On May 14, 2008, on the Charlie Rose Show, Sir Jeremie
Greenstock, Blair's Special British Representative to
Iraq told the world what the French Foreign Minister
privately said back in the days of the "mushroom
cloud" allegory: BUSH IS A LIAR when he says that all
the Western world's intelligence services believed
that Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear bomb.
President Chirac of France was the only European
leader with the courage to say "no" to Bush. Now, five
years after, a British official admits that they knew
the truth all along. Remember what the DOWNING STREET
MEMOS said about the intel being "fixed" around an
attack. After you read this portion from the
interview, you will have no doubt what "fix" meant. It
was one lie after another, covering the previous lies,
and so on. Think about this on Memorial Day when we
remember the sacrifice of all the moms and dads,
patriots who died in Iraq believing Bush and the
neocons:

[begin quote]
CHARLIE ROSE: What do you think would have happened if
there had not been an invasion of Iraq?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: I think that the sanctions regime
around Iraq would have broken down, that Saddam
Hussein was learning to smuggle some quite dangerous
materials into his regime. He was building missiles
with engines from Russia that he got through the black
market, capable of striking Israel. I think Iraq would
have been quite a menace, but they would have shown
with time that they did not have biological or
chemical weapons.

CHARLIE ROSE: Or nuclear?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: We knew they didn`t have nuclear.
That wasn`t...

CHARLIE ROSE: We didn`t know it then.

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Yes, we did know it in 2003.

CHARLIE ROSE: We did?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: Really?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: As I told you before, Charlie, we
didn`t have any doubts about that. And if the American
people were misled on that score, they were misled.

CHARLIE ROSE: Wait a minute. I know you have said
this, but I mean, there was no question at the time of
the American invasion in your mind and in the British
government`s mind and in Tony Blair`s mind that they
had no nuclear capability?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: No question at all. We knew that.

CHARLIE ROSE: Is that what Tony Blair says?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: He says absolutely we did not go to war
about nuclear?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Correct. We knew it in 1998, when I
first came to the United Nations. The nuclear file was
on the point of being closed by the U.N. inspectors
with the agreement of the Security Council, except
that Iraq had not passed a parliamentary resolution
forbidding any meddling with nuclear materials in
Iraq. That was a demand of the U.N. resolutions. The
rest of it we knew was cleared out, was old hat, was
dead.

CHARLIE ROSE: So if you knew it, then your best ally
had to know it.

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: But did they act like they knew it?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: They acted as though they thought
he would try and reconstitute it, but we knew he
didn`t have the materials to reconstitute it. He
wanted to reconstitute it, but he didn`t have the
capacity to do that, and we would have spotted
anything that moved on the nuclear front, because he
was well covered. But biological and chemical
materials are much smaller, are much easier to hide.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: We had big doubts about that.

CHARLIE ROSE: War without consequences.

Tell me what you -- when you look at this now, having
time to write this essay and see what other people are
writing, and talk to a lot of people, and the value of
distance and 20/20 hindsight, what should we have
known, what didn`t we know? What are the consequences
for this? And is there any possibility, as the Bush
administration believes, that history will be kind to
them?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Well, Iraq needs time to become a
stable, decent place. We took our own decades, if not
centuries in the case of the United Kingdom, to reach
a stable democracy. We had our civil wars.

We are trying to get Iraq through this in a few years`
time rather than a few centuries. We hurried a process
that wasn`t ready to go this fast. So history might be
kind in 25 years` time, but it`s not going to be kind
as long as the violence lasts.

We`ve made Iraq a horrible place to live. And a lot of
Iraqis are saying that they preferred it under Saddam
Hussein. Well, that`s a bitter thing to say, because
they hated it under Saddam Hussein.
But some bad calculations were made. There was --
Charlie, there was tremendous wisdom in the American
system that was not used in the analysis, in the State
Department, in the CIA, of course, but also in the
think tanks and the Arab specialists that you have in
this country.

CHARLIE ROSE: OK. Tell me what that wisdom was and who
it was.

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Well, it started with the secretary
of state, Colin Powell, who as Bob Woodward has told
us, said to the president, "You break it, you fix it.
This is going to be a difficult country...

CHARLIE ROSE: But he never said to the president,
don`t do it.

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: No. That was the president`s
decision.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes. Don`t you depend on your people to
advise you? I mean, did you ever say to Tony Blair, "I
think this a bad idea"?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: I said that going to war without a
smoking gun, without proof of WMD, was an unwise thing
to do, but that was done privately.

CHARLIE ROSE: OK. But Colin Powell could have done it
privately. Are you saying, you know, if he didn`t do
it privately, do you think he believed it?

