by Gordon Brown
On the international front, progress was seemingly being made: in early August, Iraq’s foreign minister invited the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, to send the international weapons inspector, Hans Blix, to Baghdad. I and many others thought, wrongly as it turned out, that tensions were now easing. It was the calm that preceded the storm. When Tony came back from a summer holiday during which he read up papers on Iraqi weapons, he was convinced that we were at a disadvantage because the press were assuming war was inevitable and yet the public had been given no real reason why. Having sent George Bush a memo in July about the need to shift public opinion, he now spoke to him at the end of August and they met early in September. At a press conference in Sedgefield, just before his meeting with Bush, Tony was more explicit about the threat Iraq faced and promised a dossier. This would show, he said, that without any question Saddam was still trying to develop a chemical, biological and, potentially, nuclear capability.
Geoff Hoon simultaneously sought approval from me for six separate ‘urgent operational requirements’ – new equipment now needed as an emergency. In the first days of September I was sufficiently worried to ask for evidence of the claims Tony had made about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. I was sent what I now know to be the same evidence Tony had been given over the summer. The first was the 500-page paper ‘Proliferation Study of Iraq’, providing an in-depth examination of each of Iraq’s programmes to develop weapons, and what was called an ‘aide-memoire on Weapons of Mass Destruction and Proliferation’ addressing several countries of concern including Iraq.
In the first document there were claims that Iraq had ‘begun development’ of ballistic missiles with a range of more than 1,000 km, was ‘continuing to carry out research into nuclear weapons development’, and ‘could begin the production of mustard gas on a significant scale at any time and the nerve agents sarin and VX within weeks’. According to the study, Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons (CBW) production capability had ‘been dispersed to survive a military attack and UN inspections’. The second report said the regime had ‘the necessary command and control structure necessary to deliver CBW weapons’ and that Iraq was on ‘a worldwide drive to acquire production-level quantities of materials for making solid rocket motors and a continued emphasis on guidance and control technology’.
The facts I was being given were unequivocal – Saddam had a capability to produce chemical and biological weapons and was trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Just before Parliament was recalled and the dossier published I agreed to Geoff Hoon’s equipment requests, setting an initial overall ceiling of £150 million. I felt the answer was to be safe now rather than sorry afterwards. Jack Straw was at this time indicating that a genuine offer from Iraq to comply with UN resolutions would reduce the arguments for military action. I dictated an official note saying that it was right to prepare for all eventualities.
But in these months before the war, I had no idea that key decision-makers in America were already aware that the evidence on the existence of WMDs was weak, even negligible. We now know from classified American documents, which became public in 2011, that in the first days of September 2002 a report prepared by the US Joint Chief of Staff’s director for intelligence landed on the desk of the US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. ‘Please take a look at this material as to what we don’t know about WMD,’ Rumsfeld then wrote to Air Force General Richard Myers. ‘It is big,’ he added. So it was.
Commissioned by Rumsfeld to identify gaps in the US intelligence picture, it is now clear how forcibly this report challenged the official view: ‘We’ve struggled to estimate the unknowns … We range from 0% to about 75% knowledge on various aspects of their [Iraq’s WMD] program,’ the report stated. It conceded that US knowledge of the Iraqi nuclear weapons programme was based largely – perhaps 90 per cent of it – on analysis of imprecise intelligence. These assessments, the report said, relied ‘heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence. The evidentiary base is particularly sparse for Iraqi nuclear programs.’ The Americans thought Saddam possessed a viable weapon design, though this was qualified with the statement: ‘We do not know the status of enrichment capabilities … We do not know with confidence the location of any nuclear-weapon-related facilities.’ The same lack of intelligence was true of biological weapons – ‘We cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi facilities that produce, test, fill, or store biological weapons’ – and chemical weapons: ‘The specific agent and facility knowledge is 60–70 per cent incomplete … We do not know if all the processes required to produce a weapon are in place.’ The Iraqis, it was reported, ‘lack the precursors for sustained nerve-agent production’, confirming that US intelligence could not identify any Iraqi sites producing the final chemical agent. And as for missiles and the Iraqis’ ability to target countries like the UK with them, which was to be the subject of dramatic claims only a few weeks later, Rumsfeld was informed: ‘We doubt all processes are in place to produce longer-range missiles.’
While the British paper I had been given suggested a capability if not a production programme, this highly confidential US evidence was a refutation not only of the claim that Iraq was producing WMDs but also of their current capability to do so. It is astonishing that none of us in the British government ever saw this American report.
As we were later to discover, the intelligence had not established beyond doubt either that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons or that efforts to develop nuclear weapons continued. Christopher Meyer, the UK ambassador to Washington at the time, who had meetings with US officials on 12 September, said that ‘US interlocutors all pointed more generally to the need not to get trapped into juridical standards of proof. The bulk of the case should rest on history and commonsense argument, rather than specific new intelligence. When it came to Saddam’s WMD, absence of evidence was not the same as evidence of absence. We should not be afraid to argue that, just as in 1991, Iraq’s programmes were probably much further advanced than we knew.’
