Iraq: I Wouldn't Have Backed Blair - Howard

[UpInArms]

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3220090

Tory leader Michael Howard said tonight that he would not have backed the Government in the crucial Commons vote on the Iraq war if he had known that the intelligence was flawed.

His comments, in an interview with the Sunday Times, come after the Butler Report found that the intelligence on Iraq’s banned weapons – described by Mr Blair as “detailed, extensive and authoritative” – was in fact “sporadic and patchy”.

Mr Howard said that he could not have supported the Government motion because it referred to Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction and long range missiles” posing “a threat to international security”.

“If I knew then what I know now, that would have caused a difficulty. I couldn’t have voted for that resolution,” he said.

“If you look at the terms of the actual motion put to the House of Commons on March 18, it placed very heavy emphasis on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

...more...

[KoKo]

1. Is this a "Tory Play" for the anti-Iraq Invasion crowd, though? Politics

as Usual..or sincere? Asking as an American who might not get the subtelties, here.

[legin]

2. Me thinks Howard speak with forked tongue

would be my guess.

[legin]

3. I've never been particularily keen on

the think tank that Michael Howard is head of, the Atlantic Partnership, set up before 911:

http://www.atlanticpartnership.com/

Although interesting article that provides evidence for an opposing view:

<<snip>>

Now the same kind of pressure is being applied, only in reverse. The White House regrets that the new leader of the Conservative party, Michael Howard, is failing to give unstinting support for the Iraq war and Tony Blair. There have been as yet no menacing calls from the Vice President. But Michael Howard has been left in no doubt that he is in the doghouse. ‘The White House hates Michael,’ says one senior Conservative official, perhaps with exaggeration. ‘It feels that he is not standing shoulder to shoulder with Tony Blair. It is furious with him.’ The official says that Howard has received ‘quite a few indirect messages’ from the administration to the effect that it would be better if he stayed his tongue.

Another member of the Tory leader’s office says that the White House ‘has been letting it be known to us that we are not being supportive enough on the war’. This official adds that the American administration does not feel that the Conservatives are ‘selling the message’. The truth is that George Bush only has the haziest idea of British domestic politics. He once referred to William Hague, when he was Conservative party leader, as ‘that guy with the runner’ — a reference to Seb Coe, Hague’s chief of staff, without whom he rarely left his office. In so far as George Bush has a view of the Conservative party, he thinks it should be out there telling the story, a subsidiary branch of the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. (The US Embassy, however, is also out of favour in Washington, where it is blamed for not putting the American case for war with nearly enough vim. The situation is not helped by the fact that Will Farish, a vanishing figure in any case, has been obliged for imperative domestic reasons to spend a great deal of time away from London.)

Michael Howard is by no stretch of the imagination the only Conservative politician who is being targeted by the US. Colleagues say that Michael Ancram, the shadow Foreign Secretary, has been told informally by the State Department of its disappointment at his attitude. The former Conservative party leader, Iain Duncan Smith, has received a message concerning growing US alarm about the increase in ‘anti-Americanism’, a strong hint that the Conservatives should do more to help out Tony Blair over the war. Duncan Smith spent last week in the United States, where he enjoyed long meetings with Vice President Cheney and the National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

An unmistakable sign of the new coolness between the Conservatives and the Republican party is that no such courtesies have yet been afforded to Michael Howard. At this stage in the electoral cycle, there would normally be intensive discussions about co-operation between the Conservatives and the Republicans, with key Conservative aides readying themselves to fly to the United States to help the Presidential campaign. Little or nothing of the sort looks likely to take place this year, partly because the Republicans are concentrating their firepower on helping out Tony Blair. Relations between the Republican and Conservative parties are at their worst for decades.

There is abundant evidence of this, most eloquent of all Michael Howard’s in-tray. The Conservative leader has been deluged with letters from senior Republicans attacking him, sometimes in strong terms, for his alleged failure to support Tony Blair to the hilt. The Republican party believes that the betrayal is all the greater because of his role in setting up the Atlantic Partnership, a think tank dedicated to ‘purposeful strengthening’ of links between Europe and the United States. The Atlantic Partnership, whose meetings are addressed by senior members of the US administration as well as top-rank European politicians, has been extremely effective in getting the US message across to an elite British audience. But some of the Partnership’s Republican backers have told Michael Howard that his recent criticisms of Tony Blair amount to a betrayal. According to an aide, Howard recently remarked on receiving a letter from an angry Republican, ‘I am not going to be told by Americans what I will and will not do.’ Downing Street is well aware of this growing Republican disenchantment with the Tory party. One official at No. 10 observes that the White House is getting ‘very testy’ with the Conservatives over their failure to support the war. Possession of this knowledge may be one of the reasons why Blair feels confident about rebuking Howard for undermining his war effort, making claims that he has undermined the armed forces by doing so.

These transatlantic forays against Michael Howard are just one more example of how out of touch the US has become. After all, the main domestic attack on the Tory leader is that he is too close to, not too critical of, the US administration. Howard’s criticisms of Tony Blair, let alone the United States, have been extremely muted, so much so that they are so far indiscernible to the average voter, though that may change over the coming months.

This does not mean that Howard and the Tories have resiled from the war, nor from the necessity to see it through to a conclusion. Indeed, in recent months Howard has started to ask probing questions about the conduct of the occupation, the handling of the Red Cross report into alleged British atrocities, and has put particular emphasis on the lack of a senior figure in the occupation command structure. Above all, he is starting to query Tony Blair’s claim that Britain must never publicly diverge from the United States. Michael Ancram made the point well in last Monday’s Iraq debate, when he complained that Tony Blair ‘never admits in public whether the differences even exist, let alone the discussions he has had on them’.

<<snip>>

(The original article in the Spectator needs site registration. Editor of Spectator is Tory shadow cabinet minister for the Arts)
so:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1139175/posts

[Moderator]

4. legin

Per DU copyright rules
please post only four
paragraphs from the
copyrighted news source.

Thank you.


DU Moderator

[AP]

5. I wonder where he stood on the Falklands Island War, that other great

threat to British sovereignty.

[daleo]

6. It is hard to believe a Tory would have resisted Bush's siren call

It seems this is more likely an opportunistic attempt to appeal to the anti-war vote. Although, in Canada, the Conservative Party has not always jumped when the U.S. commanded (e.g. the Conservative P.M. Diefenbaker resisted the U.S. on installing nuclear missiles on Canadian soil in the early 60's, while the Liberals were for it). I don't know if the same has been true in Britain, though.

[Capt_Nemo]

7. Howard is about the last person on Earth with moral authority...

to criticize Blair on Iraq. What a Hypocrite! :puke:

Anyway I hope Blair and Howard will eat each other up on the Iraq
disaster. F*** them!

[Zorra]

8. The intelligence was flawed alright - Bu$h, Blair and Howard all

suffer from flawed intelligence.

And they blame their own stupidity on the CIA and other agencies.

[Gyre]

9. Which is EXACTLY what Kerry should've said from the start

Because it's the only reasonable response from a Democrat who's trying to distinguish himself from Bush and capitalize on the Q word. Sadly, Rove is correct when he says that Kerry can't successfully attack Bush on Iraq when he's said that he would probably do the exact same thing AND he supported the funding of it. In fact, it will be used against him. DLC screwed the pooch on that one, I think. I know it's the one thing I hold against Kerry. It's kind of like Clinton saying he smoked pot but never held his breath to get high.

Please correct me if I'm wrong on this perception of hypocrasy on Kerry's part.

Gyre