Christopher Meyer told a hearing in London on Thursday that because contingency military plans had been decided before inspectors went in, "we found ourselves scrabbling for the smoking gun".
"When you looked at the timetable for the inspections, it was impossible to see how [Hans] Blix could bring the process to a conclusion, for better or for worse, by March," when the US invasion was to begin. This indicates that the US was simply looking for a justification to start the war rather than pursuing a diplomatic solution.
He said the result was to turn a UN Security Council resolution, which would have called on Saddam Hussein to comply with disarmament obligations, "on its head".
"And suddenly, because of that, the unforgiving nature of the military timetable, we found ourselves scrabbling for the smoking gun, which was another way of saying 'it's not that Saddam has to prove that he's innocent, we've now bloody well got to try and prove that he's guilty'."
"And we - the Americans, the British - have never really recovered from that because of course there was no smoking gun," he said.
The five-panel inquiry also heard that Condoleeza Rice, former US secretary of state, had raised the issue of Iraq hours after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
"She said there's no doubt this was an al-Qaeda operation, we are just looking to see if there could possibly be any connection with Saddam Hussein," Meyer said. After the war, US Army intelligence personnel went through millions of pages of the Saddam's regime records and was unable to find a connection with al-Qaeda.
Asked at what point war with Iraq was inevitable, Meyer said "that is a damn hard question to answer".
"What was inevitable was that the Americans were going to bust a gut to carry out the mandated policy of regime change," he said.
Source: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2009/11/20091126131216251104.html
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