‘How can we make things worse than a dictator murdering his people?’ I would say, exasperated.
A further frustration was that I still wasn’t getting the accurate information I needed. Sometimes I felt that I picked up more from odd members of the Syrian diaspora I’d meet than I did from our diplomats.
Nor was I getting the options I needed from officials. National security adviser Kim Darroch wrote to me that there was some reluctance in the Whitehall machinery to put pen to paper with ideas. I wrote back: ‘This has to stop – just tell people to caveat what they say!’ – pleading for the frankest advice and the boldest ideas, even if civil servants had to hedge their language.
Kim wrote again about the scepticism and the tendency to seek out legal obstacles. As I scribbled on a later strategy document: ‘… of course (HISTORIANS note) we need legal advice. But we should consider what might work and then ask lawyers – not the other way round.’ If the military’s view was ‘all or nothing’, the FCO’s seemed to be ‘almost nothing’.
I understood their nervousness. The aftermath of the invasion in Iraq had been horrendous. There was an inquiry under way. But I also believed it was misguided. Civil servants could only be held to account for the things they advised. It was different for me. Prime ministers are not just responsible for what they do, but for what they don’t do. I could see what was going to happen if we didn’t act. If Assad won, or clung on, it would mean more towns devastated, lives destroyed, families displaced – and more terrorism here in Britain. There was no doubt: this dictatorial, corrupt, brutal, bloodthirsty leader slaughtering Sunni Muslims while the West stood to one side would be the greatest piece of propaganda for extremism.
I have always believed that just because you can’t do everything doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. Action might not offer a high probability of success, but inaction pretty much guaranteed an outcome at least as bad. Couldn’t the military see that? In March 2013 I even had to overrule a reluctant MoD and order that chemical-weapons-sampling and protective equipment be sent to the FSA. The threat of such weapons played on my mind constantly.
Perhaps my biggest frustration, however, lay with the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Obama had admitted back in August 2012 that if Assad used chemical weapons, it ‘would change my calculus’. That was good. We had a red line, and I trusted 100 per cent that if it were crossed, he would act. But in the meantime, indecisiveness reigned supreme over American policy on Syria. The ‘train, equip and mentor’ programme that had kicked off by late January 2013 was no more than the start of assisting real pressure from below.
As the world dragged its feet, Assad dug in. In November 2012 I went to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan to see the effects of his brutality. Rows and rows of white tents stretched far into the desert. Children playing football in the dust stopped and stared. People were desperate to tell me about being bombed and shot out of their houses. What hit me most was the evident permanence of the place – the tarmac roads, proper street signs, souk-like shops. And the size – it was already the fourth-biggest city in Jordan.
By May 2013, I confessed that I thought Assad was beginning to win: ‘All the things we and the Americans should have done nine months ago – from proper integrated command centres for the opposition leaders to train and help them – it’s sort of beginning to happen now, but it’s happening nine months later than it should have done. I don’t think it’s going to work, because Assad thinks he’s doing too well and the peace process is too convoluted.’ What’s more, I recorded my concern about chemical weapons, which the regime was reportedly using on a small scale.
William Hague returned from the Geneva Conference the following month, with no agreement reached. The opposition wouldn’t countenance Assad staying in the long term, and the Alawites in the regime wouldn’t risk trying to dump him until it was clear that he was losing.
I was willing to try anything, so I threw a curveball. I could see that Russia, which supported the regime, could prove a big frustration to our efforts. So in the spring of 2013 I attempted some shuttle diplomacy to get the Russians and Americans closer together on the idea of a transition deal built around a new leader from within, or approved by, the regime.
From the landline in my Downing Street office I spoke to Putin. ‘Vladimir,’ I said, ‘I’d like to come and talk to you about Syria – purely and simply about Syria. You’re chairing the G20 and I’m chairing the G8, and it’s a perfect excuse for us to meet without everyone asking why we’re meeting.’ He said it was a great idea, and asked if I’d like to come to Sochi to see the preparations for the Winter Olympics.
I was alone in my office, and wanted to get the official view on such a visit. My door was shut, so I picked up the first thing on my desk, a teaspoon, and threw it at the door, hoping it would summon someone. Luckily John Casson appeared and said he thought I should go. From then on, it was known as ‘the spoon conversation’.
But before I could get there, something unhelpful happened. We told the US what we had planned, and that caused John Kerry to rush to see Putin in Moscow a couple of days before us. He pitched the same ‘Let’s make common cause to build a Syrian government that can defeat terror’ proposal, but without pinning Putin down on specifics. The danger was that he’d leave a slightly conflicted picture.
Still determined to seal some sort of deal, I flew to the Black Sea city of Sochi on 10 May. This subtropical resort has its own microclimate – it’s all palm trees and sandy beaches – and yet it was, incredibly, where Russia would be hosting the Winter Olympics the following year.
It was an extraordinary meeting at Putin’s villa overlooking the water. He started off with a stack of cue cards in front of him. We did half an hour on the bilateral relationship – he got about a third of the way through the card tower – referencing everything from British visa policy to the Russian ban on British beef and lamb, which I had been lobbying hard to have lifted. He joked that I seemed willing to trade British cows for Russian businessmen.
