American President George W. Bush’s plans to convene a meeting of coalition partners in Bermuda to set the deadline for the Iraq war was vetoed by Britain and Spain, it has been revealed.

As the world yesterday marked the fifteenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the US which led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, a new biography of the 43rd president details plans for the scuppered Bermuda summit.

“With the attack on Iraq imminent [in March 2003] Bush decided it would be useful to meet once more with British Prime Minister Tony Blair,” says biographer Jean Edward Smith in his bestselling new account of the 2001-09 Bush presidency, simply titled Bush.

“Without Britain’s support, America would be virtually alone and Bush wanted to support Blair [against domestic British opposition to the pending war] all he could …

“Bush had originally suggested they meet in Bermuda, where President Eisenhower had met Churchill and later Harold Macmillan, but the British believed Bermuda was geographically too close to the United States and thus symbolically suspect [in the eyes of British antiwar politicians and activists].”

Bush’s father George H.W. Bush, the 41st American president, had also held back-to-back meetings with British Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major in Bermuda in 1990 and 1991.

Author Smith, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Toronto and the John Marshall Professor of Political Science at West Virginia’s Marshall University, says the summit venue was hastily changed to the Azores.

Meeting there on March 16, Bush and Blair were joined by Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar and Portuguese leader José Manuel Durão Barroso, both of whom also backed the American president’s plans to attack Iraq.

It was the Spanish leader Aznar who suggested the Azores as an alternative to Bermuda for that final pre-invasion meeting, explaining to Bush: “The name of those islands is associated with an article of dress [Bermuda shorts] that isn’t exactly appropriate for the gravity of the moment we find ourselves in.”

The US’s stated intent for commencing plans to invade Iraq following 9/11 was to remove “a regime that developed and used weapons of mass destruction, [harboured] and supported terrorists, committed outrageous human rights abuses, and defied the just demands of the United Nations and the world.”

In the lead-up to the invasion, the US and its chief ally Britain argued Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to both his Middle East neighbours and the broader international community.

Along with Iraq’s alleged development of WMDs, another justification for invasion was the purported link between the Saddam Hussein government and terrorist organisations including al-Qaeda, responsible for orchestrating the devastating 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC.

As with the argument that Iraq was developing biological and nuclear weapons, evidence linking Hussein and al-Qaeda was later discredited by multiple US and international intelligence agencies. In the Azores, Bush convened what was in effect a council of war with his closest allies in what he called “The Coalition of the Willing” — those countries which supported US plans to disarm Iraq and depose its leadership by way of military intervention.

President Bush announced the long-threatened invasion would commence 48 hours after he issued a final warning to Iraq following the end of the Azores meeting to say military action was imminent. “This is our last effort,” said Bush, who argued all diplomatic avenues to resolve the crisis had been exhausted. “Everyone has to be able to say we did everything we could to avoid war but this is the final moment, the moment of truth.”

The US-led invasion commenced a few days later on March 20.

Direct American and coalition military involvement in Iraq extended until 2011, with a smaller US force being deployed there in 2014 to help battle an ongoing sectarian insurgency.

It is estimated more than 200,000 people have died since the Iraq war began and that it will end up costing the US $2.2 trillion, including substantial amounts for the care of wounded veterans through at least the middle of this century. The decision by the US and Britain to go to war in Iraq was hugely controversial at the time, splitting the international community and pushing traditional pro-Washington allies such as France, Germany and Canada into an anti-war bloc that included China and Russia.

Professor Smith, who has been called today’s foremost biographer of formidable figures in American history, is the author of previous well-received books on Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt, Ulysses Grant, among others

He concludes his biography on the 43rd president saying: “Whether George W. Bush was the worst president in American history will long be debated, but his decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”

• Bush by Jean Edward Smith is published by Simon and Schuster and can be ordered through the Bermuda Bookstore or the Bookmart