Citing a confidential British memorandum, the newspaper said the president was certain that war was inevitable and made his view known during a private two-hour meeting with Blair in the Oval Office on January 31, 2003.

Information about the meeting was contained in the memo written by Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The Times.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," the paper quotes David Manning, Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, as noting in the memo.

"'The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,' Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. 'This was when the bombing would begin'," the paper continued.

The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment, the paper said.

Five days after the Bush-Blair meeting, then US secretary of state Colin Powell was scheduled to appear before the
United Nations to present evidence that Iraq posed a threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons.

Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum had not been made public, according to the report. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by British lawyer and international law professor Philippe Sands.

In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast excerpts from the memo.

But since then, The New York Times has been able to review the five-page memo in its entirety.

The document indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable, the paper said.

Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq, The Times noted.

Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a US surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Iraqi president
Saddam Hussein.

Now word comes that “mentally ill” troops are being
sent back to Iraq. [See: Some
troops headed back to Iraq are mentally ill] This article refers to “a
little-discussed truth fraught with implications,” but the implications
discussed all have to do with the effects on the soldiers being returned, and
these soldiers’ “effectiveness in combat.” In many instances,
being returned to combat, and to a state of constant tension, will exacerbate
the soldier’s problems, the article -- correctly -- suggests.  

The article indicates that the military is putting pressure on
mental health professionals treating these soldiers to minimize the extent
of their problems and to declare them fit for return to Iraq and combat. For
example, some Army doctors are reporting that they are being told to diagnose
combat-stress reaction instead of the more serious post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). Further, the article reports that professionals treating emotionally
disturbed soldiers “are under pressure” to approve their redeployment
to Iraq. I have written about the moral issues involved in mental health treatment
of soldiers in Iraq [To
Heal or To Patch: Military Mental Health Workers in Iraq]. The issues are
similar for those treating the soldiers when they return if the professionals
play any role in deciding whether or not the soldiers should return to combat.
The mental health professionals are not in a position to make unbiased judgments
as to a soldier’s readiness to return to combat when their own status
and advancement in the military may depend upon how they exercise that judgment. 

One “implication” not even mentioned in the
article is that sending “mentally ill” soldiers back into
combat puts not only the soldiers’ own mental health at risk, but endangers
Iraqis as well. What is the quality of decision-making by highly stressed soldiers,
whether they suffer from “PTSD” or only from “combat-stress
reaction”? These soldiers are armed with lethal weapons and are often
in a position to make split-second life-or-death decisions. After all, “stress” is
often used as a defense when other armed authorities, such as police, are caught
engaging in abusive or even murderous behavior. Surely the effects of stress
can only be magnified on soldiers who spend a year or more being assigned to
a country where they can never feel entirely safe.  

We know from the memoirs of US soldiers in Iraq how alienated
from Iraqis they feel. Thus, Colby Buzzell, in his My War: Killing Time in
Iraq describes being “hit with the realization that I’m on the
other side of the planet far away from home, and that I’m a stranger
in a really strange land” (p. 297).  

These strangers feel so alienated from Iraqis that they have
a number of names for them. As Kayla Williams tells us in Love My Rifle More
Than You: Young and Female in the US Army: 

“[W]e called them hajjis, but we also called them sadiqis… or
habibis…. We called them towelheads. Ragheads. Camel jockeys. The fucking
locals. Words that didn’t see our enemy as people – as somebody’s
father or son or brother or uncle” (p. 200; emphasis in original). 

Of course, it isn’t only “the enemy” that terms
like these describe, and who aren't seen as people. Ordinary Iraqis of all
stripes are characterized as the “hajjis” or “the fucking
locals.” 

Not surprisingly, in such a climate of alienation combined with
pervasive never-ending danger, even mentally “healthy” soldiers
have emotional difficulties. For example, Jason Christopher Hartley, author
of the memoir Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq, describes
attempting to refuse leave:  

“[I]n all honesty, I did it because I didn’t want
to leave Iraq. One of the ways to cope with being in combat is to go crazy
just a tiny bit and learn to enjoy the work… I was afraid that if I
left, it would be difficult to get back into the ‘combat is fun’ way
of thinking when I returned” (p. 279). 

