I thought the phrase "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" was familiar; it was in fact
reported by the BBC back in March, in a programme that looked at the whole timeline for the buildup to the Iraq invasion. They didn't give the full text of the July 2002 memo, but did quote the most interesting bits. There's a full transcript
here (unfortunately it's a plain text file, so you have to scroll a long way right to read it all). The timeline is set out, with lots of quotes,
here (that page was last updated on 29th April, 2005 - ie just before the Sunday Times published the full July 2002 memo). Much of this is based on documents leaked to the
Telegraph in September 2004.
14 March 2002
We spent a long time at dinner (with "Condi") on IRAQ. It is clear that Bush is grateful for your support and has registered that you are getting flak. I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States. And you would not budge either in your insistence that, if we pursued regime change, it must be very carefully done and produce the right result. Failure was not an option.
David Manning (senior foreign policy advisor) to the Prime Minister, marked "Secret - Strictly Personal"
-----------------------------------------------
18 March 2002 (British ambassador in Washington having Sunday lunch with Paul Wolfowitz)
On Iraq I opened by sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice last week. We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe. The US could go it alone if it wanted to. But if it wanted to act with partners, there had to be a strategy for building support for military action against Saddam. I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UN SCRs (Security Council Resolutions) and the critical importance of the MEPP (Middle East Peace Process) as an integral part of the anti-Saddam strategy.
Christopher Meyer to Sir David Manning, marked "Confidential and Personal"
From the Telegraph:
Peter Ricketts, Foreign Office policy director, to the Foreign Secretary in a confidential memo dated Friday, March 22:
The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programmes, but our tolerance of them post-11 September. I am relieved that you decided to postpone publication of the unclassified document.
...
But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or chemical weapons/biological weapons fronts: the programmes are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.
US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qa'eda is so far frankly unconvincing.
To get public and Parliamentary support for military options we have to be convincing that the threat is so serious/imminent that it is worth sending our troops to die for.
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