Live from Austin!

The families of British servicemen killed in Iraq are launching a new political party. They plan to run candidates against Labour MPs who voted for the war, in as many local elections as possible. Their message is simple: The bastards lied to us, we proved they lied to us, we want them out.

Which is all very admirable, but unfortunately they’ve decided to call the party Spectre, which is making it a bit hard for me to take them seriously. I haven’t seen any photos of Reg Keys sitting in a revolving chair petting a fluffy white cat, but I’m sure Photoshop artists are working on it even as I type this.

Perhaps they could consider renaming the party to, say, Smersh. Or The Alan Parsons Project. Or Preparation-H.

I’m sure there are some people who still doubt that Bush decided to attack Iraq immediately after 9/11, in spite of the fact that the 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabian and Iraq had nothing to do with it at all. So:

PRESIDENT George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001.

According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after the strikes using hijacked jets, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror’s initial goal—dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Meyer claims Bush replied: ‘I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.’ Regime change was already US policy.

It was clear, Meyer says, ‘that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn’t be to discuss smarter sanctions’. Elsewhere in his interview, Meyer says Blair always believed it was unlikely that Saddam would be removed from power or give up his weapons of mass destruction without a war.

Faced with this prospect of a further war, he adds, Blair ‘said nothing to demur’.

Details of this extraordinary conversation will be published this week in a 25,000-word article on the path to war with Iraq in the May issue of the American magazine Vanity Fair. It provides new corroboration of the claims made last month in a book by Bush’s former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, that Bush was ‘obsessed’ with Iraq as his principal target after 9/11.

—Observer

From the Bush-Blair press conference:

Questioner: One question for you both: Do you believe that there is a link between Saddam Hussein, a direct link, and the men who attacked on September 11?

Bush: [Mumbling off-mike] … make that claim.

Blair: I think that answers your question.