Blair 'double-crossed' by Bush over Iraq war
Former US Ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson claimed Thursday British Prime Minister Tony Blair had been "double- crossed" by President George Bush's aides in the run-up to the Iraq war. "Mr Blair came to the US when Mr Bush was talking about regime change, and when he left Mr Bush started talking about disarmament as the objective," Wilson said. "I think, at the end of the day, he was double-crossed by the regime change crowd in Washington," he told BBC Radio Four's Today programme.
Wilson, who was acting ambassador to Baghdad in the run-up to the 1991 Iraq war, has claimed that the outing of his wife Valerie Plame as a CIA agent in July 2003, was an attempt by the White House to smear him after he said Iraq intelligence was twisted. He said that he had watched the way that the British built their disarmament case and believed it had a lot to do with the influence that led Bush to go to the UN before the Iraq war. "I think that Mr Blair really thought that he was getting involved in a disarmament campaign," but that the president and his administration had already come to a decision that it wanted to go to war with Iraq, the former ambassador said.
Britain's Attorney General Lord Goldsmith was warning that fresh revelations about disputes between Blair and Bush on the Iraq conflict could damage UK relations with the US administration.
Goldsmith was said to had "read the riot act" to the media on Wednesday because of the political embarrassment caused by a sensitive leak of face-to-face exchanges between the prime minister and the US president in the White House on April 2004. Last week, a former MP's researcher and a civilian servant were charged under Britain's Official Secrets Act over a leaked Foreign Office memo criticizing the scale of the US assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja, in which up to 1,000 civilians were feared killed.
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