A JOURNEY

by Blair, Tony

  The US effort, through the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), was a mess. On the other hand, the truth is that until American forces got into Baghdad and obtained a real sense of what the real-life situation was, there was a limit to what could be done. I will come to how that effort progressed. But right at the outset, let’s be very clear: it would be so easy to say that the reason for the subsequent difficulty lay in planning failures, in terms of the civilian capacity to rebuild Iraq. It isn’t true. The plain fact is that with the money and effort committed, any defects would have been overcome, had the problem been administrative or bureaucratic. What went wrong was on the security side. Some of the civilian decisions may not have helped and I will come to those also. But the notion that they were the root of the problem is just false, a delusion I’m afraid, and one that matters, because in future conflicts we have to be aware of the limitations of this approach. Reconstruction is essential. It can’t happen in a violent environment. I saw that in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve also seen it since in Gaza and the West Bank.

  The only issue is whether with better preparation, the security situation itself would have been better. If that preparation had yielded in and around Baghdad different or more troops, it is possible it would have. Down south, where the British were and where soon enough we were joined by 20,000 troops from other nations, it is less clear. For much of 2003 the south was relatively calm.

  But I doubt any change would have prevented the al-Qaeda and Iran factors emerging; and it was those that from 2005 to 2007 almost tipped the country into the abyss.

  In those initial weeks, all seemed according to plan. The regime had no support among the people at large. Many towns declared themselves open to coalition forces. Pockets of fighting continued but, without a local base of support, they were quickly eliminated and the south – Shia and heavily anti-Saddam – was swiftly subdued. Indeed, by 12 April, local police patrols resumed in Basra.

  Baath Party officials were being captured or were surrendering to US forces. When the notorious Abu Ghraib prison complex was taken – notorious then and to become even more notorious later – it was found empty. Saddam had released all the prisoners, at least the criminal elements. It should have warned us – along with the intelligence that Saddam had allowed al-Qaeda to establish a base inside Iraq in early 2003 – that his tactics were not to fight our superior force but to let the country be overrun and then attempt to plunge it into chaos. But at this point, the reception accorded to the forces, if not that of garlands of flowers, was certainly more like that extended to a liberating force than to an occupying one. Towards the end of April, a million Shia pilgrims attended the main Shia festival in Karbala, something Saddam had forbidden to them.

  On 27–28 April, things were sufficiently quiet even in Baghdad for General Garner, head of ORHA, to be able to host a political and reconstruction meeting with over two hundred Iraqi delegates and representatives of the coalition force nations. At the end of June, the first new Basra political council was established.

  Before then, I had myself visited Basra on 29 May. The British troops had been brilliant. I saw the forces at the Presidential Palace and then at the port of Umm Qasr. The port was being de-mined and they were preparing to reopen it. The potential of it was enormous, all of it lost during the Saddam years. But it could have been – and in the heyday of ancient Iraq it was – one of the great ports in the world. When, just before leaving office in 2007, I made a speech in the Emirates and said that Basra in time could become like Dubai or Abu Dhabi, I was much mocked. But the truth is it could, and today is expected to double its capacity in the next three years, having already increased it dramatically since the days of Saddam.

  I visited a school newly refurbished by the British troops. Basra was quiet and relatively peaceful. Up in Baghdad, the statue of Saddam was wrenched from its pedestal and broken into pieces to cheers. It was a great moment. Stupidly I gave an interview to the Sun and allowed myself to be drawn into a vainglorious remark about how I had almost lost my job over the war. (Rather less important than the soldiers losing or risking their lives, you might think.) But all in all, at that point the campaign had been hard and bloody but successful and short. By the end of May, roughly five hundred coalition troops had been lost, over four hundred of those American, and according to the Iraq Body Count around 8,000 Iraqis had died, obviously significant numbers of them combatants.

  The humanitarian disaster had not happened. The oilfields had been protected. The resistance of Saddam elements had crumbled. The warnings of doom had been wrong.

  We thought we were at the end of the main military campaign. Actually, we were at the beginning of what then became a quite different phase of operations; but this one hard, bloody, protracted, and at times during those years, the result was most definitely in doubt; even today it is fragile.

  In this phase, the absence of international unity in the original decision, and the vested interests of many to prove that it was a mistake, counted heavily against us. I got a taste of this during a visit to Russia at the end of April. Vladimir Putin launched into a vitriolic attack at the press conference, really using the British as surrogates for the US, and then afterwards at dinner we had a tense, and at times heated, discussion. He was convinced the US was set on a unilateralist course, not for a good practical purpose but as a matter of principle. Time and again, he would say, ‘Suppose we act against Georgia, which is a base for terrorism against Russia – what would you say if we took Georgia out? Yet the Americans think they can do whatever they like to whomever they like.’ Chechnya was another example, though as I pointed out I had actually supported suppression of terrorism there.

