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Soulmates.... and the Iraq deal [War] "signed in blood"

The Inquiry into the Iraq War might have just got underway in the UK, but it has already led to some "interesting" evidence.

The SMH reports this rather startling revelation:

"The personal relationship between Tony Blair and George Bush was so strong the former US President felt his British counterpart was the ''only human being he could talk to'' and other world leaders were ''like creatures from outer space''.

The details of the friendship between the leaders emerged yesterday when the former British ambassador to the US Christopher Meyer gave evidence to the inquiry into the Iraq war.

Sir Christopher, who was in the US on September 11, 2001, and before Iraq was invaded in 2003, said the two men got on extraordinarily well, and he remembered the then US secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice, telling him Mr Bush felt understood by Mr Blair.

''I remember it was after they had a very good weekend together and so did the wives, and the press conference afterwards, the Colgate moment, didn't do justice to the nature of their relationship,'' he told the inquiry.

''They met at various meetings from time to time. It was Condoleeza Rice that told me that the President said he felt the only human being he could talk to was Tony … the rest were creatures from out of space.'"

Meanwhile, The Telegraph/UK reports on this evidence from the former UK Ambassador to the US:

"The two men were alone in the ranch so I'm not entirely clear to this day what degree of convergence (on Iraq policy) was signed in blood, if you like, at the Crawford ranch.

"But there are clues in the speech Tony Blair gave the next day, which was the first time he had said in public ‘regime change'. He was trying 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.

"When I read that I thought ‘this represents a tightening of the UK/US alliance and a degree of convergence on the danger Saddam Hussein presented'."

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