General Discussion

deminks

(11,014 posts) Thu Jul 7, 2016, 11:35 AM Jul 2016

Blair to Bush: "If we win quickly, everyone will be our friend"

https://theintercept.com/2016/07/06/chilcot-report-tony-blair-told-george-w-bush-if-we-win-quickly-everyone-will-be-our-friend/

(snip)

Consider this July 28, 2002, letter from Blair to George W. Bush. The first thing you’ll notice is its tone: It sounds like an adult trying to placate a heavily armed 8-year-old. “I will be with you, whatever,” Blair writes. “Getting rid of Saddam is the right thing to do.” But, he writes, “Suppose it got militarily tricky.” And suppose “the Iraqis feel ambivalent about being invaded.” Blair suggests Bush not go it alone. “If we win quickly, everyone will be our friend.”

Chillingly naïve stuff. But the most important thing about Blair’s letter is that it’s clearly a response to a British cabinet meeting memorialized in the famous “Downing Street Memo” of July 23, 2002, which was authored just five days before Blair wrote to Bush.

The Downing Street Memo, sometimes called the “smoking gun” document of the Iraq war, was leaked to the U.K.’s Sunday Times in 2005 (and the original has now been declassified as part of the Chilcot Report).

(snip)

So the Blair letter is, among other things, the final proof of the seriousness of the Downing Street Memo, which, if you recall, the mainstream U.S. media ignored and mocked when it was leaked. The memo did not record meaningless D.C. gossip, as pundit Michael Kinsley suggested when it was published in 2005. Instead it was the basis for the most crucial communication possible between the U.S. president and the U.K. prime minister.

(end snip)

So, where is the American "press"? Sitting with their thumbs up their bums watching the freak show in Congress with meaningless investigations.