  I realised then how deep was his feeling that Russia had just been ignored by the US and his determination that they should see it eventually as a mistake. The difficulty was that I half agreed with him about the unilateralism. There was an arrogance to it that was not so much wrong as counterproductive to our cause. But it didn’t mean that the action per se shouldn’t have been taken or that the analogies he was drawing were accurate. The truth is that the India–Pakistan dispute over Kashmir did erupt into sporadic violence and there was terrorism coming out of Pakistan. But, though elements of state organisations might be involved, that was a long way from saying the Pakistan government was a terrorist government, or Pakistan was a rogue state. China’s issue with Taiwan was of internal Chinese unity. It was not really an external threat to anyone. Chechnya did indeed exhibit some of the same characteristics, but frankly if the US or Britain had gone into Iraq as hard as Russia had in Chechnya, there would have been bedlam.

  I respected Vladimir for being as direct as he was. Though we disagreed, we kept lines open. But the chance to forge a really strong US/Russian partnership had been lost. If I were the US I wouldn’t allow the same thing to happen with China. Bind them in and treat them as an equal, not in form alone but in substance.

  There was also another more pressing and more embarrassing issue for us. We were actively searching for the WMD. We were sure we would find them. This was the moment I was waiting for. It would draw a line under one major issue.

  As our troops went further into Iraq, so we would get daily reports. Sometimes we would try to inspect plants or sites and get thwarted. Other times we would think we had made a find and be disappointed. As the weeks wore on, I became more and more agitated. By the time of my visit to Basra at the end of May, Donald Rumsfeld had somewhat unhelpfully suggested that we may never find WMD, a prediction that turned out to be true but needed to be handled with some care. It was, after all, the casus belli.

  When in Basra, I met Jerry Bremer, who had just taken over the running of ORHA, soon to be the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). I told him that he should not hesitate in asking for anything he needed from us, and advised him to use the same tactic with his own administration. ‘Don’t hold back,’ I said. ‘If you need it, demand it. I will back you up and I’m sure your
president will too.’ Unsurprisingly, he seemed a trifle overwhelmed, but very capable and committed.

  Following that conversation, however, I redoubled our efforts on helping, not just in respect of our field of operations down in Basra, but in what we could do to support the US in the rest of the country. It was set to be my principal preoccupation over the coming months.

  The visit was a real wake-up call. Though I could see that much was being done, I could also see we were in danger of having won the war, then losing the peace. The expectations of the people were enormous. The complexities of tribal and religious life manifest. This was a huge challenge and there was no cause whatever for complacency.

  On my return I called the key ministers together and gave a series of instructions to get our help to the US on a better footing. We had thought they would handle the centre of the country and we the south. I realised after that visit that unless they succeeded, we would fail. I had sent John Sawers, my former key foreign policy adviser, to Baghdad. He came to the same conclusion: the American operation needed a drastic boost. I also sent a strong note to George and we then spoke by phone.

  Fortunately, on 22 May, the UN had passed unanimously UN Resolution 1483 which gave the UN a key role in all aspects of Iraq’s development. It put us back on a multilateral path. I argued strongly for the appointment of a really top UN operative to go into Baghdad. After some deliberation, Kofi agreed. At my urging he chose Sergio Vieira de Mello, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and a man with a first-rate record and experience.

  However, my attention soon got diverted elsewhere. On 29 May, the BBC’s Today programme contained as its top story revelations from its defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan. In it, he focused on the forty-five-minutes claim in the September 2002 dossier. As I’ve said, this claim was in the dossier, it was highlighted by some papers the next day in a form we should, in retrospect, have corrected. But it then disappeared off the radar.

  The claim turned out to be wrong. Also, unknown to me, or to the Secretary of State, or indeed to the JIC, there had been internal Ministry of Defence debate about it. One of those taking part in the debate, though not directly responsible for the dossier, was a Dr David Kelly, a Ministry of Defence intelligence expert of about twenty years’ experience.

  The BBC broadcast did not claim, simply, that the intelligence was wrong on the forty-five minutes. What Gilligan said was:

  What we’ve been told by one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that dossier was that actually the government probably knew that that forty-five-minute figure was wrong even before it decided to put it in . . . Downing Street, our source says, a week before publication ordered it to be sexed up to be made more exciting and ordered more facts to be discovered.

  There could hardly have been a more inflammatory or severe charge. Mistaken intelligence is one thing. Intelligence known to be mistaken but nonetheless still published as accurate is a wholly different matter. That is not a mistake but misconduct. What’s more, directly attributed to Number 10.

  In view of five separate inquiries into this and the vast quantities of ink, time and energy expended on it, it would be tedious to go back over every fact, every argument, sub-argument and all the very painful personal grief that it caused. Dr Kelly, a decent and honourable man, took his own life. The two top people at the BBC, Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies, resigned. Alastair and numerous officials went through several months of absolute hell over an allegation that was untrue. Probably my own integrity never recovered from it. Quite a consequence, really. As a result of it, something else happened: the division over the war became not a disagreement but a rather vicious dispute about the honesty of those involved. A difficult situation became and remains an ugly one.

  Of course, as I have said, the blunt and inescapable truth is that though Saddam definitely had WMD, since he used them, we never found them. The intelligence turned out to be wrong. But here is where the relationship between politics and the modern media plays such a crucial role.

