Originally published July 3 2005
Memos detail early plans for invading Iraq
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The "Downing street memo," dated March 2002, describes U.S. and British intentions to invade Iraq eight months before any justification was found.
In March 2002, the Bush administration had just begun to publicly raise the possibility of confronting Iraq.
Foreshadowing developments in the year before the war started, British officials emphasized the importance of U.N. diplomacy, which they said might force Saddam Hussein into a misstep.
They also suggested that confronting the Iraqi leader be cast as an effort to prevent him from using weapons of mass destruction or giving them to terrorists.
President Bush and his main ally in the war, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, have long maintained that they had not made up their minds to go to war at that stage.
Publication of the Downing Street memo at the height of Britain's election campaign at first garnered little notice in U.S. media or other British newspapers.
But in the weeks that followed, anger has grown among war critics, who contend that the document proves the Bush administration had already decided on military action, even while U.S. officials were saying that war was a last resort.
Condoleezza Rice, the current secretary of State who was then Bush's national security advisor, was described as enthusiastic about "regime change."
Although British officials said in the documents that they did not think Iraq's weapons programs posed an immediate threat and that they were dubious of any claimed links between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda, they indicated that they were willing to join in a campaign to topple Hussein as long as the plan would succeed and was handled with political and legal care.
I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was different from anything in the States.
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