How the Leaked Documents Questioning War
Emerged
Sun Jun 26, 2005 17:45
64.140.158.96
How the Leaked Documents Questioning War Emerged from 'Britain's Deep
Throat'
By Michael Smith
The Sunday Times UK
Sunday 26 June 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1669292,00.html
It started with a phone call and has now swept across America: Michael Smith tells the tale of his 'Downing Street memo' scoop.
It began with a phone call from a friend nearly 10 months ago - somebody well-placed who had given me a few stories before. But he wasn't really a journalistic source, though he has now been dubbed "the British Deep Throat" by some of the US press.
He was just a friend. So I had no great expectations of the meeting we arranged in a quiet West End bar. I was just expecting a convivial drink, with the usual exchange of gossip, the catching-up on how our lives were going.
Almost immediately it was clear that this time it would be something more. The place was empty, but my friend chose the most secluded spot he could find. He was clearly nervous.
He wasn't sure if I'd be interested in what he had, he said. It was about the run-up to the war. "All the Butler stuff," he said, referring to Lord Butler, who had reported on the failures of intelligence over Iraq.
He thrust two sheets of paper into my hand. It was a "Secret - Strictly Personal" letter from Jack Straw to the prime minister written in March 2002, a year before the invasion.
In the letter the foreign secretary said there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any weapons of mass destruction worth talking about and that, in part as a result of a lack of US preparation, post-war Iraq was likely to become a very nasty place.
It was, in short, remarkably prescient and would make a pretty good story, I said, with some understatement. Well, I've got five others just like it from the same period, said my source. "Most say stuff just like that, or worse."
The documents covered the period running up to a summit between George W Bush and Tony Blair at the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, in early April 2002. At that time the swift victory against the Taliban in Afghanistan had left hawks in the US administration openly briefing that Iraq was next.
Most of the leaked documents were designed to brief ministers or Blair on whether backing the US plans to get rid of Saddam would be sensible and legal. They set out the merits and dangers of taking part. Their gist was that there weren't many merits. The documents made it pretty clear that it wasn't sensible, it wasn't legal and it was very risky.
The document that seemed to encapsulate the problems was another "Secret - Strictly Personal" letter to Blair. It was written by his foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning.
"I think there is a real risk that the (US) administration underestimates the difficulties," Manning wrote. "They may agree that failure isn't an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it."
When I reported these documents I was surprised to find that there was no real interest in them in America. The story swiftly died away.
Then eight months later, in the run-up to Britain's general election, with the focus on the attorney-general's advice to Blair on the legality of war, somebody else gave me further, even more startling documents. They concerned a meeting in Downing Street on July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion, when Blair was insisting to the public that all options on Iraq were still open.
One leaked document was a Cabinet Office briefing paper for a crucial Downing Street meeting held on the day in question. It said the prime minister had promised Bush at the Crawford summit that he would "back military action to bring about regime change". It added that ministers had no choice but to "create the conditions" that would make military action legal.
The other document was the minutes of the actual meeting, chaired by Blair and attended by Straw; Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary; Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general; Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6; John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee; and Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of defence staff.
Dearlove, who had just returned from Washington, said "military action was now seen as inevitable . . . the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action".
Straw agreed with Dearlove. He said Bush had "made up his mind to take military action. But the case was thin".
After reporting these secret memos, which revealed the dubious manoeuvrings of government, I expected the US press to react. Surely there would be a storm of anger over the way in which the American public had been deceived into going to war? But still there was no interest. Then slowly something astonishing happened. People power took over.
The Sunday Times website was inundated with ordinary US citizens wanting to read the minutes of the July meeting. Bloggers set to work passing the word.
Six ordinary, patriotic citizens with no political axe to grind were so outraged to discover the truth about the path to war that they set up their own website, naming it after the minutes, which had become known as the Downing Street memo.
The focus turned to what may ultimately be the most important part of the memo: the point where Hoon said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime".
