by Gordon Brown
Our Italian journey had another important but far less political purpose: to meet the Pope. I knew, of course, that Pope Benedict was theologically conservative, but Sarah and I warmed to him as a person. We found we shared a passion for bringing education to the world’s poor. In private he had an ease of manner at odds with his rather austere public image and he struck up an instant rapport with John and Fraser. Both had baulked at wearing suits, shirts and ties for the occasion; John eventually struck a compromise, wearing a tie on top of his favourite T-shirt.
Like prime ministers before me I was drawn to the Middle East, asking myself what contribution Britain, historically so engaged in the region, could make to the peace process. In July I became the first British prime minister to address the Israeli Knesset; I spoke to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. My father had visited Israel twice a year for decades. In my schooldays, he had shown me slides of people and places in Israel on an old film projector that kept breaking down. Now I was lighting a flame at the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust in memory of the victims – I would also later visit Auschwitz to pay my respects – and was addressing Israel’s leaders. The widely respected historian Martin Gilbert and his wife Esther joined Sarah and me on the visit. Martin generously helped with my speech. I urged all parties in the Israeli Parliament to support a permanent peace with the Palestinians. The phrase ‘Next year in Jerusalem’, used every year at the Passover commemoration of the Jews’ wandering in the desert, should not just mean ‘home at last’, I said, but ‘free from war at last’. Swords should be turned into ploughshares in such a way that there was never a need for swords again.
This was one of a series of meetings that I held in the region to help promote the peace process – with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Oman and, of course, the Palestinians. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had made a state visit to Britain in October 2007. Then and later, often through his ambassador in Washington, I acted as a go-between for him with the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, a friend of mine who was determined to find an ever-elusive settlement. In fact, the outlines of a settlement – a viable Palestine and a stable Israel with shared occupancy of Jerusalem – were already there on the table. The issue was how we could get agreement. At this point Tony Blair was travelling back and forth from London as Middle East envoy and America continued to take the lead in negotiations. Nicolas Sarkozy, however, favoured a European initiative. I felt that to deliver a two-state solution we also needed a twenty-one-state solution – all the Arab countries agreeing a settlement with Israel – to which the king of Saudi Arabia was the key.
As had become the norm, any progress was swiftly followed by setbacks. Hopes rose in January 2009 after the latest ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, when I was part of a delegation that included other European heads of government that visited Egypt to pledge funds for the reconstruction of Gaza and the West Bank. That same day we all flew to Jerusalem to dine with Israel’s major party leaders. But in the end there proved to be no way forward. Despite or perhaps because of his bold plans for peace, Olmert was besieged by accusations of corruption. King Abdullah, meanwhile, was ageing and in poor health.
At that Jerusalem dinner, Benjamin Netanyahu, then leader of Israel’s opposition and soon to be prime minister, made clear that his overriding objective was not a two-state solution but preventing a nuclear Iran. Netanyahu was an old friend and colleague – we had been finance ministers together. I knew he was influenced by his father’s long-expressed doubts about Iran’s trustworthiness. His views were not to change. Israel was and is utterly committed to a Middle East with no nuclear states except their own. With British support, the Israelis had secretly and unceremoniously bombed Syria’s nuclear facility in the autumn of 2007. Later, Netanyahu would bitterly oppose the international nuclear deal agreed with Iran in 2015 for not being tough enough. By 2009, with Netanyahu newly empowered as prime minister and holding quite different priorities from Olmert’s, a two-state solution was off the table. Sadly, at the time of writing it still is.
In 2008 I was also able to push forward our agenda for international development. Douglas Alexander, our minister for international development, had worked with me since the 1980s. He had been passionate about eliminating global poverty since his schooldays and was one of a line of very successful development ministers, following Clare Short, Valerie Amos and Hilary Benn. I was fortunate now to be able draw on his very considerable skills and judgement in this and in many other areas. In November 2007, Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian prime minister, had visited No. 10 to launch the Global Health Partnership, a concerted attempt to fund a worldwide effort against preventable and curable diseases. In September 2008 at a special United Nations global education event, I launched Education for All, our initiative to get every child in the world to school by 2015. By now I was working closely with the champions of global education, Nelson Mandela’s wife Graça Machel (one of my mentors), John Sexton the visionary president of New York University who was now creating the first Global Network University, President Kikwete of Tanzania whose pioneering initiative Big Results Now would become a model for all Africa, and Jim Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank whose commitment to a world free of poverty had transformed that institution. Education supported by aid was, I said, the best route out of poverty for millions.
In August 2008 I visited China a second time for the last days of the Beijing Olympics. It was in part a family trip. John and Fraser came with us, but with so many official meetings to attend we were fortunate to have with us taking charge of the children Melanie Derby, who for ten years, in and out of Downing Street, in London and in Scotland, was the best carer, comforter and friend. Our family and hers became and remain very close. I knew this would prove a more difficult trip diplomatically as the Chinese had publicly objected to my decision to meet the Dalai Lama that April, the outcome of which had been my agreement that Britain would change its position from favouring Tibetan independence to supporting ‘autonomy within China’ – ironically, the Dalai Lama’s own policy. Even though the Chinese leadership rejected this as well, they recognised that we had gone some way to narrow our differences.
