The New York Times has
more details from a top secret January 31, 2003 Downing Street memo that the Guardian
first reported on a month ago.
DowningStreetMemo.com has more details on previous related memos from before the invasion, including the full text of several. The new five page document obtained by the Times describes a meeting between Bush and Blair which took place five days before Colin Powell made his famous presentation to the United Nations on Iraqi WMD. The memo makes it clear that military action would go forward,
whether the WMD pitch sold or not:
"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."
At one point, the memo describes UN support as "an insurance policy" and lists three options to bypass the UN:
1-Provoking Saddam into shooting down a UN spy plane
2-Bringing out a new defector to describe Saddam's WMD
3-Assassinating Saddam Hussein
More quotes from the memo below. You can also get the context of the January 2003 timeframe here.
Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.
"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."
It also described the president as saying, "The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's W.M.D," referring to weapons of mass destruction.
A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.
The difference between how the White House saw the Iraq War and how they presented it to the American people gets clearer every day.