Blair, US relations in spotlight at Iraq inquiry

Tony Blair may have swung behind US calls for regime change in Iraq after meeting president George W. Bush at his Texas ranch, a former top diplomat told an inquiry into the 2003 war Thursday.

Christopher Meyer, then Britain's ambassador to Washington, said that Blair's line seemed to harden following talks at the ranch in Crawford in April 2002, much of which was held in private with no advisers present.

Meyer also detailed the warm personal relationship between the pair, saying Bush could talk to the then British prime minister but saw other world leaders as "like creatures from outer space".

Blair stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Bush in taking Britain into the Iraq war with the United States in 2003 despite lack of UN Security Council approval. He resigned in 2007, partly due to the enduring unpopularity of the Iraq war.

The probe also heard that toppling Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was not an early priority for Bush. Even straight after the September 11, 2001 attacks by Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, Saddam was a footnote.

Meyer said he was "not entirely clear what degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford ranch."

But the day afterwards, Blair made a speech in which he publicly mentioned regime change for the first time.

"What he was trying to do was to draw the lessons of 9/11 and apply them to the situation in Iraq which led -- I think not inadvertently but deliberately -- to a conflation of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein," Meyer said.

"When I heard that speech, I thought that this represents a tightening of the UK/US alliance and a degree of convergence on the danger Saddam Hussein presented."

Britain was still, though, encouraging Washington to act with the approval of the UN Security Council, Meyer said.

In the early days of the Bush administration, Iraq was seen as being like a "grumbling appendix", Meyer added.

He said while there were concerns over Saddam, there were no plans to take action, despite calls from US neo-conservatives like deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

On 9/11 itself, Meyer spoke to Condoleezza Rice, then US national security advisor.

"She said: 'There's no doubt it's an Al-Qaeda operation' but at the end of the conversation, she said 'We're just looking to see whether there could possibly be any connection with Saddam Hussein," he added.

Meyer said that the following weekend there was a "big ding dong" at Camp David, Bush's Maryland retreat, when Wolfowitz "argued very strongly" for action against Iraq.

But he added: "The decision taken that weekend was that the prime concern was with Al-Qaeda, it was with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and Iraq... had to be set aside for the time being."

There was, though, a "fault line" emerging in the Bush administration between secretary of state Colin Powell on the one side and vice-president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the other.

Talk of regime change in Iraq in US circles increased in the following months leading up to the Blair-Bush meeting at Crawford, Meyer said.

The inquiry, Britain's third related to the conflict, is looking at its role in Iraq between 2001 and 2009, when nearly all its troops withdrew. It will report by the end of 2010.

Blair will give evidence, although not until January.