Ministry of Defence figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that virtually none were used in March and April; but between May and August an average of 10 tons were dropped each month, with the RAF taking just as big a role in the "spikes of activity" as their US colleagues. Then in September the figure shot up again, with allied aircraft dropping 54.6 tons.
If this was a covert air war, both Bush and Blair may face searching questions. In America only Congress can declare war, and it did not give the US president permission to take military action against Iraq until October 11, 2002. Blair's legal justification is said to come from UN Resolution 1441, which was not passed until November 8, 2002.
Last week one US blogger, Larisa Alexandrovna of RawStory.com, unearthed more unsettling evidence. It was an overlooked interview with Lieutenant-General T Michael Moseley, the allied air commander in Iraq, in which he appears to admit that the "spikes of activity" were part of a covert air war.
From June 2002 until March 20, when the ground war began, the allies flew 21,736 sorties over southern Iraq, attacking 349 carefully selected targets. The attacks, Moseley said, "laid the foundations" for the invasion, allowing allied commanders to begin the ground war.
The bloggers may have found their own smoking gun.
======================================================
Downing Street Memos show U.S. push for war
Michael Smith, Reporter for London Times
on 'Hardball' MSNBC 06/20/05 8:45 pm MT
http://www.apfn.org/APFN/MEMO.HTM
British officials were worried about White House motives for invading Iraq, leaked documents indicate
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 19, 2005
LONDON - When Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn't want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about "regime change" in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.
President George W. Bush wanted Blair's support, but British officials worried that the White House was rushing to war, according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos that have renewed questions and debate about Washington's motives for ousting Saddam Hussein.
In one memo, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war. "U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts says in the memo. "For Iraq, 'regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam."
The documents confirm Blair was genuinely concerned about Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, but they also indicate he was determined to go to war as the United States' top ally, even though his government thought a pre-emptive attack might be illegal under international law.
"The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September," said a typed copy of a March 22, 2002, memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press and written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. "But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW [chemical or biological weapons] fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up."
Details from Rice's dinner conversation also are included in one of the secret memos from 2002, which reveal British concerns about both the invasion and poor postwar planning by the Bush administration, which critics say has allowed the Iraqi insurgency to rage. The eight memos - all labeled "secret" or "confidential" - were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. They are named after Blair's Downing Street office.
Smith told AP that he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.
The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said on condition of anonymity that their content appeared authentic.
Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert who teaches at Queen Mary College, University of London, said the documents confirmed what post-invasion investigations have found: "The case of weapons of mass destruction was based on thin intelligence and was used to inflate the evidence to the level of mendacity. In going to war with Bush, Blair defended the special relationship between the two countries, like other British leaders have. But he knew he was taking a huge political risk at home. He knew the war's legality was questionable and its unpopularity was never in doubt."
Dodge said the memos also confirm that "soon after 9/11 happened, the starting gun was fired for the invasion of Iraq."
Bush and Blair both have been criticized at home since their WMD claims about Iraq proved false. But both have been re-elected, defending the conflict for removing a brutal dictator and promoting democracy in Iraq. Both the Bush and the Blair administrations have dismissed the memos as old news.
Details of the memos ran in papers last month but news in Britain turned to the election that returned Blair to power. In the United States, however, details of the memos' contents reignited a firestorm, especially among Democratic critics of Bush.
In one memo - from Straw to Blair on March 25, 2002 - the foreign secretary said he would have a tough time convincing the governing Labour Party that a pre-emptive strike against Iraq was legal under international law. "If 11 September had not happened, it is doubtful that the U.S. would now be considering military action against Iraq," Straw wrote. "In addition, there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with OBL [Osama bin Laden] and al-Qaida."
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/politics/ny-wodown194311477jun19,0,2667618.story?coll=ny-lipolitics-print
=================================================================
When Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn't want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about "regime change" in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.
