Blair gave secret promise to Bush over Iraq invasion: report

Tony Blair promised George Bush that Britain would support military action by the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein in a series of secret notes written a year before the invasion of Iraq.
The content of the notes was revealed yesterday by Mr Blairs former spokesman, Alastair Campbell.
The Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war was electrified by the appearance of Mr Campbell, who disclosed details of the highly sensitive correspondence in a defiant defence of his former boss.
On three separate occasions Mr Campbell spoke of his pride at the way in which the events unfolded.
As a country we should feel incredibly proud of the role we played in getting rid of one of the most brutal regimes in history, he said.
Mr Campbell prepared the ground for the eagerly awaited appearance of Mr Blair at the end of this month with an unrepentant and combative justification of the Iraq conflict, which claimed 179 British lives. The former spin doctor said that he was proud of the part he played in the most controversial act of Mr Blairs premiership.
In a tense five-hour encounter with the five-member inquiry, Mr Campbell placed Gordon Brown, then the Chancellor, at the heart of an inner circle of key ministers and advisers whom he consulted in private on Iraq.
But in the most dramatic revelation, he said that Mr Blair sent notes to President Bush so sensitive that they were not shown in advance even to senior members of the Cabinet. I sometimes felt that they were quite advisory, he said of the letters to Mr Bush. They were very frank.
He insisted that despite Mr Blairs instinct that he should be with the US, he remained committed to finding a diplomatic resolution right up to the eve of the invasion in March 2003.
He also revealed that, before attending a meeting with President Bush in April 2002, Mr Blair had asked military chiefs to consider the options for a US invasion of Iraq and how then to run the country.
Mr Campbell denied that Mr Blair had misled Parliament by claiming that there was evidence that Saddam had a growing programme of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). He also rejected accusations that he was responsible for sexing up a government dossier of intelligence on the Iraqi WMDs but accepted that the controversial claim that they could have been deployed within 45 minutes could have been clearer.
He described the September 2002 dossier as a cautious assessment and insisted that it had not been designed to present the case for war but to highlight why Mr Blair was concerned about the threat posed by Iraq. I think the Prime Minister all the way through was trying to get it resolved without a single shot being fired.
He said that he was never in doubt that Iraq would be found to have WMDs and the realisation after the invasion that Saddam did not have any operational chemical or biological weapons was very difficult.
The inquiry was told that Mr Blair wrote a series of private notes to President Bush about overthrowing Saddam that were only seen in advance by his foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning. Mr Campbell said that he assumed that Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was shown the letters later. But as for whether Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, was sent a copy, he said: That would depend.
The Prime Minister wrote quite a lot of notes to the President, he said. I would say the tenor of them was that . . . we share the analysis, we share the concern, we are going to be with you in making sure that Saddam Hussein is faced up to his obligations and that Iraq is disarmed. If that cannot be done diplomatically and it is to be done militarily, Britain will be there. That would be the tenor of the communication to the President.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the Tory former Foreign Secretary who opposed the invasion, said that the content of the letters should be made public.
Mr Campbell vigorously defended the part that he played in drawing up the dossier. He denied asking Sir John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, to beef up the evidence. He said that Clare Short, the International Development Secretary, was excluded from planning for the aftermath of the conflict because of fears that highly sensitive information might be leaked to the media. (Times Online)