If Hartley, by all indications a mentally healthy soldier, was
only able to survive by going a bit crazy and, in his case, cultivating a love
of combat, what happens to an emotionally disturbed soldier returned to that
crazy-making environment? Does (s)he cower in terror, perhaps shooting at stimuli
little more dangerous than his or her shadow, even if those stimuli happen
to be Iraqi civilians? Or does (s)he perhaps cultivate an even greater love
for combat, shooting at Iraqis as an expression of a game necessary to transform
the pervasive fear? Undoubtedly each of these paths is chosen by some. Either
possibility will increase the odds of adding to the massive Iraqi civilian
casualties being generated by this war of occupation, estimated at about 100,000
in September 2004 and considerably higher at this point. [See my 100,000
Iraqis Dead: Should We Believe It? and When
Promoting Truth Obscures the Truth: More on Iraqi Body Count and Iraqi Deaths and
Les Roberts: The
Iraq War: Do Iraqi Civilian Casualties Matter?]  

Soldiers in Iraq routinely make split-second decisions whether
to shoot or not, such as at the innumerable checkpoints or
when on convoy.
We already know from a study published in the July 1, 2004 New England Journal
of Medicine [Combat
Duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mental Health Problems, and Barriers to Care:
see their Table 2] that 14% of Army soldiers and 28% of Marines returning from
Iraq reported “being responsible for the death of a noncombatant.” To
deploy mentally unstable soldiers [not to mention those with drug or alcohol
problems] likely will increase these horrific numbers. This policy of returning
potentially unstable soldiers to combat in Iraq is, thus, not only a serious
threat to the mental health of the soldiers, but a threat to occupied Iraqis.
This policy, already reprehensible because of the danger it poses to the long-term
mental health of the US troops, is also in its reckless disregard for Iraqi
lives yet another example of the innumerable war crimes being committed against
the Iraqi people.

An inquiry has been launched by the US Navy's Criminal Investigation Service after the military was presented with evidence that the 15 civilians, including seven women and three children still in their nightclothes, had been killed in their homes in the wake of the bombing. If it is proved that they died in a rampage by the Marines, and not as a result of "collateral damage", it would rank as the worst case of deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians by US armed forces since the invasion three years ago.

The military still insists that eight men who also died on 19 November were insurgents who opened fire on a Marines patrol after the bomb explosion. One military spokeswoman said the civilian deaths were their fault, because they "placed noncombatants in the line of fire as the Marines responded to defend themselves". But numerous witnesses say the only shooting was by the Marines, and that the only difference between these victims and the rest were that they were young men who could be depicted as insurgents. Despite claims of a fierce firefight after the explosion, military officials say two AK-47 rifles were the only weapons recovered.

Four of the young men who died were students on their way to college. They were in a car which was near the Marines' convoy when the bomb went off. According to the soldiers' statements to investigators, they told the youths to leave the car and lie face down in the road. Instead they ran, and were shot down. All this time, the Marines said, they were under fire from nearby houses.

The IoS understands, however, that local people have contradicted this account in almost every detail. According to their statements, the soldiers were not under fire when they approached the car. Rather than order the occupants to leave the vehicle and lie down, they simply dragged them out and shot them. While investigators seek to determine the truth of the incident, the military has admitted no weapons were found in the vehicle.

Likewise, people strongly disapprove of the foreign policy of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, particularly their position on the war in Iraq. In a September 2005 New York Times-CBS News poll, support for immediate withdrawal stood at 52 percent, a remarkable figure when one considers that very few political organizations have articulated an "Out Now" position.

The official justifications for the war have been exposed as complete fallacies. Even conservative defenders of U.S. empire now complain that the situation in Iraq is a disaster.

Yet many people who opposed this unjust invasion, who opposed the 1991 Gulf War and the sanctions on Iraq for years before that, some of whom joined mass demonstrations against the war before it began, have been persuaded that the U.S. military should now remain in Iraq for the benefit of the Iraqi people. We confront the strange situation of many people mobilizing against an unjust war but then reluctantly supporting the military occupation that flows directly from it.

