by Blair, Tony
That said, because of the difficulties such an act required, because war should be the last not the first resort, I had come to a firm conclusion that we could only do it on the basis of non-compliance with UN resolutions. Tyrant though he was, Saddam could not be removed on the basis of tyranny alone.
In later times another myth came to light, based on observations by the then UK ambassador to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer. He alleged that while at Crawford, I had pledged ‘in blood’ that I would support America, had signed up for regime change and then articulated it in a speech in Texas the day after Crawford, for George Bush Snr.
Actually, he was never present at the Bush meeting; wasn’t even in the same building; I made no such commitment – in fact I emphasised the UN route; and my speech in Texas was entirely consistent with my other public pronouncements.
But there it is – the myth, once given birth to, becomes the reality.
However, I was clear about two things. The first was that Saddam had to be made to conform to the UN resolutions, that the years of obstruction and non-cooperation had to end. The second was that Britain had to remain, as a country, ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with America. This is not as crude or unthinking a policy as it sounds. It didn’t mean we sacrificed our interest to theirs; or subcontracted out our foreign policy. It meant that the alliance between our two nations was a vital strategic interest and, as far as I was concerned, a vital strategic asset for Britain.
It implied we saw attacks on the US as attacks on us, which I did. It argued for an attitude that did see us genuinely as at war, together, with a common interest in a successful outcome. I believed then, as I do now, that the US could not afford to lose this battle, that our job as an ally who faced a common threat should be to be with them in their hour of need. I know all this can be made to sound corny or even, as some would have it, self-deceiving in terms of our effect on US decision-making. I was well aware that ultimately the US would take its own decisions in its own interests. But I was also aware that in the new world taking shape around us, Britain and Europe were going to face a much more uncertain future without America. As the defeat of Communism showed – and let’s be clear, without America, it would not have been defeated – our alliance with the US mattered. My experience in needing Bill Clinton to act on Kosovo, which he did and which arguably saved the Balkans, had shown that we had recent and not merely historical reasons for knowing our need of America. So when they had need of us, were we really going to refuse; or, even worse, hope they succeeded but could do it without us? I reflected and felt the weight of an alliance and its history, not oppressively but insistently, a call to duty, a call to act, a call to be at their side, not distant from it, when they felt imperilled.
At the press conference in the Crawford school library, with the flags of the US and UK behind us, we delivered a strong message. It was basically: change the regime attitude on WMD inspections, or face the prospect of changing regime.
Behind closed doors, however, our talk was more nuanced. We shared the analysis about the nature of the Saddam government, its risk to security and also the wider problem of the region. My concern then and subsequently was to locate the question of Saddam in the broader context of the Middle East as a region in transition. Even then, though less clearly than today, I saw the disparate issues as essentially part of the same picture. Therefore I made a major part of my pitch to George the issue of the Israel–Palestine peace process. To me this was the indispensable soft-power component to give equilibrium to the hard power that was necessary if Saddam were to be removed.
That process was in a mess. Following the intifada of 2000, there had been a terrible passage of events with Palestinians engaged in terrorist attacks and severe Israeli retaliation resulting in a vastly increased weight of occupation. The process so near to breakthrough (or so it seemed) at the tail end of the Clinton administration was now in total disrepair. Patching it up and putting it back on track was, for me, utterly crucial to creating the conditions in which the tougher, harder measures could be taken without a revolt on the Arab streets and upset across the Muslim world. Already, just six months after the atrocity of September 11, the appetite for action was waning and enthusiasm for any sort of military confrontation minimal, to say the least.
Days before leaving for Crawford, I had had a meeting at Chequers with senior army officers. The meeting was not specifically in preparation for Crawford, but to kick around the basic questions about what military action might entail. There had been discussion about whether our aim was focused on WMD or regime change. I had emphasised that the two were linked, and also that it was hard at this point to say that the nature of the WMD threat specific to Iraq had changed demonstrably in the last few years. It was the assessment of risk that had.
