A JOURNEY

by Blair, Tony

  The point is that while none of this without more justifies war, it does underline the absurdity of the notion that Bush effectively stuck a pin in the atlas and decided, inexplicably, to go to Iraq. It is true that what happened in the first Gulf War, when the decision was taken not to go on to Baghdad after having expelled Iraq from Kuwait, influenced US thinking. It did so for a perfectly valid reason: following the March 1991 ceasefire, Saddam engaged in a further bloody suppression of his population in which thousands more died and in which his grip on the country tightened.

  Through the oil-for-food programme, the international community had tried to alleviate the suffering of the people. Such a programme was necessary because of the sanctions that remained in place, precisely because of WMD and other concerns over Saddam. But it never really worked; the money was constantly filched by Saddam, his sons and his associates. The result, as I have said, was that the food and medicines often failed to get through.

  The issue of oil raises another allegation: that it was all about oil. Although fatuous as an explanation, it gained enormous currency and still has its adherents today. In truth, if oil had been our concern, we could have cut a deal with Saddam in a heartbeat. He would have readily given more in return for the lifting of sanctions and the threat of inspections. After the 2003 conflict, and as part of the UN resolution, we established a UN-administered framework for ensuring that money from oil production went to the Iraqis, and today, for the first time in decades, that money is being used to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure, schools and hospitals; and is one reason why GDP per head in Iraq in 2010 is three times that of Iraq in 2003.

  At this point it is perhaps worth dealing with the very serious charge that sanctions were containing Saddam and would have continued to do so, thus eliminating the threat he posed. So, the argument goes, war was unnecessary.

  The fact is that by 2001, the existing sanctions framework was disintegrating. It was because of this that discussion began in the UNSC, in mid-2001, for a replacement sanctions policy. Saddam had successfully conned people into believing sanctions were responsible for the appalling plight of his people. Sanctions were being breached. He was taking billions illicitly out of the oil revenues.

  The discussion focused on so-called ‘smart sanctions’, which were to be more targeted. The argument that those ‘smart sanctions’ would have constrained Saddam simply doesn’t stand up to detailed scrutiny. The ‘smart sanctions’, as originally conceived, depended crucially on the surrounding countries to Iraq changing policy and preventing leakage of illegal goods and services, which was a major factor undermining the original framework. To this end, the initial draft of the new ‘smart sanctions’ policy contained strong prohibitions on such trade and other key restrictions on Saddam.

  I doubt the sanctions would have been effective, even with these in place. But without them, there was no chance. As the discussion proceeded, several countries objected to the tougher provisions and they were dropped. In particular, the strong prohibitions on surrounding nations were taken out. As Kenneth Pollack wrote in his book on the subject, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, this left the policy neutered. He said there were seven preconditions for sanctions to work, and concluded that none of them would have happened.

  No, right or wrong, we did it for the reasons given, and for the thinking that lay behind those reasons. So: what were they?

  But for September 11, Iraq would not have happened. People sometimes take that as meaning I’m saying Iraq posed the same threat as Afghanistan, i.e. there was a link to al-Qaeda. I’m not. It is correct that some in the US system thought there was such a link. It is also correct that there was strong intelligence that al-Qaeda were allowed into Iraq by Saddam in mid-2002 (with severe consequences later) and that he was certainly prepared to support terrorism, as he did in paying money to families of Palestinian suicide bombers. But the assessment of the threat was not based on Saddam’s active sponsorship of terrorism or terrorist groups.

  (There is an interesting sidebar to this. It later emerged that al-Zarqawi, the deputy to bin Laden, had come to Iraq in May 2002, had had meetings with senior Iraqis and established a presence there in October 2002. This intelligence has not been withdrawn, by the way. Probably we should have paid more attention to its significance, but we were so keen not to make a false claim about al-Qaeda and Saddam that we somewhat understated it, at least on the British side.)

  The link with September 11 arose in this way. As I wrote earlier, the real shock of that attack in which 3,000 people died – the worst single terrorist attack in the history of the world – was that it indicated a mindset on al-Qaeda’s part of unlimited destruction, i.e. if it could have been 30,000 or 300,000, the better from their perspective. This was not a targeted terror attack to achieve a definable and realisable political objective; it was a declaration of all-out war in pursuit of a religiously motivated objective. It was therefore of a different order from anything the world had faced before.

  At the same time, the issue of WMD had grown. Again, now that history has been rewritten so as to impose the worst possible construct on the action taken, it seems almost as if the whole issue of WMD was a convenient invention to justify a decision already taken. In fact, the issue of proliferation – and not just of nuclear but also of chemical and biological weapons – was a source of growing anxiety even before September 11. The various conventions and treaties in force were conspicuously lacking in enforceability. The activities of A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who brought Pakistan to nuclear status, were the subject of a vast amount of behind-the-scenes discussion, debate and concern in the intelligence community. His expertise was alleged to be for sale. We were pretty sure that some countries like Libya had active chemical or biological or nuclear programmes.

