford needed to surmise the exchanges between the president and prime minister.

Whether or not Bush then told Blair in plain terms that a decision to invade had definitively been made, he had already told him immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks (as Sir Christopher Meyer, British ambassador in Washington at the time, has since recorded) that ''when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq" - something which was not vouchsafed to the British (or American) people at the time.

And yet what does seem quite certain is that at Crawford, as well as before and after, Blair told Bush that he could count on his unswerving support whatever decision was taken. Blair has even explained his rationale for this several times, though only to trusted journalistic interlocutors rather than in Parliament, where he would have to defend it.

As the war was beginning in March 2003, he told Peter Stothard, a former editor of the London Times, that the White House was set on war, and he believed that ''it would be more damaging to long-term world peace and security if the Americans alone defeated Saddam Hussein than if they had international support to do so." He had earlier told Philip Stephens of the Financial Times of his fear that Washington would throw off all constraints in the unilateral pursuit of its enemies, and that his mission was to get up close enough to Bush to ''keep the United States in the international system."

Not that this doctrine of effectively unconditional support for America is all Blair's own work. In recent years, you could hear it argued in the Foreign Office that our country's remaining, self-abnegating role is to support Washington at all times simply to show that the Americans are not alone. There are echoes there of Harold Macmillan, the prime minister from 1957 to '63, who liked to say of the Americans that ''we are the Greeks to their Romans." This was really a kind of patronizing national vanity (we worldly sophisticates will educate and guide the raw young barbarians across the ocean), and for all his Classical education Macmillan had forgotten that those wise Greek mentors in Roman households were in fact slaves.

Still, this doctrine does mark a drastic turn in British policy. A glance back at history, from 1776 to 1812 to 1895 (when the two countries very nearly went to war again as Grover Cleveland rattled his saber over a footling border dispute in South America), shows that Britain and the United States have by no means always been intimate buddies.

The years 1941 to '45 were the foundation of the ''special relationship" - as reality and as myth - and the wartime alliance was reaffirmed when NATO was born in 1949 and British troops went to fight in Korea. And yet even during the heyday of the Atlantic Alliance, outside of the Europe which NATO existed to protect the United States and Great Britain were very far from automatically backing each other's every venture.

In 1956 you Americans did not support England in the Suez adventure (and you were right). A decade later we British did not support America in Vietnam (and we were right). However plausible Blair's arguments for giving armed support in Iraq may seem to him, they would have been just as plausible in the case of Vietnam. The Johnson administration badly wanted British troops there (''just one battalion of the Black Watch," Dean Rusk said), not for military reasons but to show that America led what might have been called a coalition of the willing.

The truth - which the Downing Street Memos illuminate with painful clarity - is that all along this ''special relationship" was painfully unequal and one-sided, not to say (as one wag here has) that it was special mainly in that only one party knew it existed, ''and relationships don't come more special than that." What we have now surely seen in Iraq is in truth the nemesis of the special relationship.

Looked at coolly, there is something very curious about Blair's argument that it would be more dangerous if the Americans were seen to act alone. Either Washington was doing something wise and virtuous, in which case it should have been supported for that reason, or it wasn't, in which case a true friend would have counseled caution. ''My country right or wrong" is bad enough, but ''their country right or wrong" is barely sane. As to binding the present administration into the international system, judge for yourself.

In this month's bitter disputes among the members of the European Union, especially between London and Paris, there has been a tendency, not only in his own country, to say that Blair has won the latest round with President Jacques Chirac. But has he won anything at all in his dealings with President George Bush?

At a joint press conference with Bush in Washington on June 7, when asked about the passage in the first memo stating that ''facts were being fixed round the policy" Blair again defiantly insisted that ''the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form." What he has now learned in the valleys of Mesopotamia is that there are some facts that simply cannot be fixed, even by the most persuasive of politicians.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His books include ''The Controversy of Zion" and, most recently, ''The Strange Death of Tory England."