LONDON — It was the end of January 2003. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was five days away from giving a critical speech at the U.N. Security Council, laying out the case that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction and posed a danger to world peace.
But huddled with aides at the White House, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were not sure there was enough evidence to convince the Security Council. Without the council's explicit authorization, their plans for an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein could be difficult to defend under international law.
Bush proposed an alternative: paint a U.S. spy plane in United Nations colors and see if that didn't tempt Hussein's forces to shoot at it. In any case, he said, the war was "penciled in" for March 10 and the United States would go ahead with or without a second U.N. resolution.
Blair replied that he was "solidly with" the president.
That is the gist of an account of the Jan. 31, 2003, meeting contained in the new edition of "Lawless World," a book by British author Philippe Sands. He has not identified the writer of the memorandum on which the account is based, but British media reports say it was one of the aides in attendance: Sir David Manning, then security advisor to Blair and now the British ambassador in Washington.
A spokesman for Blair on Friday refused to address the allegations but repeated Downing Street's insistence that there was no decision to commit British forces to war in Iraq until after it was authorized by Parliament on March 18, two days before the invasion was launched.
A spokesman for Manning said the ambassador would not comment.
Sands, 45, is a professor of international law and a founding member of the Matrix law office in London, where Cherie Blair, the prime minister's wife, also works. His book, initially published last year, is not primarily about the decision to go to war in Iraq. Rather, it examines a range of issues in which, he argues, the Bush administration, with Britain's complicity, has undermined the "rules-based" international system built largely by the United States and Britain after World War II.
Sands said there was no doubt about the authenticity of the documents he quotes.
"They have not been denied, and they cannot be denied," he told the Los Angeles Times this week. Britain's Channel 4 News said it had seen the document outside Britain. The channel's Jon Snow presented excerpts in a broadcast last weekend.
