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Tag: Saddam Hussein

  • George W Bush memoirs: foreign powers and Tony Blair

    George W Bush memoirs: foreign powers and Tony Blair

    Cowboy Bush and Wse BlairGeorge W Bush, the former US president, has launched his memoirs and given a series of interviews, which provide fascinating insights into his views on foreign powers, among them Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister.

    By Andy Bloxham

    On Tony Blair:

    He compared Mr Blair to Winston Churchill and disclosed that, on the eve of the war in Iraq, the British PM was willing to risk bringing down the Government to push through a vital vote. He cites Mr Blair’s “wisdom and his strategic thinking as the prime minister of a strong and important ally”, adding: “I admire that kind of courage. People get caught up in all the conventional wisdom, but some day history will reward that kind of political courage.”

    On British and European public opinion:

    The former president was frank about the lack of weight he attached to how he was thought of in the UK both while he was in power and since he left it, saying: “It doesn’t matter how people perceive me in England. It just doesn’t matter any more. And frankly, at times, it didn’t matter then.” He said: “People in Europe said: “Ah, man, he’s a religious fanatic, cowboy, simpleton.” All that stuff… If you believe that freedom is universal, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people take courageous measures to live in a free society.”

    On Saddam:

    “There were things we got wrong in Iraq but that cause is eternally right,” he said. “People forget he was an enemy, he had invaded countries, everybody thought he had weapons of mass destruction, it became clear that he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction. What would life be like if Saddam Hussein were [still] in power? It is likely you would be seeing a nuclear arms race.” He also adds that Saddam disclosed his reasons for pretending to have WMDs when he could have avoided war were because “he was more worried about looking weak to Iran than being removed by the coalition.”

    On Afghanistan:

    “Our government was not prepared for nation building. Over time, we adapted our stratedy and our capabilities. Still, the poverty in Afghanistan is so deep, and the infrastructure so lacking, that it will take many years to complete the work.”

    On Iran:

    “A government not of the people is never capable of being held to account for human rights violations. Iran will be better served if there is an Iranian-style democracy. They play like they’ve got elections but they’ve got a handful of clerics who decide who runs it.”

    On China:

    He believes its internal politics will stop it being a superpower economy to rival the US for many years. “China, no question, is an emerging economy. China has plenty of internal problems which means that, in my judgment, they are not hegemonistic. They will be seeking raw materials.”

    On Syria:

    Mr Bush recounts an incident when Israel’s then-prime minister Ehud Olmert called him to ask him to bomb what Mossad agents had discovered was a secret nuclear facility in Syria. He said no but Israel destroyed it without warning him. Telling the story appears to signal his displeasure at not being told.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8119227/George-W-Bush-memoirs-foreign-powers-and-Tony-Blair.html, 09 Nov 2010

  • 45-minute WMD claim ‘came from an Iraqi taxi driver’

    45-minute WMD claim ‘came from an Iraqi taxi driver’

    Tory MP and defence specialist Adam Holloway says MI6 got information from a taxi driver who had heard Iraqi military commanders talking about weapons

    Straw

    An Iraqi taxi driver was the source of the discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a Tory MP claimed today.

    Adam Holloway, a defence specialist, said MI6 obtained the information indirectly from a taxi driver who had overheard two Iraqi militarycommanders talking about Saddam’s weapons.

    The 45-minute claim was a key feature of the dossier about Iraq‘s weapons of mass destruction that was released by Tony Blair in September 2002. Blair published the information to bolster public support for war.

    After the war the dossier became hugely controversial when it became clear that some of the information it contained was not true. An inquiry headed by Lord Butler into the use of intelligence in the run-up to the war revealed that MI6 had subsequently accepted that some of its Iraqi sources were unreliable, but his report did not identify who they were.

    Today, in an interview with the Daily Mail, Holloway said the key piece of information about 45 minutes came from an Iraqi officer who was using a taxi driver as his own sub-source.

    “[MI6] were running a senior Iraqi army officer who had a source of his own, a cab driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border,” said Holloway, a former Grenadier Guardsman and television journalist.

    “He apparently overheard two Iraqi army officers two years before who had spoken about weapons with the range to hit targets elsewhere in the Middle East.”

    Holloway made his comments to coincide with the publication of a report he has written claiming that MI6 always had reservations about some of the information in the dossier but that these reservations were brushed aside when Downing Street was preparing it for publication.

    According to the Mail, Holloway says in his report: “Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD case, [MI6] were squeezing their agents in Iraq for anything at all.

    “In the [MI6] analysts’ footnote to their report, it flagged up that part of the report describing some missiles that the Iraqi government allegedly possessed was demonstrably untrue. The missiles verifiably did not exist.

    “The footnote said it in black and white. Despite this the report was treated as reliable and went on to become one of the central planks of the dodgy dossier.”

    Holloway claims that MI6 was not to blame for the fact that the footnote was ignored. “It seems that someone, perhaps in Downing Street, found it rather inconvenient and ignored it lest it interfere with our reasons for going to war,” his report says.

    The report is due to be published on the first defence website.

    Butler concluded that, although the claims in the Iraq dossier went to the “outer limits” of what the intelligence available at the time would sustain, there was no evidence of “deliberate distortion”.

    Today Sir John Scarlett, the key figure responsible for the preparation of the dossier, will give evidence to the Iraq inquiry. Scarlett was chairman of the joint intelligence committee at the time and he went on to become head of MI6.

    He is expected to be asked about the dossier, although he is unlikely to provide detailed information about MI6 sources in public. The inquiry has said that, if witnesses want to discuss confidential issues relating to national security, they can do so in private.

    The September dossier did not specify what weapons Iraq could deploy within 45 minutes. Intelligence officials subsequently revealed that it was meant to be a reference to battlefield weapons, not long-range missiles.

    But, when it was published, some British papers interpreted the dossier as meaning that British troops based in Cyprus would be vulnerable to an Iraqi attack. At the time the government did not do anything to correct this error.

    Guardian