President Bush wanted Blair's support, but British officials worried the White House was rushing to war, according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos that have renewed questions and debate about Washington's motives for ousting Saddam Hussein.
In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war.
"U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts says in the memo. "For Iraq, `regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam."
The documents confirm Blair was genuinely concerned about Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, but also indicate he was determined to go to war as America's top ally, even though his government thought a pre-emptive attack may be illegal under international law.
"The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September," said a typed copy of a March 22, 2002 memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press and written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
"But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW (chemical or biological weapons) fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up."
Details from Rice's dinner conversation also are included in one of the secret memos from 2002, which reveal British concerns about both the invasion and poor postwar planning by the Bush administration, which critics say has allowed the Iraqi insurgency to rage.
The eight memos — all labeled "secret" or "confidential" — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.
Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.
The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.
The eight documents total 36 pages and range from 10-page and eight-page studies on military and legal options in Iraq, to brief memorandums from British officials and the minutes of a private meeting held by Blair and his top advisers.
Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert who teaches at Queen Mary College, University of London, said the documents confirmed what post-invasion investigations have found.
"The documents show what official inquiries in Britain already have, that the case of weapons of mass destruction was based on thin intelligence and was used to inflate the evidence to the level of mendacity," Dodge said. "In going to war with Bush, Blair defended the special relationship between the two countries, like other British leaders have. But he knew he was taking a huge political risk at home. He knew the war's legality was questionable and its unpopularity was never in doubt."
Dodge said the memos also show Blair was aware of the postwar instability that was likely among Iraq's complex mix of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds once Saddam was defeated.
The British documents confirm, as well, that "soon after 9/11 happened, the starting gun was fired for the invasion of Iraq," Dodge said.
Speculation about if and when that would happen ran throughout 2002.
On Jan. 29, Bush called Iraq, Iran and North Korea "an axis of evil." U.S. newspapers began reporting soon afterward that a U.S.-led war with Iraq was possible.
On Oct. 16, the U.S. Congress voted to authorize Bush to go to war against Iraq. On Feb. 5
By Michael Smith
The Sunday Times UK
Sunday 26 June 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1669292,00.html
It started with a phone call and has now swept across America: Michael Smith tells the tale of his 'Downing Street memo' scoop.
It began with a phone call from a friend nearly 10 months ago - somebody well-placed who had given me a few stories before. But he wasn't really a journalistic source, though he has now been dubbed "the British Deep Throat" by some of the US press.
He was just a friend. So I had no great expectations of the meeting we arranged in a quiet West End bar. I was just expecting a convivial drink, with the usual exchange of gossip, the catching-up on how our lives were going.
Almost immediately it was clear that this time it would be something more. The place was empty, but my friend chose the most secluded spot he could find. He was clearly nervous.
He wasn't sure if I'd be interested in what he had, he said. It was about the run-up to the war. "All the Butler stuff," he said, referring to Lord Butler, who had reported on the failures of intelligence over Iraq.
He thrust two sheets of paper into my hand. It was a "Secret - Strictly Personal" letter from Jack Straw to the prime minister written in March 2002, a year before the invasion.
In the letter the foreign secretary said there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any weapons of mass destruction worth talking about and that, in part as a result of a lack of US preparation, post-war Iraq was likely to become a very nasty place.
It was, in short, remarkably prescient and would make a pretty good story, I said, with some understatement. Well, I've got five others just like it from the same period, said my source. "Most say stuff just like that, or worse."
The documents covered the period running up to a summit between George W Bush and Tony Blair at the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, in early April 2002. At that time the swift victory against the Taliban in Afghanistan had left hawks in the US administration openly briefing that Iraq was next.
Most of the leaked documents were designed to brief ministers or Blair on whether backing the US plans to get rid of Saddam would be sensible and legal. They set out the merits and dangers of taking part. Their gist was that there weren't many merits. The documents made it pretty clear that it wasn't sensible, it wasn't legal and it was very risky.
