Britain's Tony Blair may have swung behind US calls for regime change in Iraq after meeting President George W. Bush at his Texas ranch in 2002, a top diplomat told an inquiry into the war on Thursday.
Christopher Meyer, then Britain's ambassador to Washington, said Blair's line seemed to harden following talks at the Crawford ranch in April 2002, much of which were held in private with no advisors present. He also detailed the warm personal relationship between the British prime minister and US president, saying Bush could talk to Blair but saw other world leaders as "like creatures from outer space". Blair strongly backed Bush, taking Britain into the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 despite lack of UN Security Council approval. He resigned in 2007, partly due to the unpopularity of the Iraq war.
The probe heard that toppling Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was not an early priority for Bush. Even after the September 11, 2001 attacks by Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, Saddam was merely a footnote.
Meyer, ambassador to the United States from 1997 to 2003, said he was "not entirely clear what degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford ranch."
But the day after, Blair made a speech in which he publicly mentioned regime change for the first time. "What he was trying to do was to draw the lessons of 9/11 and apply them to the situation in Iraq which led - I think not inadvertently but deliberately - to a conflation of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
Britain was still, though, encouraging Washington to act with the approval of the UN Security Council, Meyer said. There was, though, a "fault line" emerging in the Bush administration between Secretary of State Colin Powell on one side and Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the other.
The inquiry, Britain's third related to the conflict, is looking at Britain's role in Iraq between 2001 and 2009, when nearly all its troops withdrew. It will report by the end of 2010. Blair will give evidence in January.
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