Although we had come to Beijing for the closing ceremony of the Olympics we were there in time to cheer on Tim Brabants as he took kayaking gold, sit behind Pelé at the football final and visit the British team in the Olympic Village. I would also greet the victorious medal winners off their plane when they landed back at Heathrow. As we watched the track and field competition, one moment brought back a painful memory: we sighed when our men’s 4 x 100 m relay team dropped the baton – just as I had on my first sports day at secondary school. But another handover went more smoothly: when Boris Johnson and I spoke to cheering crowds at the British compound as Beijing passed the Olympic baton to London.
It is said that in their first term prime ministers typically focus on domestic issues and only in their second do they shift their attention to foreign affairs. Leaving aside each of these overseas endeavours, I did not have that luxury, for overshadowing every one of them were the most pressing foreign policy issues of all: Iraq and Afghanistan. For four years before I entered No. 10, and for the first time in decades, Britain had been fighting two major wars, both of which were going badly.
CHAPTER 13
IRAQ: HOW WE WERE ALL MISLED
For those of us who are of a certain age, there are memories we share, some that will never die. They become indelible threads, tragic and triumphant, in the time-bound fabric of our lives. And for more than half a century, they have come to us almost instantaneously on television.
On 11 September 2001, I happened to be sitting with Sue Nye and Ed Balls watching TV in the small temporary office in the Treasury that I had while the building was being renovated. We were waiting for the coverage of Tony Blair’s speech on Europe to the Trades Union Congress in Brighton when the programme was suddenly interrupted with the first horr
ifying images of an attack on the Twin Towers in New York. A little under twenty minutes later, a second plane crashed into the World Trade Center. We then heard news of a plane flying into the Pentagon, followed by one crashing into a field in Pennsylvania that was probably on its way to the Capitol or White House. In a little over an hour and a half after the first plane struck, both of the Twin Towers lay in ruin and thousands had died unspeakable deaths, including sixty-seven British citizens.
There are moments in history that once lived through can never be forgotten. On that November day in 1963 I remember being in Kirkcaldy when I first heard of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I vividly remember too the real anxiety across the world at the time of the Cuban missile crisis the year before. And, nearly thirty years later, there were the unforgettable scenes from Germany when the Berlin Wall – seemingly such a permanent scar across the heart of Europe – came crashing down. That moment in 1989; the execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu on Christmas Day the same year; Yeltsin standing astride a Russian tank in defiance of an attempted coup in 1991: these events and their accompanying images marked a geopolitical shift that transformed the balance of power not just in Europe but across the entire world, a process that is still under way. And most recently, and sad to say, I will never forget waking up in the early hours of 24 June 2016 to hear David Dimbleby’s confirmation that the British people had voted to reverse our decision of forty years before and leave the European Union. The finality of his words will stay with me always.
So it was on 11 September 2001. I cried at the carnage that had been inflicted on our closest ally, America, a place I often visited on official business and on holiday. I worried about friends and colleagues in New York – indeed, there were a number of Treasury officials there on that day. Fortunately they soon phoned to say they were safe. We then had to consider the possibility that what had happened was a prelude to further attacks in Europe – perhaps London. The whole of Whitehall went into lockdown. I received a series of security briefings, and across government, far into the night, we reviewed what measures to take if a terrorist assault were to hit the UK.
I sensed that once more we were at a historic turning point, and remember saying to Sue and Ed that everything would now change. While economics had dominated the previous decade, security and foreign policy, I predicted, would be front and centre in the coming one. And so it turned out, as 9/11 was followed by 7/7 and further terrorist atrocities in the UK in the ensuing years.
We knew within hours that the terrorists were working out of Afghanistan, that their funding came from Saudi Arabia and that the epicentre of their activities was the border with Pakistan. Almost immediately, George Bush invoked Article 5 of the NATO Charter which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all, and assembled a coalition to invade Afghanistan that eventually included fifty-one countries. The first combat operations of Operation Enduring Freedom began less than a month later on 7 October 2001. In Britain support for the United States was instinctive – which Tony encapsulated eloquently when he said we stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with America. But this instinct would be severely tested in the maelstrom that followed.
The connection between 9/11 and the military invasion of Afghanistan was completely clear, but later, when I first heard that war in Iraq was being planned, I asked ‘Why Iraq?’ Fifteen years on, the decision to go to war there remains the most controversial foreign-policy decision of our generation.
There was nothing new about UK military intervention overseas. Britain had sent troops to the Korean War in the 1950s, and had briefly waged war to reclaim the Suez Canal later that decade, fought in Malaysia during the 1960s, re-established control over the Falklands in the 1980s, and acted as part of an international coalition to halt Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the 1990s. More recently, we had deployed UK forces to stop ethnic cleansing by Serb militias in Kosovo in 1998, participated in the Desert Fox operation in Iraq during the same year, and intervened in Sierra Leone in 2000. But Iraq in 2003 was different: unlike these other interventions, we participated in a full-scale occupation of another sovereign state for the first time since the Second World War. While Britain had stayed out of Vietnam in the 1960s – Harold Wilson having rebuffed Lyndon Johnson’s request for a token presence (‘a few Scottish bagpipers’, as the president put it) – we would become not only America’s fellow combatants in Iraq, with the second-largest contingent in the coalition force, but their biggest cheerleader too.