The new Chief of Defence Staff, Sir Mike Boyce, a submariner and former navy chief, and Sir Anthony Pigott, a general who had studied the military options, gave a presentation. They warned it could be a bloody fight and take a long time to remove Saddam. The US were engaged in preliminary planning, but it was hard to read where they were going with it. We needed to get alongside that planning and be part of it. Of course, as ever, this presented a dilemma: if you wanted to be part of the planning, you had to be, at least in principle, open to being part of the action. Early on, because I could see that this might have to end with Saddam’s forcible removal, I resolved to be part of the planning. From around April, we were then fairly closely involved even in the early stages of US thinking.
None of this meant that war was certain. It wasn’t and indeed a constant part of the interaction between George and myself through those months, probably up to around November, was acute anxiety that since we were planning for the possible, that meant, in the media mind, it was inevitable. We had the basic concepts ironed out: Saddam had to comply with UN resolutions and let the inspectors back in; he couldn’t, on this occasion, be allowed to mess about – his compliance had to be total; and if he refused, we were going to be in a position where we were capable of removing him. So the diplomacy and the planning proceeded along separate but plainly at certain points connected tracks.
It made domestic politics, however, highly uncomfortable. Naturally people were reading the reports, assuming everything was decided and taking positions accordingly. If we said war was not agreed, they asked if we were planning; if we accepted we were doing some form of planning, that meant war was indeed therefore agreed. The notion of a contingency was too subtle. And, to be fair, many of the noises emanating from parts of the US system did suggest that there was only one direction in which policy should go.
We flew back from Crawford with some really tough thinking to do. I made a statement on the Middle East peace process, following George’s commitment to me to re-engage with it. We had the Budget to get settled, on which I was having meetings with Gordon, on the whole reasonably satisfactorily. We had finally agreed a policy on the rise in National Insurance tax to pay for the NHS.
Around this time, also, and for the first time since we had been in government, relations with the press finally really soured. The frustration of the right wing at the state of the Tory Party was boiling over into ever more personal and vitriolic assaults on me, any passing minister who looked vulnerable and on those who worked closely with me.
We had the extraordinary saga of the Queen Mother’s funeral. The Queen Mum had died at the ripe old age of 101. The nation was generally sad at her passing. She had been such a familiar and solid British figure over the decades, much loved and remembered for her stoicism and grit during the war, when she insisted on staying in London through the Blitz.
The arrangements for a big state event such as this are always complicated. She was going to lie in state in Westminster Hall for a week, before the actual funeral service. From my office, Clare Sumner, a civil servant and a lovely, capable and very straight young woman, got in touch with Black Rod, a retired general, about the protocol. For some reason unbeknown to me, there
had been an issue over what I did or where I stood or some such (I can’t even recall the detail it was so trivial), which had been resolved without any problem, so Clare thought, and she agreed to do exactly as Black Rod wanted. I never even knew of the issue until afterwards.
The Telegraph, Spectator and the Mail on Sunday then ran stories about how I and Alastair (who had known absolutely nothing of it either) had interfered with the Queen Mother’s funeral, caused consternation and distress, how disrespectful to muscle in, etc. All complete rubbish. For once, and stupidly, I took it seriously and we decided to go to the Press Complaints Commission. It was the last time I made that mistake. To be fair, the person who was the full-time executive was perfectly sensible, but of course the PCC panel was made up of the editors. Then we were told that the source was very close to Black Rod. So the PCC felt they couldn’t adjudicate. But it left a bitter taste.
Then Steve Byers, who had been a good minister, decided to resign. He had endured weeks of constant battering, being called a liar and a cheat and a villain and the rest, over his refusal to sack his press aide Jo Moore (who had sent an email on September 11 saying it was a good time to ‘bury’ bad news), and various issues to do with the railways. There was absolutely no justification for his resignation but I could tell he had had enough. You have to be superhuman or maybe subhuman to endure it all, with your family reading it and your friends pitying and your enemies crowing, and I could tell he was just shot through. The reshuffle gave me a chance to bring in David Miliband as a minister, barely a year after his election as an MP.
