London ? In the spring of 2002, two weeks before British Prime Minister Tony Blair journeyed to Crawford, Texas, to meet with President Bush at his ranch about the escalating confrontation with Iraq, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sounded a prescient warning.

“The rewards from your visit to Crawford will be few,” Straw wrote in a March 25 memo to Blair stamped “Secret and Personal.” “The risks are high, both for you and for the Government.”

In public, British officials were declaring their solidarity with the Bush administration’s calls for elimination of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But Straw’s memo and other secret documents disclosed by British journalist Michael Smith together reveal a different picture. Behind the scenes, British officials believed the U.S. administration was already committed to a war that they feared was ill-conceived and illegal.

“I think there is a real risk that the administration underestimates the difficulties,” David Manning, Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote to the prime minister on March 14, 2002, after he returned from meetings with Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, and her staff. “They may agree that failure isn’t an option, but this does not mean they will necessarily avoid it.”

A U.S. official with firsthand knowledge of the events said the concerns raised by British officials “played a useful role.”

“Were they paid a tremendous amount of heed?” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I think it’s hard to say they were.”

This article is based on those memos, supplemented by interviews with officials on both sides of the Atlantic – none of whom was willing to be cited by name because of the sensitivity of the issue – and written accounts. Spokesmen for the Foreign Office and the prime minister’s office declined to comment but did not question the authenticity of the documents.

Sense of alarm

British concerns over the direction of Iraq policy began long before July 2002. By the end of January of that year, officials said, the British Embassy in Washington informed London that U.S. military planning for an invasion of Iraq had begun. The sense of alarm here increased after Bush, in his State of the Union address on Jan. 29, branded Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil.”

Blair did not share their view. His aides contend that in the days immediately after the 9-11 attacks, Blair saw Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a potential danger that needed to be dealt with. But the prime minister faced an entirely different set of obstacles, political and legal, than Bush did, including much stronger domestic opposition to war.

The first major British cabinet discussion on Iraq took place March 7, 2002, according to the memoirs of Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who quotes several senior cabinet secretaries as raising questions about the war. “What has changed that suddenly gives us the legal right to take military action that we didn’t have a few months ago?” demanded David Blunkett, one of Blair’s closest political allies.

Sticking with the U.S.

Blair defended his approach, Cook reported, by saying Britain’s national interest lay in staying closely allied with the United States. “I tell you that we must steer close to America,” Blair said, according to Cook. “If we don’t, we lose our influence to shape what they do.”

These themes would be repeated regularly in the first six Downing Street memos, composed between the March 7 cabinet meeting and Blair’s trip to Crawford a month later.

The first memo was a 10-page options paper produced by the overseas and defense secretariat of the Cabinet Office the day after the cabinet meeting. It noted that British intelligence on Iraq was poor, that no legal justification currently existed for invasion and that removing Saddam’s government “could involve nation building over many years.” Still, it concluded: “Despite the considerable difficulties, the use of overriding force in a ground campaign is the only option that we can be confident will remove Saddam and bring Iraq back into the international community.”

Hope to influence Bush

In his memo to Blair six days later, Manning wrote that “Bush has yet to find the answers to the big questions.” The foreign policy adviser raised several matters, including “how to persuade international opinion that military action against Iraq is necessary and justified” and “what happens on the morning after?”

On March 22, Peter Ricketts, then political director of the Foreign Office, wrote to Straw that Blair could also “bring home to Bush some of the realities” and “help Bush make good decisions by telling him things his own machine probably isn’t.”

Finally, Straw weighed in with his memo to Blair laying out the political problems in convincing members of Parliament in the ruling Labor Party that the use of force was justified, legal and would produce the desired result. But even after legal justification, Straw added, “We have also to answer the big question – what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole on this than on anything.”

Initial conditions

At the Crawford summit, Bush and Blair discussed the prospect of going to war in the spring or fall of 2003. According to a Cabinet Office briefing paper prepared in July, Blair told Bush, “The U.K. would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq’s WMD through U.N. weapons inspectors had been exhausted.”

In a post-summit speech at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, Blair offered a cryptic criticism of his advisers. His commitment to democratic values, Blair said, “means that when America is fighting for those values, then, however tough, we fight with her – no grandstanding, no offering implausible and impractical advice from the touchline.”

“In the end, only Blair and Bush know what they said to each other at Crawford and what they agreed to,” said a senior British official. “They spent a long time together with no one else around, which was most unusual.”

Rallying support

After his return from Washington, officials and analysts say, Blair sought to unify the fractious elements within his government and party around a policy of coercive diplomacy. “Blair comes back from Crawford with a clear sense that the Americans are preparing for war,” said Michael Clarke, director of the International Policy Institute at King’s College, who met with policy-makers at key points during the year. “But the British approach is slightly different – that we are preparing for war as a means of forcing Iraq to comply so that we don’t actually have to fight.”

By the early summer of 2002, officials said, there was a new sense of alarm and concern in London. The Bush administration had not committed to seeking U.N. support, and U.S. forces were increasing flyovers and other military activities that officials feared could be provocative. Opinion polls were showing a majority of Britons opposed military action and 160 members of Parliament had signed a proposed resolution urging caution.

Several senior officials were dispatched to the United States for consultations. When they returned to London, a meeting was scheduled that produced two more secret documents. The first was a Cabinet Office briefing paper dated July 21 that expressed concern that stepped-up U.S. air raids inside Iraq created “the risk that military action is precipitated in an unplanned way.”

The briefing paper also said a Security Council resolution setting up the return of U.N. inspectors to Iraq could be drafted in a way that Saddam would find unacceptable. “It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject (because he is unwilling to accept unfettered access) and which would not be regarded as unreasonable by the international community,” the memo reported.

‘A shift in attitude’

On July 23, officials gathered at Blair’s office. Among them were Straw; Manning; Richard Dearlove, chief of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency; Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon; Atty. Gen. Peter Goldsmith; and Adm. Michael Boyce, chief of the Defense Staff.

Dearlove, a veteran intelligence operative with a reputation for being hard-nosed, had just returned from a visit to Washington, where officials say he met with Rice and CIA Director George Tenet.

According to the July 23 memo, Dearlove reported “a perceptible shift in attitude” in Washington. “Military action was now seen as inevitable,” the memo said, adding that the president’s National Security Council “had no patience with the U.N. route.” Dearlove also included the observation that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

When Blair sat down with Bush at Camp David on Sept. 7, 2002, the president told him he had decided to seek a Security Council resolution demanding Iraqi compliance. Blair looked greatly relieved, according to Bob Woodward’s book, “Plan of Attack,” which was published last year. But then Bush looked Blair in the eye and warned that dealing with the Iraqi threat would still likely entail war.

“I’m with you,” Blair replied, according to Woodward’s book.