In part, this position is rooted in the pessimistic conclusions many drew after the February 15, 2003, day of international demonstrations -- perhaps the largest coordinated protest in human history -- failed to prevent the war. This pessimism was exacerbated by some of the leading spokespeople for the antiwar movement, who misled audiences by suggesting that the demonstrations could stop the war. As inspiring as the demonstrations were, it would have taken a significantly higher degree of protest, organization, and disruption of business as usual to do so.

The lesson of February 15 is not that protest no longer works, but that protest needs to be sustained, coherent, forceful, persistent, and bold -- rather than episodic and isolated. And it needs to involve large numbers of working-class people, veterans, military families, conscientious objectors, Arabs, Muslims, and other people from targeted communities, not just as passive observers but as active participants and leaders.

We will need this kind of protest to end the occupation of Iraq. But we will also need to be able to answer the objections and concerns of thoughtful, well-meaning people who have been persuaded by one or more of the arguments for why U.S. troops should remain in Iraq, at least until "stability" is restored. Below, I outline eight reasons why the United States should leave Iraq immediately, addressing common arguments for why the United States needs to "stay the course."

The U.S. Military has no right ro be in Iraq in the first place.

The Bush administration built its case for invading Iraq on a series of deceptions. The war in Iraq was sold on the idea that the United States was preempting a terrorist attack by Iraq. But Iraq posed no threat. The country was disarmed and had overwhelmingly complied with the extremely invasive weapons inspections. In a rare moment of honesty, Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN in March 2001,"I don't believe [Saddam Hussein] is a significant military threat today."

As the case for war has crumbled, so has the case for occupation, which also rests on the idea that the United States can violate the sovereignty of the Iraqi people and all the laws of occupation, such as the Hague and Geneva Conventions, which clearly restrict the right of occupying powers to interfere in the internal affairs of an occupied people.

The United States is not bringing democracy to Iraq.

Having failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- the first big lie of the invasion -- the United States has turned to a new big lie: George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, John Negroponte, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton, and their friends are bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. Democracy has nothing to do with why the United States is in Iraq. The Bush administration invaded Iraq to secure long-established imperial interests in the Middle East -- the same reason Washington backed Saddam Hussein as he carried out the worst of his crimes against the Iraqi people, the Kurds, and the Iranians.

By invading Iraq, Washington hoped not only to install a regime more favorable to U.S. oil interests; it hoped to use Iraq as a staging ground for further interventions to redraw the map of the Middle East. Several U.S. bases have been established in Iraq and are likely to remain long after U.S. troops are expelled. All of this has nothing to do with democracy. In fact, the United States has long been a major obstacle to any secular, democratic, nationalist, or socialist movements in the region that stood for fundamental change, preferring instead what is euphemistically called "stability," even if it meant supporting the most reactionary fundamentalist religious forces or repressive regimes.

The U.S. government opposes genuine democracy in the Middle East for a simple reason: if ordinary people controlled the region's energy resources, they might be put toward local economic development and social needs, rather than going to fuel the profits of Western oil companies. Democracy cannot be "installed" by outside powers, at gunpoint. Genuine democracy can come about only through the struggle of people for control over their own lives and circumstances, through movements that are themselves democratic in nature. When confronted with such movements, such as the 1991 Iraqi uprising, the U.S. government has consistently preferred to see them crushed than to see them succeed.

The United States is not making the workd a safer place by occupying Iraq.

The invasion of Iraq has made the world a far more unstable and dangerous place. By invading Iraq, Washington sent the message to other states that anything goes in the so-called war on terror.

After September 11, India called its nuclear rival Pakistan an "epicenter of terrorism." Israel has carried out "targeted assassinations" of Palestinians, bombed Syria, and threatened to strike Iran, using the same rationale that Bush did for the invasion of Iraq." You don't negotiate with terrorism, you uproot it. This is simply the doctrine of Mr. Bush that we're following," explained Uzi Landau, Israel's minister of public security.

Furthermore, the invasion of Iraq is spurring the drive for countries to develop a deterrent to U.S. power. The most likely response to the invasion of Iraq is that more countries will pursue nuclear weapons, which may be the only possible protection from attack, and will increase their spending on more conventional weapons systems. Each move in this game has a multiplier effect in a world that is already perilously close to the brink of self-annihilation through nuclear warfare or accident.