  After September 11, the thinking was this: if these terrorist groups could acquire WMD capability, would they use it? On the evidence of September 11, yes. So how do we shut the trade down? How do we send a sufficiently clear and vivid signal to nations that are developing, or might develop, such capability to desist? How do we make it indisputable that continued defiance of the will of the international community will no longer be tolerated?

  In this regard, there grew up a distinction that was neither helpful nor sensible. Often, and most of all in respect of Iraq, people would say: is it regime change you are after, or WMD? The true answer is that though in one sense these are separate questions, in another, of course, the two are connected. If, for example, Iran was a well-governed, democratic nation at ease with the world and was trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability, our attitude would be very different. We would still have concerns and would still oppose it, but the context of risk and threat would be dramatically altered. And the point is if they were democratic, they probably wouldn’t be seeking such capability. In other words, the appreciation of the danger is in part governed by the assessment of the regime. In a very profound sense it was in the nature of the Saddam regime that the ambitions for WMD were to be found, and the risks to be judged.

  An example of this muddled thinking is to be found in the constant assertion that whereas the US had a policy of regime change, the UK had a policy to do with WMD. Therefore, it is said, we were on different sides of the argument and eventually the UK was pulled on to the US ground.

  It is instructive to read the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 passed by President Clinton. It was then that US policy became regime change, but it did so – as the Act makes clear – because of the WMD issue and Saddam’s breach of UN resolutions. It wasn’t to do with the moral case against Saddam; it was precisely to do with the WMD threat, and arose out of his defiance of the will of the international community.

  Therefore, as the impact of September 11 reverberated around the world, and I as a leader contemplated the future potential for risk, the possibility of terrorists acquiring WMD was at the forefront of my mind.

  It was true that, in certain respects, you could say that g
roups like al-Qaeda and regimes like that of Saddam were on opposite sides. Al-Qaeda was aiming at governments, and often those in the Arab world. Governments – and especially dictatorships – inherently dislike and distrust those who operate outside their influence. Fanaticism disturbs those who rule through order imposed with an iron fist. All of this was true, and remains true.

  But I thought I could see something deeper, that at a certain level down beneath the surface there was an alliance taking shape between rogue states and terrorist groups. There was a common enemy: the West and its allies in the Arab and Muslim world. They shared a fear of Western culture, attitudes and thought. Rightly, as the adoption of such thought was a material threat to them. There was a reason why Saddam of all the Arab leaders was so vociferous in opposition to the Saudi peace initiative, launched with much courage by the then Crown Prince Abdullah in 2002. Peace between Israel and Palestine was a threat to all those of an extremist hue, as it is today. It would mean coexistence. To groups like al-Qaeda, this was anathema. To regimes like Saddam’s, it was a threat. A calm region, on a path to change, would not be an easy region for the likes of him or his sons.

  This sharing of a common enemy was buttressed by a common set of attitudes: indifference to human life; the justification of mass killing to achieve ends abhorrent to most people; and a willingness to involve religion and the history of Islam in pursuit of such ends.

  Would someone like Saddam want al-Qaeda to be powerful inside Iraq? Absolutely not. Would he be prepared to use them outside Iraq? Very possibly. Was there a real risk of proliferation, not only from Iraq but elsewhere, leaching into terrorist groups which would not be averse to using WMD? I certainly thought so.

  Actually, I still think so. How many times did I hear, in respect of the Iranian government, people tell me that they, as Shia, would never forge an alliance with Sunni groups in the Middle East? But where they conceive it serves a tactical purpose, they do – because they share with those groups an interest in instability and a passionate aversion to ‘Western’ values, which they rightly see as a long-term threat to their grip on power.

  I also felt that the Middle East should be viewed as a region whose problems were ultimately interlinked and whose basic challenge was very simple: it was urgently in need of modernisation. It was an alarming melange of toxic ingredients: a wrong-headed view of the future; a narrative about Islam that was at best inadequate and at worst dangerous; and governed by regimes that could be allies of the West but be otherwise under immense internal strain. The leaders were often well intentioned, but presiding over systems that were inherently and deeply unsustainable. So the leaders would be open to the West, but their societies would not be. The discourse between leaders in that world and in ours could agree on the need to root out extremism, but the discourse on their streets would frequently represent that extremism.

  This was exemplified by the attitude to Israel. At leadership level, though highly critical, and sometimes with good cause, of Israeli governments, the leaders basically wanted peace. What had been used as a rallying cry was now an irritant, and moreover a source of internal disaffection. Whereas at one time they wanted to use the issue, now they just wanted it solved, out of the way, off the agenda. And though back then Iran was perceived as less of a threat (a point they would make against the Iraq War, of which more later), there was even at that time a growing anxiety about Iranian influence and intention. They might dislike Israel, but they never feared it. Iran was a different order of worry altogether.

  But, as even a cursory reading of local Arab press would indicate, at street level and among the educated commentariat, Israel was hated. It became a means of siphoning off the demand for change inside, by focusing political energy and commitment to an external cause, an injustice not just to Palestinians but to Muslims everywhere, a vital and persistent proof that the West was inimical to Islamic interests and to Islam itself.

