The moronic monkey’s defenders have insisted forever that “September 11 changed everything.” According to them, the terrorist attacks meant that Chimpy could not afford to take any more chances that Saddam might have those weapons that everybody and their brother knew he didn’t have.

It’s a cute theory, with only one (other) little flaw.

Chimpy wanted to attack Iraq from day 1 of the Reign of Error. And his “poodle,” “Phony Tony” Blair, knew it.

According to this article, Blair resisted at first, but finally succumbed to the demands of his monkey boss.

Tony Blair’s government knew that prominent members of the Bush administration wanted to topple Saddam Hussein years before the invasion but initially distanced itself from the prospect knowing it would be unlawful, it was disclosed at the Iraq inquiry today.

British intelligence also dismissed claims by elements in the US administration that the Iraqi leader was linked to Osama bin Laden, it heard.

Evidence given at the opening day of the inquiry, chaired by the former top civil servant Sir John Chilcot, painted a picture of a Whitehall slowly realising the significance of George Bush’s election in November 2000 on US policy towards Iraq.

Even before the Bush administration came to power an article written by his then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, warned that “nothing will change” in Iraq until Saddam was gone, Sir Peter Ricketts, a former chairman of the joint intelligence committee (JIC) and now the Foreign Office’s top official, told the inquiry.

“We were aware of these drumbeats from Washington and internally we discussed it. Our policy was to stay away from that part of the spectrum,” added Sir William Patey, then head of the Middle East department at the Foreign Office.

He revealed that in late 2001 – following the 9/11 attacks on the US – he asked officials at the ministry to draw up an Iraq “options” paper, including regime change. “We dismissed it at the time because it had no basis in law,” Patey told the inquiry.

“We quite clearly distanced ourselves in Whitehall from talk about regime change,” said Ricketts. Up to March 2002 “there was no increased appetite among UK ministers for military action in Iraq,” he added.

Simon Webb, a former policy director at the Ministry of Defence, who also gave evidence today, described the issue of regime change in Iraq during the early days of the Bush administration as “the dog that did not bark. It grizzled, but it did not bark”.

The exchanges on opening day of the inquiry are significant in the light of previously leaked documents which reveal that Blair told Bush in April 2002 – nearly a year before the invasion of Iraq – that he would in principle support military action “to bring about regime change”.

A month earlier, David Manning, Downing Street foreign policy adviser at the time, told Blair that he had advised Rice: “You [Blair] would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a parliament, and a public opinion which is very different than anything in the States.”

Yet in July 2002, Lord Goldsmith, then attorney general, was still warning the government that regime change was “not a legal basis for military action”, according to leaked documents.

They didn’t need any legal basis for acting, because Chimpy gots Jesus sitting up on his sholder, and Jesus done told him to get rid of Saddam.

All the lives and money we’ve pissed away in Iraq, for nothing but Chimpy’s attempt at manliness, and Cheney’s profiteering. here were Beck, Malkin, Bachmann, and the rest of the “Freedom!” scum while this was going on?

Tags: blair, bush, iraq, lies, rushpubliscums

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Chimpy's Glorious Oedipal Crusade on Iraq, Jolly Roger. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.