This article originally provided by The New York Times

June 8, 2005

Bush and Blair Deny 'Fixed' Iraq Reports

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, June 7 - President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain presented a united front on Tuesday against a recently disclosed British government memorandum that said in July 2002 that American intelligence was being "fixed" around the policy of removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

"There's nothing farther from the truth," Mr. Bush said in his first public comments about the so-called Downing Street memo, which has created anger among the administration's critics who see it as evidence that the president was intent to go to war with Iraq earlier than the White House has said.

"Look, both of us didn't want to use our military," Mr. Bush added. "Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option."

Mr. Blair, standing at Mr. Bush's side in a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House, said, "No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all."

The statements contradicted assertions in the memorandum, which was first disclosed by The Sunday Times of London on May 1 and which records the minutes of a meeting of Mr. Blair's senior policy advisers more than half a year before the war with Iraq began.

The contents of the memo have dogged Mr. Blair, who has taken years of political criticism at home for joining Mr. Bush in the Iraq war and has come to Washington on his first trip since his re-election in May expressly to seek support on his plans for more aid to Africa and for fighting global warming.

Mr. Blair, generally unsmiling through the 25-minute news conference, went home after dinner at the White House on Tuesday night with much less than he had wanted.

The two leaders pledged to cancel the debts of 27 of the world's poorest nations to the World Bank and the African Development Bank, although no deal has yet been reached. And as expected, Mr. Bush announced that the White House would release $674 million in aid to Africa, mostly for food aid to Ethiopia and Eritrea, drawn from money already appropriated by Congress.

But Mr. Blair failed to persuade Mr. Bush to agree to a doubling of aid to Africa, to $25 billion, from the world's richest nations, or to close the gap with the administration on policy toward climate change. Mr. Blair has cited the two areas as top foreign policy priorities.

Mr. Bush defended his decision not to join with Mr. Blair by repeatedly saying that the United States has already tripled aid to Africa to $3.2 billion during his administration. But he promised, "We'll do more down the road." The United States has one of the lowest levels of aid among developed countries in the share of national income it gives, or 16 cents to each $100.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair also appeared far apart on the issue of global warming - "I think everyone knows there are different perspectives on this issues," the prime minister acknowledged - as the president sidestepped a question about whether climate change was man-made. Instead Mr. Bush reiterated his longstanding position that the development of new technology was the best way to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Such differences were pushed aside in the public formalities of the news conference, where the two leaders seemed happy to have survived their re-elections after the war in Iraq.

"Glad you're here," Mr. Bush said to Mr. Blair. "Congratulations on your great victory. It was a landmark victory, and I'm really thrilled to be able to work with you to be able to spread freedom and peace over the next years."

The two expressed common ground most emphatically on the Downing Street memo, which was written by Matthew Rycroft, a top aide to Mr. Blair.

In particular, it reports that Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, had been in talks in Washington and had told other senior British officials that Mr. Bush "wanted to remove" Mr. Hussein "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D.," or weapons of mass destruction.

"But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," Sir Richard was reported in the memo to have told his colleagues.

Since the disclosure by The Sunday Times, 89 Democrats in the House of Representatives have written to the White House to ask if the memorandum accurately reflected the administration's thinking at the time, eight months before the American-led invasion of Iraq began. Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, has said there is "no need" to respond to the letter.

In his comments at the news conference, Mr. Bush noted of the memorandum that "they dropped it out in the middle of his race," indicating that he thought it had been made public last month to hurt Mr. Blair's chances for re-election.

Mr. Blair, who spoke frequently about the memorandum during his campaign, said it was written before the United States and Britain went to the United Nations seeking a resolution to justify military action in Iraq.

"Now, no one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time than me," Mr. Blair said.

The White House has always insisted that Mr. Bush did not make the decision to invade Iraq until after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented the administration's case to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, which relied heavily on claims, now discredited, that Iraq had illicit weapons. But as early as Nov. 21, 2001, Mr. Bush directed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to begin a review of what could be done to oust Mr. Hussein.