  As I have argued before, the most combustible combination politics knows is a people faced with a choice between an undemocratic government with the right idea, and a popular movement with the wrong one. That choice was there in abundance in the region and beyond. In the case of Saddam, this was almost inverted, which meant that his influence within the region was both poisonous and regressive to those who, like many of the Gulf states, wanted desperately to take their people on a journey to the future.

  I looked at the region and felt the chances of a steady evolution were not good, and undoubtedly worse if Saddam remained in power. I never quite understood what the term ‘neocon’ really meant. To my bemusement, people would say: It means the imposition of democracy and freedom, which I thought odd as a characterisation of ‘conservative’. But what it actually was, on analysis, was a view that evolution was impossible, that the region needed a fundamental reordering.

  George Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2002 was famous for its ‘axis of evil’ remark, linking Iran, Iraq, Syria and North Korea. It indicated that America was set on changing the world, not just leading it; and, as Afghanistan had shown, if necessary by force.

  From my perspective, there were two drawbacks with the way the thesis was expressed by its supporters. The first was that (and this is less a criticism of George, who was always wary of the term) by wrapping it in partisan language – ‘neocon’ – it caused obvious problems for those from the progressive wing of politics, like me. Second, as I said in my September 2001 conference speech (and like a broken record thereafter), I believed that resolution of the Palestinian issue was of essential strategic importance to resolving this wider struggle. It hadn’t caused the extremism, but resolving it would enormously transform the battle lines in defeating it.

  However, leaving those problems aside, I had reached the same conclusion from a progressive standpoint as George had from a conservative one. The region needed a fundamental change. And this change was to be of a different character. In the 1980s we had armed Saddam as we had the mujahideen in Afghanistan, so as to thwart Iran in the one case and the Soviet Union in the other. It was a tactical move but a strategic mistake. This time, we would bring democracy and freedom. We would hand power to the people. We would help them build a better future. We would bring not a different set of masters, but the chance to be the masters, as our people are of us.

  And hadn’t we shown that such idealism was indeed achievable? In Afghanistan they were preparing for their first election, and the Taliban at that time were seemingly banished. In my first term, we had toppled Milosevic and changed the face of the Balkans. In Sierra Leone, we had saved and then secured democracy after the ravages of the diamond wars. We had the military might of America, not to say that of Britain and others. There was no way Saddam could resist: he would lose, or he would go voluntarily, in the knowledge that the alternative was involuntary removal.

  So if there was a message to be sent about defiance of the international community, it should be sent to Iraq. If there was a regime whose detestable nature and penchant for conflict was clear, it was Saddam’s. If there was a people in need of liberation, it was surely the Iraqi people.

  It didn’t turn out like that. Precisely because the roots of this wider struggle were deep, precisely because it was a visceral life-or-death battle between modernisers and reactionaries, precisely because what was – and is – at stake was no less than the whole future of Islam – the nature of its faith, its narrative about itself, and its sense of its place in the twenty-first century – precisely because of all this, there was no way the forces opposed to modernisation, and therefore to us, were going to relinquish their territory easily. They were going to fight as if their survival depended on it, because it did and it does. Let the values of democracy put down their own roots; let Western-funded development help the people prosper; get people right in the heart of the Arab world to see the benefits of a modern approach to work, leisure and life, and the narrative about the West as enemies, as infidels, would collapse and be seen as the self-servi
ng nonsense that it is.

  And they were going to fight using the one weapon almost impossible for any government, even one in a strong tradition of government, to handle: terrorism. The truth is that the insurgency among Sunni groups, albeit with some high-visibility terror attacks thrown in, was disruptive but manageable. What precipitated the deluge and very nearly broke the country apart were the al-Qaeda-led attacks of indiscriminate terror in markets, shopping malls and even mosques, killing large numbers of ordinary civilians and spreading fear and panic; complete with highly discriminate attacks focused specifically on Shia places of worship and holy sites and on the Shia population itself that were designed to fan – and did fan – the flames of sectarianism.

  On its own, even that could have been defeated. But what lent it devastating force was that terror in combination with the steady build-up of Iranian influence among extremist Shia groups, and then finally with al-Qaeda, whose use of terror and then improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against UK, US and other forces, led to the draining of support for the whole venture. We may have begun fighting Saddam; we ended fighting the same forces of reaction we are fighting everywhere in the region, beyond it and even on our own streets.

  In other words, left to itself, the country could have just about managed. What made the task all the harder, occasionally verging on the impossible, were the activities of the outside influences, hell-bent on chaos and destruction. Both al-Qaeda and Iran knew what was at stake in Iraq. Neither was going to let the nation stabilise without a fight, and as our will weakened, theirs grew. It was then only through Prime Minister Nouri Maliki showing (frankly unanticipated) leadership qualities – and the Bush decision to surge – that the balance of will to win was shifted back towards the forces of democracy and modernisation.