“The British ambassador to Washington, Christopher Meyer, wrote to the Prime Minister’s [Tony Blair’s] Office in London about a meeting he had had with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on March 17, 2002 [regarding an invasion of Iraq]: ‘It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe. The US could go it alone if it wanted to. But if it wanted to act with partners, there had to be a strategy for building support for military action against Saddam. I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UN Security Council resolutions and the Middle East peace process as an integral part of the anti-Saddam strategy. …I said that the UK was giving serious thought to publishing a paper that would make a case against Saddam. If the UK were to join the US in any operation against Saddam, we would have to be able to take a critical mass of parliamentary and public opinion with us.’ ”
– Deepak Tripathi, Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan, Page 62