Then he pushed the pile to one side. ‘Look,’ he said, fixing me with his blue-eyed, shark-like stare, ‘I don’t want to have the normal argument where I say you’ve got it wrong about Syria and Libya, and you say, no you’ve got it wrong about Syria and Libya, and we have an argument. I want to talk very frankly about how we try and put a sensible plan together.’
Great. That was exactly why I was there. His preoccupation – whether it was genuine or just a posture to discredit the opposition – was with the risks of supporting terrorism. He said that the logic of my position seemed to be that we’d have the Al Nusra Front at the peace deal. ‘No,’ I hit back. ‘I don’t want the Al Nusra Front at the peace deal. I want us to unite with a credible unity government of Syria and destroy them.’ He smiled. ‘Destroy them? Ah, now you’re talking my language.’
He claimed that his support for Syria was not predicated on supporting Assad personally. I said I understood that a transition from Assad needed credible Alawite and Sunni leaders – including those from within the regime – to work together. We agreed that the UN and Geneva peace process wasn’t working. I proposed a P4 approach (the UK, France, the US and Russia). I said the UK would accept a compromise – a ceasefire before any promises of Assad’s departure – if Russia accepted that he could not be part of a transitional deal. My vision was for an international conference in Moscow that ended the war with (presumably) the Moscow Agreement. Who cared who got the credit, if it meant getting the right outcome?
Our three hours together turned out to be the most substantive meeting between a Russian leader and a UK leader since Thatcher and Gorbachev. It was followed by a twelve-course lunch, complete with life-sized pineapples made of ice, containing golden spoons laden with caviar, and a caramel chocolate dessert made to look like Big Ben.
After that, Putin was eager to show how he had been preparing for the Wi
nter Olympics. He suddenly appeared wearing dark sunglasses, ushered me into a black Mercedes SUV – just the two of us and a translator – and drove us at high speed to a helipad. We jumped into a helicopter and flew over the Olympic site. He proudly pointed out where they had been storing up snow over the winter, under huge blue tarpaulins. Looking down on the icy scene below, I could feel our relationship thawing. I seemed finally to be getting through to him.
I worked hard to build on this. When Putin visited Britain for the G8 that summer I invited him to Downing Street to honour the Royal Navy veterans who crewed the Arctic convoys supplying our Soviet allies during the Second World War, undertaking what Churchill described as ‘the worst journey in the world’.
They had been given the same medal, the Atlantic Star, as those who escorted convoys between Britain and America. The Arctic convoy veterans felt that they had been ignored, not least because of the simple fact that the Atlantic and the Arctic are different oceans. I was sympathetic to their case, and helped to secure them a separate medal. It was a joy to bring this campaign to an end, and to have these brave men who had helped defeat Nazi Germany at No. 10.
So here they now were, naval berets on their white hair, their blazers heavy with decorations, being presented with Arctic Stars by me, and Ushakov Medals by the Russian president. The whole exercise seemed to soften him. He said in the press conference, ‘A lot brings us together in our history, and I hope that we will have a brilliant future lying ahead.’
The Putin–Cameron bond had reached new levels. He was even cracking jokes, though always with a sinister edge. After the ceremony he said to me, ‘David, I know you think that I have horns and a tail and don’t really believe in democracy …’ A smile crept in. ‘And you know, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.’
It was an alliance that was not to last.
And it was not just Russia. I would need to work almost as hard to ensure that the EU would not frustrate our Syrian strategy.
The arms embargo, imposed in May 2011, damaged our cause, because it prevented the rebels from getting the weapons they needed. It had awful echoes of Bosnia, so at the NSC I pushed for a consensus to end the embargo, though ultimately that would need EU approval. Ed Llewellyn and John Casson discovered when chatting to diplomats that the EU was about to roll over the embargo for another year, blocking weapons from all sides. We had to work quickly to get this altered to a one-month rollover. That gave us time to look for a better alternative formulation.
In the end, it came about in a strange way. François Hollande’s office rang mine at the start of the European Council meeting on 14 and 15 March 2013 and asked if I’d talk to him about the Syrian arms embargo. I walked into his room in Brussels anticipating negotiations. There was already a television camera there. I sat down, and he said in English that we really must scrap this arms embargo. I think he wanted to show that he could lead European policy, having been outmanoeuvred by Merkel and me during the previous Council’s budget negotiations.
I was delighted to concur, and once again I didn’t care if he wanted to make it look like his idea. The EU allowed the embargo to lapse – though further agreements would have to be reached before the Syrian rebels could be supplied with arms. However, some EU countries remained deeply sceptical about helping the rebels. Some were convinced that whatever followed Assad would mean more persecution of Christians; others that it was the Iraq War all over again, and we should stay out of it.
As so often happens in politics, the right result had an unhelpful by-product. Removing the embargo sparked the suspicions of Conservative backbenchers that there was a conspiracy afoot that would take us back to some Iraq-style intervention. As a result, an Early Day Motion was tabled in Parliament on 5 June calling for a vote on any decision to arm the Syrian rebels. I wish I could have dismissed it as the usual suspects causing trouble. But it was more serious than that. Signed by forty-nine MPs, it reflected a large proportion of public opinion which was wary of starting down a slippery slope towards another full-scale engagement.
