Political Director of the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office Peter Ricketts wrote a memo to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on March 22, 2002, which was leaked to the press during May 2005 as part of the Downing Street Memos. It stated: ” ‘The truth is that what has changed [regarding our position on Iraq] is not the pace of Saddam Hussein’s WMD programmes, but our tolerance of them post-11 September. This is not something we need to be defensive about, but attempts to claim otherwise publicly will increase skepticism about our case. …[The] US[‘s] scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing.’ ”
– Philip Taylor, The War in Iraq, Page 249