The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
to them,
what mattered to President Bush, is whether they would … concede a
veto
… that the
red line was that they shouldn’t do that, and they were confident
that they
had not
…
“… [T]he
red line was ‘We believe’ they were saying ‘that we have a right to
go
without
this resolution. We have been persuaded to come to the United
Nations’ …
‘but the
one thing that mustn’t happen is that by going down this route, we
then find
we lose the
freedom of action we think we now have’ and if the resolution had
said
there must
be a further decision by the Security Council, that’s what it would
have
done, and
the United States would have been tied into that.
“They were
all very, very clear that was the most important point to them and
that
they hadn’t
conceded that, and they were very clear that the French
understood
that, that
they said that they had discussed this with other members of the
Security
Council as
well and they all understood that was the
position.”190
476.
Lord Goldsmith
stated:
“It was
frankly, quite hard to believe, given what I had been told about
the one red
line that
President Bush had, that all these experienced lawyers and
negotiators in
the United
States could actually have stumbled into doing the one thing that
they
had been
told mustn’t happen … a red line means a red line. It was the only
one,
I was
told, that mattered. They didn’t mind what else went into the
resolution, so
long as it
did not provide a veto, and if it required a decision then one of
the Security
Council
members, perhaps the French, could then have vetoed action by the
United
States,
which, up to that point, they believed they could take in any
event.”191
477.
Asked whether
his US interlocutors had been able to provide him with
any
evidence
that France had acknowledged the US position, Lord Goldsmith
replied:
“I wish
they had presented me with more. That was one of the difficulties,
and
I make
reference to this, that, at the end of the day we were sort of
dependent upon
their view
in relation to that … I looked very carefully at all the
negotiating telegrams
and I had
seen that there were some acknowledgements of that,
acknowledgements
that the
French understood the United States’ position, at least, in
telegrams that
I had seen,
and I was told of occasions when this had been clearly stated to
the
478.
Correspondence
between Ms Adams and the British Embassy Washington
recorded
that Lord Goldsmith had asked the US lawyers if they had any
evidence
that the
French had acknowledged that no second resolution was needed, and
the
US lawyers
had offered to check. The subsequent reply was that, although they
had
190
Public
hearing, 27 January 2010, pages 110-111.
191
Public
hearing, 27 January 2010, pages 127-128.
192
Public
hearing, 27 January 2010, page 112.
86