We had a Cabinet in June at which John Prescott launched a scathing attack on Peter Mandelson and others who, he said, were upsetting the balance between New Labour and Old. I hit back pretty hard and said it was a difficult time but that’s what government’s like and we couldn’t, as I think I said at the time, ‘wet our knickers’ every time we hit a rough period.
Anyway, you get the picture: the usual mix of the historic, the transient and the trivial. And throughout, now an insistent and pervasive backdrop, Iraq and what we were going to do about it.
Iraq will be looked back on for many reasons, but one interesting study is around the fact that it was the first war fought on the ground in the new era of transparency and twenty-four-hour media. Literally every day, stories would appear moving the debate this way and that and in line with developing patterns of reporting, always hardening speculation into fact. At times we would not be sure whether we were driving the agenda or being driven by it. On holiday in France in August 2002, I took a call from George, who was equally frustrated by the fact that everyone assumed we had made up our mind and that the march to war was inexorable.
However, in one sense it was not surprising that they felt this way. At a meeting just before the holiday towards the end of July, Mike Boyce made it pretty clear that he thought the US had decided on it, bar a real change of heart by Saddam. Geoff Hoon, then Defence Secretary, described the options – basically for a generated start, i.e. slow build-up; or a running start, i.e. fast-moving; and also as to where the troops would move in, at that time the preference being for them to come in from the north. So it’s impossible not to read the accounts of the meetings during that time without an assumption of a decision already taken.
But here is the difference between everyone else and the final decision-taker. Everyone else can debate and assume; only one person decides. I knew at that moment that George had not decided. He had, as I say, concluded a conceptual framework in which the pivotal concept was that Saddam had to come fully into compliance and disarm, but he had taken no final position on the way to make him.
In late July, I sent George another personal, private note setting out the case for going the UN route; and stressing again the Middle East peace process. David Manning, my foreign affairs adviser, went to Washington, talked it through with Condoleezza Rice and then direct with the president. I followed up with another call.
The debate around the UN within the administration was pretty fierce. We agreed to meet after the summer break.
I reflected with the closest team on the different strands of the challenge. If it came to war, how did we do it with least bloodshed? That was the military question. On the basis that we did it, how did we maximise the coalition? That was the UN question. And how did we do it without provoking uproar across the Middle East? That was the Arab question.
When I returned from holiday I did a press conference in Sedgefield. It was strange how I always relaxed there, even in the most unrelaxing moments. I also had my lines clear. I was going to be very tough: we had to deal with Saddam; it was right to do it; we had to send an unvarnished and plain message on WMD to the world.
One other rather fateful decision was taken at that time. Reasonably enough, people wanted to see the evidence on Saddam and WMD. This evidence was contained in intelligence. It was not practice, for obvious reasons, to disclose intelligence. We decided we had to do it. Many times afterwards, I regretted this decision. The ‘dossier’, as it was called, later became the subject of the most vicious recrimination and condemnation. In reality, it was done because we could see no way of refusing it, given the clamour for it. The very unprecedented nature of it was, however, part of the problem. Both opponents and supporters of action against Saddam were urging us to share with the public the intelligence we had.
Two things should be said in retrospect about the dossier. First, contrary to ex post facto wisdom, it was considered at the time – September 2002 – dull, and not containing anything new. The infamous forty-five-minutes claim was taken up by some of the media on the day but not referred to afterwards, and was not even mentioned by me at any time in the future, including in the crucial parliamentary debate on 18 March 2003, which authorised military action. Of the 40,000 written parliamentary questions between September 2002 and the end of May 2003 when the BBC made their broadcast about it, only two asked about the forty-five-minutes issue. Of the 5,000 oral questions, none ever mentioned it. It was not discussed by anyone in the entire debate of 18 March 2003. So the idea we went to war because of this claim is truly fanciful.