Meanwhile, the invasion has also quite predictably increased the resentment and anger that many people feel against the United States and its allies, therefore making innocent people in these countries far more vulnerable to terrorism, as we saw in the deadly attacks in Madrid on March 11, 2004, and London on July 7, 2005.

The United States is reviled not because people "hate our freedoms," as Bush suggests, but because people hate the very real impact of U.S. policies on their lives. As the British playwright and essayist Harold Pinter observed," People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget. They strike back."

The United States is not preventing civil war in Iraq.

Perhaps the greatest fear of many antiwar activists who now support the occupation is that the withdrawal of U.S. troops will lead to civil war. This idea has been encouraged repeatedly by supporters of the war. "Sectarian fault lines in Iraq are inexorably pushing the country towards civil war unless we actually intervene decisively to stem it," explained one U.S. Army official, making the case for a continued U.S.presence.

But Washington is not preventing a civil war from breaking out. In fact, occupation authorities are deliberately pitting Kurds against Arabs, Shia against Sunni, and faction against faction to influence the character of the future government, following a classic divide- and-rule strategy. Taking this idea to its logical extreme, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman argues, "We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind." Such arguments are not just the fantasy of keyboard warriors like Friedman, however. As the journalist A.K. Gupta notes, "the Pentagon is arming, training, and funding" militias in Iraq "for use in counter-insurgency operations." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said such commandos were among "the forces that are going to have the greatest leverage on suppressing and eliminating the insurgencies."

In addition, the Iraqi constitution, drafted under intense pressure from occupation authorities, essentially enshrines sectarian divisions in Iraqi politics. And, finally, despite all of its rhetoric about confronting Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq, the United States has in fact encouraged it, bringing formerly marginalized fundamentalist parties such as the Dawa Party and the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq into the Iraqi government.

The United States is not confronting terrorism by staying in Iraq.

Iraq has never been the center of a terrorist threat to the United States. Each month, further evidence emerges that the Bush administration went to great lengths to suppress facts that undermined its case for war, while touting bogus evidence in its support. As the New York Times reported in November 2005, "A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document."

Al-Qaeda made its first appearance in Iraq only after the invasion, a predictable outcome of the U.S. occupation. In reality, the United States engaged in state terrorism under the pretext of fighting a terrorist threat that did not exist in Iraq, and in the process greatly increased the likelihood of individual and organizational terrorist acts targeting the United States or its proxies abroad.

Even more circular is the idea that the United States has to stay in Iraq until it "defeats" the resistance to the occupation. The occupation itself is the source of the resistance, a fact that even some of the people responsible for the war have been forced to acknowledge.

The United States is not honoring those who died by continuing the conflict.

One of the most cynical reasons for staying in Iraq was advanced by President Bush in response to the growing public criticism over the mounting deaths of U.S. soldiers and the deliberate campaign by the administration to suppress images of the returning coffins. Speaking to a carefully targeted audience in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he fled to escape the protest of Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son, Casey, in Iraq on April 4, 2004, Bush made a rare public acknowledgment of the number of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We owe them something," he said. "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for. We will honor their sacrifice by staying on the offensive against the terrorists."

Sheehan herself had the best response to this attempt to manipulate people into supporting continued occupation, asking, "Why should I want one more mother to go through what I've gone through, because my son is dead?. . . I don't want him using my son's death or my family's sacrifice to continue the killing."

The soldiers in Iraq have not died for a "noble cause," as Bush claims. Whatever personal motivations may have brought them into the military, they died for oil, for empire, for power and profit. More deaths and injuries of Iraqis and of U.S. soldiers will only compound the tragedy of the numerous lives already lost.

The United States is not rebuilding Iraq.

The contractors now in Iraq are not there to help the people of Iraq but to help themselves, drawing on their close ties to influential politicians to secure contracts and profit from what Pratap Chatterjee rightly calls the "reconstruction racket."

The reality is, Halliburton, Bechtel, and the other companies in Iraq are looting the country far more than they are rebuilding it. Iraqis have been forced to pay elevated prices to import oil, benefiting corporations like Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, while ordinary Iraqis have to stand in lines sometimes for days to buy gasoline. Project after project remains unfinished. Hospitals are in shambles. Electricity is still at woefully inadequate levels.