I mean, it`s one thing to say, "If you break it you
own it," Pottery Barn idea first coined by Tom
Friedman. But it`s another thing to not go to the
president and say, look, decide whether you are going
to do this or not. If you do it, I want you to know
here are the consequences. On the other hand, if you
do it I am with you.

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: Is that essentially what you said to
Tony Blair?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: I wasn`t his advisor.

(CROSSTALK)

CHARLIE ROSE: He never asked you? He never said, what
do you think of our policy? You`re there, our guy in
the U.N., where all of the resolutions are being
brought on.

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: I told him what the circumstances
were at the U.N. and how we ought to perhaps go to the
U.N. But it wasn`t my job to advise him in London, but
I felt deeply uneasy about this timing, this kind of
attack.

CHARLIE ROSE: And you communicated that to Tony Blair?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Not directly, because I wasn`t in
his room when he was discussing this.

CHARLIE ROSE: But you communicated it to the foreign
minister?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: I can`t recall exactly what I said
at any one time.

CHARLIE ROSE: But they knew?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: They knew we were uneasy about it.
We believed there were WMD there. We knew that he was
contravening U.N. resolutions. No, we were government
servants as Colin Powell was a government servant.

CHARLIE ROSE: Is there anything -- you have written a
book and you have not published it, because there was
some request or imperative that the government did not
want you to say certain things, correct?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: I withdrew I it myself, because it
was going to be quite difficult to clear in the way
that I wanted to write it. But I withdrew it...

CHARLIE ROSE: So if you can`t clear it, meaning they
are stopping you from saying what you wanted to say?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: I was asked not to do it on that
timing.

CHARLIE ROSE: And what is it you wanted to say?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: I wasn`t writing a judgmental book,
Charlie. I was just offering something to the
historians about what happened at the U.N., because
the media weren`t interpreting everything in the way
that it went.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: I was offering something about how
it happened in Baghdad, in the administration under
Ambassador Paul Bremer. Just a firsthand view from the
British side about what it was like to get involved in
this extremely complex exercise.

I wanted to write something about the U.N. that taught
people a little through a real story of how the
Security Council worked, what happened in the
corridors, what happened, to some extent, in the
restricted discussions, to the extent...

(CROSSTALK)

CHARLIE ROSE: So what are they worried about? That
sounds like a good story to me.

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: I don`t think that the prime
minister or Number 10 ever had any particular problems
about what I was writing, but just bringing Iraq, the
name up, bringing it into the headlines for a few
days, was uncomfortable.

CHARLIE ROSE: The prime minister is gone.

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: How about now? How about publishing the
book now?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Well, I will come around to it.
I`ve lost -- you know, the steam has gone out of it.

CHARLIE ROSE: Has it really? Yes, that`s an
interesting point. But you can tell me, so it`s as
good as publishing a book.

(LAUGHTER)

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Well, we`ve had 10 conversations
lately.

CHARLIE ROSE: That`s exactly right.

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: I`ve been telling you now.

CHARLIE ROSE: I know, you have. And even more today,
by the way. I mean, I get it the first time, but
eventually we understand.

What do you thing the legacy is today of Iraq? And
where do we go from here? One, the legacy, and B,
where do we go from here?

JEREMY GREENSTOCK: Well, one of the legacies is for
the United Kingdom to understand -- and I hope the
United States to understand, but that`s the job of the
American people -- that the legitimacy, acting
legitimately with the approval of at least some
members of the international community these days, is
actually part of the power that you exercise. And if
you don`t act seemingly legitimately, some of that
power is taken away. Nobody can do big things in
today`s world without allies. Not even the
superpowers.

[end quote]

I saw this on TV and don't understand why the US media
is not making an issue of it!

Daniel E. Teodoru

THIS MEMBER+ BLANK PROFILE= NO CREDABLITY.

FRANCE DID NOT WANT US IN BECAUSE THEY HAD BEHIND THE BACK DEALS WITH IRAQ...

The opening salvo says it all.. the sanctions regime would have broken down and Saddam would have been a menace.. further, in view of other threats in the region that we are struggling with, Saddam would have been in excellent position to be a more pointed menace, or at least a dangerous nuisance had we not addressed him first.. what made him a target worth taking on, as opposed to Somalia, Darfur, or North Korea is as in real estate, location, location, location.. These others are as gangrenous toes that can be isolated and left to slough off in their own time,, Saddam was an aneurysm dangerously close to the heart of the matter.. I find it funny that so much dialogue was spent on Saddam's nukes, when the most poignant of the WMD issue centered on chemical and biological weapons that are far more nuanced and don't fit as easily into the 'Bush lied Troops Died' mantra....makes me question the bias of the interview....