Second, it would have been far better to have just published the JIC reports, i.e. the intelligence reports based on the raw material. We debated this, but understandably the intelligence services felt this was a breach of tradition too far. But had we done so, much grief – as well as many completely unfounded allegations about lying, making up the intelligence, etc. – would have been avoided. Or maybe not . . .
In the light of all the different allegations about the dossier, it is just worth nailing down a few of the myths. The dossier itself was the work of the JIC. They zealously and rightly protected its authorship. What it said, as the four concluded inquiries have now found, was an accurate summary of the material. Neither myself nor Alastair wrote any of it. I wrote the foreword only.
It is said, rightly, that the March 2002 JIC report on Iraq warned that the intelligence on Iraq was ‘sporadic’ and ‘patchy’. What is then omitted is what it went on to say, which was: ‘But it is clear that Iraq continues to pursue a policy of acquiring WMD and their delivery means.’ By September 2002, of course, further intelligence had been received. The final report reflected this and was firmer. But then the evidence was greater. Shortly before the dossier, fresh intelligence was received about a mobile production facility that had just been created. This led to the description of Saddam’s programme as ‘growing’.
It may be worth dealing with a further issue at this point. There was evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry that shortly before the outbreak of war, intelligence was received that Saddam might not be able to assemble WMD quickly. This was reported in the media coverage of the inquiry as meaning that, in effect, I was being warned that the threat was less than supposed. Actually, the intelligence was that Saddam had taken measures to conceal his programme, including dismantling and storing certain equipment. The overall impact of the intelligence was not that he had
given up on his programme but that he was hiding it from the inspectors. I was specifically told this intelligence confirmed his WMD programme. So, far from being a warning to desist, it confirmed the need to persist.
Anyway, no doubt after a fifth inquiry there will still be calls for more. The truth is we believed, without any doubt at all, that Saddam had an active WMD programme. Given his history, we did so for pretty good reasons. There was no intent to deceive. Indeed, such an intention would have been in any event absurd, since once Saddam was out, the truth would be out also. The ISG Report, as I indicated earlier, explains both why we were in error and also what remained accurate.
On 7 September, prior to the publication of the dossier, we had gone back to Camp David. At this meeting we had one objective: to get George to go down the UN route, i.e. to agree that before any action we would pass a UN resolution and give Saddam a final chance.
This was not an easy sell. The US context, politically, was completely opposite to ours; and the UN did not play well there. The meeting was a little tense, though by then George and I had a really good personal chemistry. In the end, one to one, I got his acceptance, not as a favour but because I think ultimately he bought the idea that this was going to be a whole lot easier if we had a coalition behind us. I said that I really feared the consequences of US unilateral action; or US/UK joint action. I had written him a note prior to the meeting setting out my concerns and saying the very unpredictability of the outcome meant that a coalition was wise. We had to try for peace, even if eventually we did go to war. This was not Kosovo or even Afghanistan. It was going to be far tougher.
It’s true to say, however, that at that point the downside risk of military action revolved around how easy or hard it would be to remove Saddam, and any humanitarian fallout. There was, of course, also the Sunni/Shia issue, but never at that stage – or indeed until after Saddam’s removal – was the true threat perceived: outside interference by al-Qaeda and by Iran. The view of our military and intelligence was that though Saddam did sponsor terrorist groups, there was only hazy evidence of any al-Qaeda link; and after the Iraq–Iran War, with its one million casualties, it was assumed that Iran would be relatively compliant. The issue of the Sunni minority suddenly turned from rulers to ruled was extensively canvassed. But the main question was about Saddam’s capability of withstanding a military campaign and about the degree of support he might have. This is highly relevant to debates about the planning for the aftermath.