  The intelligence was wrong. We admitted it. We apologised for it. We explained it, even. But it was never enough, in today’s media, for there to have been a mistake. The mistake is serious; but it is an error. Humans make errors. And, given Saddam’s history, it was an understandable error. But it leads to a headline that doesn’t satisfy today’s craving for scandal. A mistake doesn’t hit the register high enough. So the search goes on for a lie, a deception, an act not of error but of malfeasance. And the problem is, if one can’t be found, one is contrived or even invented.

  I’m not saying we handled the allegation well. But it was a global firecracker that set blazing a whole series of conspiracy theories that in turn, at the very moment when we needed to unify people, divided them in the sharpest way possible. Before it, we were in error; after, we were ‘liars’.

  The basic facts are, actually, straightforward. As each inquiry in turn found – and on the evidence there was no other finding possible – each of the points in the original broadcast was wrong. The forty-five-minutes claim was not put in the dossier by anyone in Downing Street or anyone in government, but by the JIC. We didn’t ‘probably know it was wrong’ and neither did anyone else. We never ordered the dossier to be ‘sexed up’. Dr Kelly was not one of the officials involved in drawing it up.

  Worse, Gilligan then went on in an article in the Mail on Sunday to allege that Alastair was the author of the whole claim, i.e. invented it, a charge that brought Alastair into the forefront of all the anti-war protest and was just an unbelievable thing to write, unless you were really sure it was true; which, of course, manifestly it wasn’t, and by then both ourselves and the JIC had denied it.

  It was never clear if Dr Kelly, who though he admitted talking to Gilligan denied making the allegation, really did brief him in terms that justify the story.

  But what followed set the pattern for the interaction between ourselves and the media in the years that followed. Relations between myself and the BBC never really recovered; and parts of the media were pretty off-limits after it.

  The problem was that the BBC hierarchy couldn’t see that it wasn’t an allegation we could let pass. Look, if political leaders had to chase up every false or distorted story about their motives, they would be full-time press fact checkers. But this was qualitatively different. People were giving their lives in Iraq. They could forgive an error. They couldn’t forgive a deception. Besides anything else, it meant I had deliberately misled the House of Commons. That in itself, if true, would mean resignation and disgrace.

  From the outset, I tried to get Greg and Gavyn to see it. Here’s where my friendship with both was a hindrance not a help. The Mail had been running a campaign attacking them as stooges. They wanted to prove their independence. Greg had also been personally anti-war and couldn’t really see that as Director General of the BBC he had to remain neutral.

  All I needed was for them to accept that the story was untrue. They could attack the government all they liked, but the allegation of impropriety should be withdrawn. They wouldn’t. Gavyn kept saying it wasn’t the function of the BBC governors to investigate the truth of the allegation – a bizarre position since that was precisely what they should have done. Greg – who could be very obstinate – tried to maintain that the broadcast was accurate because the forty-five-minutes claim was wrong, which, as I constantly said, was not the point.

  Anyway, I could bore you to tears with my side of the issue and no doubt they could with theirs. What happened subsequently was more serious and tragic.

  The Gilligan allegation led to a rash of others. The Foreign Affairs Committee decided it should investigate, and we were slap bang into what turned into a six-month battle of immensely time-consuming, wearing, dispiriting and draining efforts to clear our collective name.

  It became apparent in early July who the source was for the Gilligan story. Dr Kelly offered himself up. He admitted that he had also talked to Susan Watts at Newsnight, but her repor
ts had been a lot milder and less inflammatory, though even those had the quite wrong allegation that there had been a dispute over the forty-five-minutes claim between the intelligence services and Downing Street, which was not the case. There had never been a discussion of it, since we never knew of it until the JIC put it in the dossier.

  I will never know precisely what made Dr Kelly take his own life. Who can ever know the reason behind these things? It was so sad, unnecessary and terrible. He had given such good and loyal service over so many years. Probably, unused to the intensity of the pressure which the Gilligan broadcast generated, he felt hemmed in and possibly vulnerable to internal discipline if his role emerged. I don’t know and shouldn’t really speculate. I met his family later at Chequers, at my request, and very dignified and sensible people they were. The awful irony was that for all the controversy caused, Dr Kelly himself had long been an advocate of getting rid of Saddam.

  How Dr Kelly’s name came out was the subject of a significant part of the Hutton Inquiry. That too was the subject of brutal media allegations, particularly against Alastair. It was suggested that he had leaked the name in breach of instructions from the Ministry of Defence. He hadn’t. It was simply that once we knew it was Dr Kelly, and since the Foreign Affairs Committee was engaged in investigating the forty-five-minutes claim and broadcast, we would have been at risk of a charge of concealment from them had we known the source of the leak and refused to say. In fact, the whole thing was handled by Dr Kelly’s line management, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, Sir Kevin Tebbit, and by Sir David Omand, the Security and Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office, at my insistence. His name was released on 10 July, and unsurprisingly the Foreign Affairs Committee immediately said they would interview him.