I know there are times when conflict cannot be avoided. While war is evil, war is sometimes the lesser evil. Force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as was the case in the Balkans in the late 1990s or – as should have been the case – in Rwanda earlier that decade. But we should never wage war unless the cause is just. War must always be the last resort, proportionate, solely for the purpose intended, and likely to do more good than harm. Or, as I said to the Chilcot Inquiry into our involvement in the Iraq War, you cannot fight a just war unless you have grounds to believe you can create a just peace.
When I consider the rush to war in March 2003 – especially in light of what we now know about the absence of weapons of mass destruction – I ask myself over and over whether I could have made more of a difference before that fateful decision was taken. Strange as it may seem, chancellors have seldom been at the centre of decision-making in matters of war and peace. Indeed, in 1915, the then chancellor Lloyd George had to become minister of munitions in order to play a central role in Britain’s effort in the First World War. The chancellor has not been a member of most War Cabinets: there was, for example, no Treasury representative in Churchill’s War Cabinet or Thatcher’s during the Falklands conflict. My official role leading up to the conflict was to find the funds for it.
At the time, therefore, I had as much and as little access to security and intelligence information as most other Cabinet ministers. For that reason, when I went before Chilcot in 2010, I defended our decision to go to war. I explained that Iraq had systematically defied the resolutions unanimously passed by the United Nations. That was and remains true. However, in retrospect, having reviewed all the information now available – not just that revealed by the Hutton, Butler and Chilcot inquiries but in America too – I feel I now understand how we were all misled on the existence of WMDs.
In 2002 and 2003 I was on the road to a head-on collision with Tony over three matters: the euro, the NHS and tuition fees. All coincided with our decision to go into Iraq. Embroiled in these battles, I was, rightly or wrongly, anxious to avoid a fourth area of dispute, particularly one that was not my departmental responsibility but the province of Tony, the Foreign Office under Jack Straw, and the Ministry of Defence under Geoff Hoon. Most of all, there was nothing at the outset that caused me to doubt the threat Iraq posed to regional stability and global order.
Nevertheless, I did make a number of requests for information. At my insistence, I was shown more of the up-to-date British intelligence which seemed to prove that Iraq had WMDs. Indeed, I had a number of private conversations with Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6. His officials reported chapter and verse the evidence against Saddam and impressed upon me that it was well founded. I was told that they knew where the weapons were housed; I remember thinking at the time that it was almost as if they could give me the street name and number where they were located. I also knew that two of my Cabinet colleagues, Robin Cook and Clare Short, had doubts. But in the build-up to war neither approached me with any contrary information. In retrospect, I regret that I did not press as hard as I should have. By not questioning the evidence with sufficient rigour, I let myself and many others down, especially the families of the soldiers who would be lost in the conflict.
The major formal government meetings in the lead-up to our war with Iraq revolved around an inner circle of officials from No. 10, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. In March 2003, I was invited into what was, in hindsight, a rushed and last-minute discussion on post
-war reconstruction. The Treasury then worked with the US to devise a new currency for Iraq using the Bank of England’s contractors to print the notes. Beyond questions of financing, the Treasury had little involvement.
I did not know until after I left office of the Blair–Bush telephone call in December 2001 in which Tony appeared to agree in principle to support the American-led intervention in Iraq. When in early 2002 I heard through the Whitehall grapevine about the secret ‘Iraq: Options Paper’ by the Defence and Overseas Secretariat discussing various strategies for ‘regime change’, I asked to see it. But the version I eventually received turned out to be different from the original document. I admired Robin Cook for raising tough questions at a Cabinet discussion on 7 March but the evidence I was being given appeared to be accurate – that Iraq did possess WMDs.
Between April and July important steps to war were taken – decisions that I did not learn of until much later: at Tony’s meeting with George Bush at his Crawford ranch in Texas on 5–6 April (at which Tony did not commit Britain to war with Iraq, but discussed with the president the first quarter of 2003 as a possible timeframe for action against Saddam Hussein); at the pre-Crawford discussion at Chequers on 2 April (in which there was a discussion among Tony’s closest advisers of whether WMD or regime change should be given as the justification if the UK went to war); with Tony’s July letter to the president stating ‘I will be with you, whatever’; and with the No. 10 meeting around the Defence and Overseas Secretariat paper of 21 July, ‘Iraq: conditions for military action’.
That paper stated that when ‘the prime minister discussed Iraq with President Bush in Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met’; these conditions were that efforts were first made to try to eliminate Iraq’s WMDs through UN weapons inspectors, that the Israel–Palestine crisis was quiescent, that there was a workable coalition and efforts undertaken to ‘shape’ public opinion. When the paper was discussed in No. 10 two days later, on 23 July, Tony said: ‘If the political context were right, people would support regime change.’ ‘We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action,’ the minutes said, with the caveat that ‘we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions’. In retrospect, I should have barged my way into these discussions.