George Bush saw Iraq war as religious crusade against 'evil-doers', newly-released files reveal

In January 2003 – two months before US and UK forces launched their fateful invasion – Tony Blair to flew to Camp David to urge the president to allow more time for diplomacy to work.

However, files released to the National Archives at Kew, west London, show that Britain’s ambassador to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer, warned it had become “politically impossible” to draw back from war unless Hussein surrendered.

British officials were still hoping that the United Nations Security Council would agree a new resolution specifically authorising the use of military force against Iraq.

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Mr Blair’s foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, said that when he met the president he should make the point that a new resolution was “politically essential for the UK, and almost certainly legally essential as well”.

However, the Americans were becoming increasingly impatient with the unwillingness of France and Russia – which both had a veto on the council – to agree a resolution so long as UN inspectors were unable to find any evidence of Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, the supposed justification for war.

Following Mr Bush’s annual State of the Union address to Congress, shortly before Mr Blair’s visit, he warned that the options for a peaceful solution had effectively run out.

“It is politically impossible for Bush to back down from going to war in Iraq this spring, absent Saddam’s surrender or disappearance from the scene” he wrote.

“If Bush had any room for manoeuvre beforehand this was closed off by his State of the Union speech.

“In the high-flown prose to which Bush is drawn on these set-piece occasions, he said in effect that destroying Saddam is a crusade against evil to be undertaken by God’s chosen people.”

In a cable sent the previous month, Sir Christopher said that much of the impulse for deposing Hussein was coming from the president, a born-again Christian, who was scornful of what he saw as the “self-serving” reservations of the Europeans.

“His view of the world is Manichean. He sees his mission as ridding it of evil-doers. He believes American values should be universal values,” Sir Christopher wrote.

“He is strongly allergic to Europeans collectively. Anyone who has sat round a dinner table with low-church Southerners will find these sentiments instantly recognisable.”

In the event, the US and UK abandoned their efforts to get agreement on a new Security Council resolution, claiming French president Jacques Chirac had made it clear he would never agree.