The document that seemed to encapsulate the problems was another "Secret - Strictly Personal" letter to Blair. It was written by his foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning.
"I think there is a real risk that the (US) administration underestimates the difficulties," Manning wrote. "They may agree that failure isn't an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it."
When I reported these documents I was surprised to find that there was no real interest in them in America. The story swiftly died away.
Then eight months later, in the run-up to Britain's general election, with the focus on the attorney-general's advice to Blair on the legality of war, somebody else gave me further, even more startling documents. They concerned a meeting in Downing Street on July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion, when Blair was insisting to the public that all options on Iraq were still open.
One leaked document was a Cabinet Office briefing paper for a crucial Downing Street meeting held on the day in question. It said the prime minister had promised Bush at the Crawford summit that he would "back military action to bring about regime change". It added that ministers had no choice but to "create the conditions" that would make military action legal.
The other document was the minutes of the actual meeting, chaired by Blair and attended by Straw; Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary; Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general; Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6; John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee; and Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of defence staff.
Dearlove, who had just returned from Washington, said "military action was now seen as inevitable . . . the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action".
Straw agreed with Dearlove. He said Bush had "made up his mind to take military action. But the case was thin".
After reporting these secret memos, which revealed the dubious manoeuvrings of government, I expected the US press to react. Surely there would be a storm of anger over the way in which the American public had been deceived into going to war? But still there was no interest. Then slowly something astonishing happened. People power took over.
The Sunday Times website was inundated with ordinary US citizens wanting to read the minutes of the July meeting. Bloggers set to work passing the word.
Six ordinary, patriotic citizens with no political axe to grind were so outraged to discover the truth about the path to war that they set up their own website, naming it after the minutes, which had become known as the Downing Street memo.
The focus turned to what may ultimately be the most important part of the memo: the point where Hoon said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime".
Ministry of Defence figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that virtually none were used in March and April; but between May and August an average of 10 tons were dropped each month, with the RAF taking just as big a role in the "spikes of activity" as their US colleagues. Then in September the figure shot up again, with allied aircraft dropping 54.6 tons.
If this was a covert air war, both Bush and Blair may face searching questions. In America only Congress can declare war, and it did not give the US president permission to take military action against Iraq until October 11, 2002. Blair's legal justification is said to come from UN Resolution 1441, which was not passed until November 8, 2002.
Last week one US blogger, Larisa Alexandrovna of RawStory.com, unearthed more unsettling evidence. It was an overlooked interview with Lieutenant-General T Michael Moseley, the allied air commander in Iraq, in which he appears to admit that the "spikes of activity" were part of a covert air war.
From June 2002 until March 20, when the ground war began, the allies flew 21,736 sorties over southern Iraq, attacking 349 carefully selected targets. The attacks, Moseley said, "laid the foundations" for the invasion, allowing allied commanders to begin the ground war.
The bloggers may have found their own smoking gun.
======================================================
Downing Street Memos show U.S. push for war
Michael Smith, Reporter for London Times
on 'Hardball' MSNBC 06/20/05 8:45 pm MT
http://www.apfn.org/APFN/MEMO.HTM
British officials were worried about White House motives for invading Iraq, leaked documents indicate
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 19, 2005
LONDON - When Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn't want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about "regime change" in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.
President George W. Bush wanted Blair's support, but British officials worried that the White House was rushing to war, according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos that have renewed questions and debate about Washington's motives for ousting Saddam Hussein.
In one memo, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war. "U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts says in the memo. "For Iraq, 'regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam."
The documents confirm Blair was genuinely concerned about Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, but they also indicate he was determined to go to war as the United States' top ally, even though his government thought a pre-emptive attack might be illegal under international law.
"The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September," said a typed copy of a March 22, 2002, memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press and written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. "But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW [chemical or biological weapons] fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up."