Some in the US had evidence which doubted even Iraq’s capabilities. In public, the administration said something different. In October 2002, one month after the report to Rumsfeld, President Bush went on record for the first time with the assertion that Iraq ‘possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons’ and was ‘seeking nuclear weapons’. Instead of investigating further the evidence held by the Joint Chiefs, the American administration produced a ninety-two-page National Intelligence Estimate, which made no mention of any counter-evidence and instead focused on what it called ‘Key Judgements’. The key judgements were that Iraq had continued its WMD programmes in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions, had chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions, and that, if left unchecked, it probably would have a nuclear weapon within the next ten years.
Papers subsequently declassified during the Chilcot Inquiry show that the Ministry of Defence presented Tony with a UK military-options paper on 15 October 2002, stating that an urgent decision had to be taken: ‘We need to decide this week … US military planning for an operation in Iraq is gathering pace,’ it said. Three basic packages were outlined, with the third – the so-called ‘northern’ option – being the most ambitious. If this option was followed, Britain would deploy more than 300 tanks and armoured vehicles and a total of 28,000 troops, which would enter Iraq from Turkey. It would be ‘a major element of the northern line of attack which the US now judge as essential’, officials reported. Two weeks later, a memo was sent setting out Tony’s support for this option, with him stipulating that the US should be informed of this for planning purposes.
But still evidence of Iraq’s possession of WMDs remained thin. The UK Joint Intelligence Committee had compiled one report on the threat from Iraq in May 2001 which was inconclusive. They had undertaken another review in March 2002, ahead of Tony’s trip to Crawford, which assessed that Iraq had some stocks of
chemical weapons. But neither of the reports contained details on locations or quantities. ‘Actually, our knowledge of Iraq was very, very superficial,’ a senior SIS officer later said. ‘We were small animals in a dark wood with the wind getting up and changing direction the whole time. These were very, very difficult days.’
The data and intelligence which formed the basis of the September dossier, ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government’, were reviewed at the Joint Intelligence Committee during September 2002.
While the US report that was not circulated outside the Pentagon concluded ‘we cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi facilities that produce, test, fill, or store biological weapons’ and that ‘we do not know with confidence the location of any nuclear-weapon-related facilities’, the British dossier said that ‘Iraq continued to produce chemical and biological agents’ and that Saddam ‘continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons’. We had moved from the UK papers in the summer which warned of Iraq’s capability to produce weapons, to claims around the autumn dossier that there were major weapons programmes under way.
How did this happen? After all, members and advisers to the British intelligence community had their own doubts and caveats. Of course there were mistakes, like the claim Iraq had sought uranium from Africa. But during September the intelligence communities believed they had found new evidence, including from an Iraqi defector code-named ‘Curveball’, who told the Americans of his certain knowledge of mobile biological weapons production facilities.
In Tony’s foreword to the September dossier, in the executive summary and in the full document, the assertion was made that Iraqi military planning allowed for some WMD to be ready within forty-five minutes of an order to use them. This led to a sensational headline in the next day’s Sun: ‘BRITS 45 MINS FROM DOOM’. It might have been even more sensational. The JIC assessment from which the forty-five-minute claim was drawn suggested that CBW munitions could be ready for firing within twenty to forty-five minutes.
I have tried to recapture in my mind the atmosphere that prevailed at the time. There was a profound contrast between the view of the Americans that war was all but inevitable, and the view taken by some of us in the Cabinet that war could be avoided through negotiation. November 2002 seemed to hold the prospect of a peaceful solution when the Security Council unanimously adopted UN Resolution 1441, and although this stated that Saddam would face ‘serious consequences’ if he did not comply with weapons inspectors, France in particular made clear its view that Resolution 1441 did not give the US and UK an automatic right to attack Iraq. One week later, while denying that it had any banned weapons programmes, Iraq accepted the UN resolution unconditionally. The inspectors returned to Iraq later that month.
In early December, I agreed to a second tranche of £150 million for further urgent operational requirements, and then later in the month a further £500 million. Early in January 2003, Geoff Hoon announced his intention to call up 1,500 reservists, a figure that rose to 5,000 by the end of the month. That same month it was decided that if war came, the British invasion would launch not as originally planned from the north via Turkey but from the south via Kuwait. This change followed the decision of the Turkish Parliament to vote against allowing a land assault from Turkey.
But, just at this moment, Iraq agreed to the UN’s demand for aerial surveillance, and the work of Hans Blix seemed to be yielding answers. On 14 February, Blix told the UN Security Council that his team had not found any WMDs. This was followed by a statement by Dr ElBaradei that the International Atomic Energy Authority had found no evidence of ongoing and prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq. A chance seemed to be there for avoiding war; and when, on 7 March, Blix delivered a new report to the UN Security Council saying Baghdad had made progress on disarmament, that seemed more likely. Further time was needed, Blix argued. ‘Disarmament, and at any rate verification, cannot be instant,’ he said. ‘It will not take years, nor weeks, but months.’ Our response was that Saddam could have ten days: after Blix’s presentation, the US, Britain and Spain presented a draft resolution giving Saddam an ultimatum to disarm by 17 March or face the possibility of war. France, leading opposition to any war, said it could not accept the ultimatum.