From now on, the element that was most likely to frustrate British action in Syria wasn’t the EU, the US or Russia. It wasn’t my cabinet, the security services or the military. It was public opinion, which was played back to me by politicians. If there was a vote in Parliament on taking action – and a vote would be likely – I wasn’t convinced that we would get it through. A year earlier, Andrew Cooper’s polling had revealed that 46 per cent of the British public would support military action against Syria with a UN resolution, and only 14 per cent without one. Since Russia made a UN resolution impossible, I reflected that only a single, big atrocity committed by Assad would change people’s minds and enable me to change my position.
During the G8 summit I hosted in Northern Ireland in June 2013, Obama and I visited an integrated school in Enniskillen, where Catholic and Protestant children learned side by side. It was all poster paint and high-fives, but during the car journey back to the summit, conversation turned to Syria.
‘Look,’ I said to him as he gazed out of the window at a town that itself had been so wounded by conflict, ‘I do think that the continued use of chemical weapons further strengthens the argument that we have to do more.’ I added, however, that the state of opinion in Britain on intervention was such that unless there was a major atrocity, we might only be able to help back up America or help with logistics and refuelling when it came to airstrikes.
Obama restated that a big chemical-weapons attack was the only thing that would prompt American action. ‘But I want to tell you, David, I’ll be very clear that it won’t be about regime change. It won’t be because I change my Syria strategy, it won’t be an excuse to get in there big-time and topple the regime.’
We left the discussion there, and did not instruct our teams to work out in detail what would happen next. Looking back, this was our big mistake. If we had agreed then and there the response we would make to a chemical-weapons attack – and had gone on to specify the resources we would use, the targets we would strike – events could have taken a different and, in my view, far better course.
It was clear that, despite our alignment on so many issues, despite our genuine friendship, on Syria our perspectives were very different. All leaders are steered by history. As I’ve said, I was deeply affected by the West’s failure in the Balkans and in Rwanda. That weighed as heavily on me as the mistakes of Iraq. But for Obama, Iraq was definitive.
As well as my concerns about the US approach to the military track, I had concerns about its approach to the diplomatic track. Because of the scale of the Syrian people’s suffering, because of the awfulness of the terrorism being created, I felt that we all should have been prepared to do more to give Russia the status it wanted. I was happy to do that. I never felt Obama was. I still wonder now whether, if Russia had been treated as a diplomatic equal, it could have led to a peaceful outcome.
I know how carefully Obama analysed things, and I am sure his head was telling him that Putin probably wouldn’t alter his approach, even with a more direct presidential relationship. But I think he was wrong not to act faster and try harder. ‘I think the person who has been absent from it all is Obama. The Americans have not done enough, quickly enough, to back the right people in Syria, and I think Obama has rather missed the boat. It’s a slow-moving tragedy,’ was how I put it on tape.
The basic difference between Obama and me was that I did not accept that it was inevitable that any intervention would put us on a slippery slope to tens of thousands of our troops on the ground. A more limited Libya-style approach might not have been enough to force the regime to cut a deal, but it certainly would have offered a better chance of doing so than knowingly doing too little too late.
By July 2013 I had a broader assessment: ‘The problem with Syria is not excessive intervention leading to disaster; it’s lack of intervention which led to Assad being too strong … the only rebel
s with any momentum at the moment are the extremists, and that’s because the Western world hasn’t done enough to back the good guys.’
Then on Wednesday, 21 August, events took a horrific turn. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians had been killed in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Ghouta. It was the long-dreaded large chemical attack. Surely this was the big event that would shock the world and shake us into action. I watched the horrific footage – infants fitting and foaming at the mouth, parents hysterical with fear and grief. The rows of lifeless children in the makeshift mortuaries reminded me of when we lost Ivan.
Poison gas is heavier than air, and sinks down into the shelters where civilians, including children, are hiding from the fighting above. It is totally indiscriminate, and is the most awful way to die. After the horrors it famously wrought during the First World War, the use of poison gas was banned by the Geneva Protocol in 1925. The only comparable incident in modern times was Saddam Hussein’s attack on Halabja in 1988, in which 5,000 people were killed.
There was no doubt that Assad was responsible, or about the sort of gas that was used: sarin. Twenty times more deadly than cyanide. Stockpiled by the regime for years. It was carried on rockets that only the regime could access. These were the instruments of evil – and they were the actions of a tyrant emboldened and ruthless.
That was it. Red line crossed. Not only Obama’s red line for action but, I thought, a threshold in Britain’s collective consciousness – a long-held, visceral aversion to the notorious chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas that had left our soldiers guttering, choking and drowning on the battlefields a century earlier.
I could see two paths opening up before us.
One: there is a chemical-weapons attack, the next day a hundred American Cruise missiles and ten British ones destroy Syrian chemical-weapons command and control sites. I then recall Parliament and say a red line was set, they crossed it, our response was the right thing to do.
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