Details from Rice's dinner conversation also are included in one of the secret memos from 2002, which reveal British concerns about both the invasion and poor postwar planning by the Bush administration, which critics say has allowed the Iraqi insurgency to rage. The eight memos - all labeled "secret" or "confidential" - were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. They are named after Blair's Downing Street office.
Smith told AP that he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.
The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said on condition of anonymity that their content appeared authentic.
Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert who teaches at Queen Mary College, University of London, said the documents confirmed what post-invasion investigations have found: "The case of weapons of mass destruction was based on thin intelligence and was used to inflate the evidence to the level of mendacity. In going to war with Bush, Blair defended the special relationship between the two countries, like other British leaders have. But he knew he was taking a huge political risk at home. He knew the war's legality was questionable and its unpopularity was never in doubt."
Dodge said the memos also confirm that "soon after 9/11 happened, the starting gun was fired for the invasion of Iraq."
Bush and Blair both have been criticized at home since their WMD claims about Iraq proved false. But both have been re-elected, defending the conflict for removing a brutal dictator and promoting democracy in Iraq. Both the Bush and the Blair administrations have dismissed the memos as old news.
Details of the memos ran in papers last month but news in Britain turned to the election that returned Blair to power. In the United States, however, details of the memos' contents reignited a firestorm, especially among Democratic critics of Bush.
In one memo - from Straw to Blair on March 25, 2002 - the foreign secretary said he would have a tough time convincing the governing Labour Party that a pre-emptive strike against Iraq was legal under international law. "If 11 September had not happened, it is doubtful that the U.S. would now be considering military action against Iraq," Straw wrote. "In addition, there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with OBL [Osama bin Laden] and al-Qaida."
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/politics/ny-wodown194311477jun19,0,2667618.story?coll=ny-lipolitics-print
=================================================================
When Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn't want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about "regime change" in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.
President Bush wanted Blair's support, but British officials worried the White House was rushing to war, according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos that have renewed questions and debate about Washington's motives for ousting Saddam Hussein.
In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war.
"U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts says in the memo. "For Iraq, `regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam."
The documents confirm Blair was genuinely concerned about Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, but also indicate he was determined to go to war as America's top ally, even though his government thought a pre-emptive attack may be illegal under international law.
"The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September," said a typed copy of a March 22, 2002 memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press and written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
"But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW (chemical or biological weapons) fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up."
Details from Rice's dinner conversation also are included in one of the secret memos from 2002, which reveal British concerns about both the invasion and poor postwar planning by the Bush administration, which critics say has allowed the Iraqi insurgency to rage.
The eight memos — all labeled "secret" or "confidential" — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.
Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.
The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.
The eight documents total 36 pages and range from 10-page and eight-page studies on military and legal options in Iraq, to brief memorandums from British officials and the minutes of a private meeting held by Blair and his top advisers.
Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert who teaches at Queen Mary College, University of London, said the documents confirmed what post-invasion investigations have found.
"The documents show what official inquiries in Britain already have, that the case of weapons of mass destruction was based on thin intelligence and was used to inflate the evidence to the level of mendacity," Dodge said. "In going to war with Bush, Blair defended the special relationship between the two countries, like other British leaders have. But he knew he was taking a huge political risk at home. He knew the war's legality was questionable and its unpopularity was never in doubt."
Dodge said the memos also show Blair was aware of the postwar instability that was likely among Iraq's complex mix of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds once Saddam was defeated.
The British documents confirm, as well, that "soon after 9/11 happened, the starting gun was fired for the invasion of Iraq," Dodge said.
Speculation about if and when that would happen ran throughout 2002.
On Jan. 29, Bush called Iraq, Iran and North Korea "an axis of evil." U.S. newspapers began reporting soon afterward that a U.S.-led war with Iraq was possible.
On Oct. 16, the U.S. Congress voted to authorize Bush to go to war against Iraq. On Feb. 5
