Sir Christopher Meyer watched Tony Blair's courtship of George Bush while working as the British ambassador to the US, during the war. He talks about the special relationship between the two.
09 Mar 2013 - On a Sunday morning in November 1997, less than two days after I had arrived in Washington to take up the job of ambassador, I received an urgent call from Tom Pickering, one of the State Department’s most senior officials.
Saddam Hussein, Pickering said, was once again defying the United Nations inspectors whose job it was to ensure that the Iraqi dictator was not concealing weapons of mass destruction. Would I come to his office the following morning to discuss what was to be done?
From then on, Iraq was to run like a toxic stream through my time in the United States. It seems now almost inevitable that, after Saddam’s defeat in the first Gulf war of 1991, when he was left wounded but still in power, there would have to be one day a settling of accounts between him and the Americans. Within a year of Pickering’s call, “regime change” – the removal of Saddam – became official US policy. read more>>>
Mar 10, 2013 - Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair and his government have come under withering attack from a senior former diplomat and military chiefs for their handling of the war that defined his decade in power.
Blair is accused of being "evangelical" in his approach to the world and hence to toppling Saddam Hussein's regime; of being so determined to support President George W Bush that he imposed no preconditions for Britain going to war alongside the United States, and of mistakes which led to British forces being ill-prepared for the invasion and caught out by the violent aftermath. read more>>>
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