Iraq inquiry hears about Blair shift on regime change

By Peter Millership

LONDON (Reuters) - George W. Bush and Tony Blair appeared to have "converged" on regime change in Iraq after talks at the U.S. president's Texas ranch in April 2002, a former British ambassador to Washington said on Thursday.

Christopher Meyer, ambassador to the United States between 1997 and 2003, said private one-to-one talks between Bush and the then Prime Minister seemed to mark an important point on the route to the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

"I know what the Cabinet Office says were the results of the meeting but to this day I am not entirely clear what degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford ranch," Meyer told a inquiry into the Iraq war.

Meyer said comments that Blair made after the Texas meeting seemed to signal that his views on whether to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had moved towards Bush's stand.

"There are clues in the speech that Tony Blair gave the next day ... To the best of my knowledge, I may be wrong, this was the first time that Tony Blair had said in public 'regime change'," Meyer said.

"What he was trying to do was to draw the lessons of 9/11 and apply them to the situation in Iraq which led -- I think not inadvertently but deliberately -- to a conflation of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein."

Speaking to the inquiry in London on its third day, Meyer said: "When I heard that speech, I thought that this represents a tightening of the UK/U.S. alliance and a degree of convergence on the danger that Saddam Hussein presented."

Some U.S. officials had argued that there were possible links between Saddam and al Qaeda, which was blamed for masterminding the 2001 attacks on the United States. However, these suggestions have since been discredited.