Aide: Murdoch Pushed For Iraq War

Rupert Murdoch pushed Tony Blair toward war in Iraq, the ex-prime minister’s former head flak has written in the final installment of his diaries, it was revealed Saturday. Alastair Campbell’s diaries are being serialized in The Guardian. Campbell recalls that only a week before the British House of Commons voted in 2003 to send troops to Iraq, Prime Minister Blair received a call from the Australian-born media mogul, who pressed him to involve the U.K.’s military resources faster. “But [Tony Blair] and I felt it was prompted by Washington, and another example of their over-crude diplomacy,” Campbell writes. “Murdoch was pushing all the Republican buttons, how the longer we waited the harder it got.”