But the march to war was now under way. I was receiving and approving an increasing stream of spending requests from the Ministry of Defence. I told a ministerial meeting on 6 March that the estimates for the humanitarian aid alone could be as high as £4 billion. The next day, unbeknown to me at the time, the Attorney General provided lengthy, detailed and unequivocal advice on the legality of the proposed invasion. Until this point, the British position had been that a second UN resolution affirming that Iraq was in breach of the previous resolution, 1441, was desirable if war was to be prosecuted. Indeed, when Tony met President Bush on 31 January at the White House he pressed him for support for a second resolution. Now, in Lord Goldsmith’s assessment, British participation in the American-led invasion of Iraq could be declared illegal without a second UN resolution. This advice, not publicly known at the time, was only revealed in 2005. Goldsmith warned Tony: ‘I remain of the opinion that the safest legal course would be to secure the adoption of a further resolution to authorise the use of force … We would need to be able to demonstrate hard evidence of [Iraqi] non-compliance and non-cooperation.’ It was not until 17 March, at a meeting of the Cabinet, that I and others saw for the first time what was – although we did not know it – revised advice from Goldsmith stating that war would be legal without a second resolution.
The weekend of 15–16 March was tumultuous. At Tony’s specific request, I went on David Frost’s Sunday TV programme to urge the French to support joint action. At this time, Chile and other Latin American countries proposed a new UN resolution that would have accorded Saddam Hussein a last chance to disarm. However, Britain argued that the French would never support intervention under any circumstances, and so the resolution was pointless, leading the Chileans to withdraw it. The No. 10 strategy was to focus on blaming France – that we should never have our decisions on national security dictated by them.
In his evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, Hans Blix said that by this stage, with almost 250,000 coalition forces on the border of Iraq, the momentum for war ‘was almost unstoppable’. He said, with some justification, that the UK ‘remained a prisoner on that train’. It was around this time that the American evangelist Jim Wallis asked me to meet with him and a group of Christians opposed to the war. He had a middle way between war and doing nothing – a plan to indict Saddam Hussein that was later developed into a six-point plan for ousting him without violence. But as I told him, I could not see how this eleventh-hour proposition could be implemented in practice.
We have known since 2006 of a memo unearthed by Phillipe Sands, a QC and professor of international law at University College London, that in the weeks leading up to the war the US spent some time trying to make the case for action more acceptable to the public. A five-page memo, written some two months before the war by David Manning (Tony’s chief foreign policy adviser and head of the Defence and Overseas Secretariat), reveals an American plan to ‘to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover’, in the hope of provoking Iraqi forces into opening fire and thereby putting them in breach of the UN Resolution. According to Manning, the Americans still hoped that an Iraqi defector might be ‘brought out’ to talk about WMDs, or that someone might assassinate Saddam Hussein. Most of all, the memo confirmed the inevitability of conflict: ‘our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning’, Manning said.
On 17 March, in a speech from the Oval Office, Bush told Saddam Hussein that he and his sons must leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. Their refusal to do so would result in military conflict, commencing at a time of America’s choosing. The formal decision by the UK to invade Iraq if Saddam failed to obey the US ultimatum was taken by th
e Cabinet at 4 p.m. on the same day. Later that evening, Robin Cook resigned from government and delivered a powerful speech in the Commons against the war. The next day, Tuesday 18 March, saw the parliamentary debate and the biggest revolt that the Labour government was ever to face: 121 Labour MPs voted against the war, with even more – 198 in total – supporting an amendment arguing that the case for war had not yet been made. However, with Conservative support, the final tally supporting action was 412 for and 149 against. As I cast my vote, I was confident that the information we had been given about Sadaam’s weapons was accurate. However, the more I learned about the suspect intelligence over the next few years, the more I started to feel that decisions were made on the basis of inadequate information and questionable assumptions.
The Iraq War began almost immediately afterwards, on 20 March, with a bombing campaign that was targeted at Saddam himself. The initial victory was so swift that on 1 May President Bush stood in front of a banner on an aircraft carrier that read ‘Mission Accomplished’. But as we were now to discover, the main US initiatives – de-Ba’athification (i.e. removing members of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party cohorts from positions of power) and disbanding the Iraqi army – would leave a power vacuum, administrative chaos, a vast number of armed ex-soldiers and a rapid descent into anarchy and sectarian strife. We failed to persuade the US of the advantages of a UN-led administration and then set a less ambitious goal of persuading them to accept UN authorisation of a coalition-led interim administration. The UK and the US, in effect, became joint-occupying powers.