As the journalist Naomi Klein eloquently observes, "The United States, having broken Iraq, is not in the process of fixing it. It is merely continuing to break the country and its people by other means, using not only F-16s and Bradleys, but now the less flashy weaponry" of economic strangulation.

The Iraqi people are perfectly capable of rebuilding their own society, in fact far more so than foreign soldiers or contractors. To the extent that there have been any social services or security in the last two years, it is primarily Iraqis who have provided it. During the years of sanctions, Iraqis also showed their immense resourcefulness in holding together their badly damaged infrastructure. Iraqi engineers, teachers, and doctors have long been among the most educated and best trained in the Arab world. It is ultimately a racist worldview that believes Iraqis cannot rebuild or run their own country.

The United States is not fulfilling its obligation to the Iraqi people for the harm and suffering it has caused.

Understandably, many opponents of the war now believe that the United States has an obligation to the Iraqi people and therefore has to stay to "clean up the mess it has created." MoveOn.org, which grabbed headlines and signed up millions of online members with its anti-Bush campaigning, refuses to call for withdrawal of troops from Iraq because, in the words of its executive director, Eli Pariser, "There are no good options in Iraq." Using this same logic, leading anti-sanctions and antiwar groups such as the Education for Peace in Iraq Center have formally adopted positions in support of occupation, if somehow a more enlightened occupation, and therefore against immediate withdrawal.

We must confront the bizarre logic of saying that the people who have devastated Iraq, who encouraged and enforced sanctions that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the last decade, who have failed at even the most basic responsibilities as an occupying power, who are the source of the instability in Iraq today, are the only ones who can protect Iraqis from hunger and anarchy. In no other area of our lives do we accept such logic, but when it comes to the crimes of empire, we are supposed to continually ignore history. The "doctrine of good intentions" exculpates all crimes.

The reality, however, is that the U.S. occupation, rather than being a source of stability in Iraq, is the major source of instability and ongoing suffering.

Moreover, those calling for immediate withdrawal do not advocate a position of isolationism and of simply walking away from any obligation to the Iraqi people. Does the U.S. government have an obligation to the Iraqi people? Absolutely. An obligation for the crimes Washington supported for years when Saddam Hussein was an ally. For arming and supporting both sides in the brutal Iran-Iraq War. For the destruction of the 1991 Gulf War. For the use of depleted uranium munitions, cluster bombs, daisy cutters, and white phosphorus. For the devastating sanctions. For the humiliation and deaths caused by the 2003 invasion, and for the great damage the occupation has caused since.

But the first step in meeting this obligation is to withdraw immediately.

If there were any genuine justice for the people of Iraq, not only would the politicians responsible for this unjust war face prosecution for their crimes, but the U.S. government would be required to pay reparations to the Iraqi people and to the families of U.S. soldiers who have been maimed and killed by its criminal actions.

In demanding an end to the U.S. occupation, we do not need to call for some other occupying power to replace the United States. We should allow the people of Iraq to determine their own future. This means, as Naomi Klein has argued, that in addition to calling for an end to military occupation, we should be calling for an end to the economic occupation of Iraq and the cancellation of all debts that Iraq still owes from the previous regime (many of which still have not been forgiven).

If the Iraqis ask for outside assistance, that is their prerogative. But it is their decision, not ours, to make, and that decision can only be freely made if the United States, United Kingdom, and other occupying armies withdraw completely and end their economic, political, and military coercion of Iraq.

This article is adapted from Anthony Arnove's forthcoming book Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, due out on April 18 from The New Press.

"The use of force was the last option," said McClellan, adding that the option had to be planned for.

In his memo, Manning paraphrased Bush as saying "'The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,'" according to the Times report. 'This was when the bombing would begin'."

"We were continuing to pursue a diplomatic solution, but we recognized that is was necessary to prepare and plan accordingly in the event we would need to use force," McClellan said.

"The president pursed a diplomatic solution, that's why we went to the United Nation, that's why we passed a 17th resolution that called on the regime to disclose or face serious consequences," he said.

Asked about the contradiction between his statements and the memo cited by the Times, McClellan said: "I think that our public and private comments are fully consistent."