Chilcot under pressure to report after leaked Blair-Bush Iraq memo

The controversy over Tony Blair’s decision to back George Bush over the Iraq war has been rekindled after a memo emerged showing the Prime Minister pledged to support an invasion a year ahead of the conflict. Newly released information indicates that then-President George W. Bush had reached a secret deal with British Prime Minister Tony Blair to invade Iraq – almost a year before the invasion took place.

The memos make clear that the Americans wanted to capitalise on the popularity of Tony Blair at the time.

“On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary”, wrote Mr Powell, in a document the Mail on Sunday published on its website.

In 2002, when the memo was sent, Blair’s public position was to find a diplomatic solution rather than use military force in response to what was going on in Iraq.

The Labour peer’s move, which will be debated in the Lords this week, will increase the pressure on Chilcot to expedite the publication of the results of his inquiry, which was set up by Gordon Brown in 2009.

The note from in March 2002 tells Bush that Blair would “present to you the strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause”.

At the time he told voters that Britain was “not proposing military action”, a claim contradicted by the memo, which was leaked to the Mail on Sunday newspaper. It also reveals Blair’s collusion with the Department of Defense in fabricating and selling the “evidence” which convinced America that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction (it didn’t) and that they were involved in 9/11 and planning to strike America again (they weren’t).

But within weeks of his meeting at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas in April 2002, to which the Powell memo refers, details of what the two leaders had privately agreed were leaking into the public domain.

Prime Minister David Cameron has joined other politicians in arguing that the panel has had enough time and that it should wrap up its work.

SNP MP Alex Salmond said the memo was “extremely damaging” for Mr Blair.

The delay in publishing Chilcot has been nothing short of scandalous; but the idea that when the report does eventually see the light of day it will not tell the full story is even more so. He was trying 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.

Meanwhile, there are speculations that Chilcot might be asked to step down as chairman of the inquiry commission.