The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Robin Cook then went into action. He used some strong language about Saddam, calling the Iraqi tyrant ‘a shit’ and ‘the only psychopath actually in government’. This was designed to get Cook a hearing for the point he really wanted to make. ‘We cannot afford to be the only European Government supporting an American military venture,’ said the Leader of the House.1

  The Prime Minister grew restless. His chair was the only one with arms. He gripped them. It was an unusual and uncomfortable experience for a Cabinet discussion to run away from him. He tried to close them down ‘but other people piled in’.2

  Emboldened by this surprise outbreak of debate, several ministers voiced concerns about both the drift to war and the Israel–Palestine conflict. There was solid support for the Prime Minister only from Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, and Charles Clarke, the party Chairman. Blunkett returned to the fray, demanding: ‘What has changed that suddenly gives us the legal right to take military action that we didn’t have a few months ago?’

  Patricia Hewitt, the Trade and Industry Secretary, another minister who could usually be counted as a loyalist, wondered aloud why Blair was hugging so close to Bush when the Americans had just shafted Britain over steel tariffs. ‘We are in danger of being seen close to President Bush, but without any influence over President Bush.’

  The discussion lasted nearly an hour, a long debate in a Blair Cabinet. ‘A momentous event,’ Cook happily recorded in his diary. ‘For the first time I can recall in five years, Tony was out on a limb.’ Blair answered them with a passionate restatement of his conviction about Britain’s strategic interests. ‘I tell you that we must stand close to America. If we don’t, we will lose our influence to shape what they do.’ Then he sent the Cabinet away with the reassurance that nothing had been decided. ‘We are not going to rush in.’3

  Unknown to nearly everyone around the table, he had already commissioned an ‘Iraq Options’ paper from the Overseas and Defence Secretariat of the Cabinet Office. He received the paper just a day after that Cabinet meeting. The document outlined the military options ‘for achieving regime change’, the final one being ‘a full-scale ground campaign’.4

  Few of the Cabinet were on the distribution list for this paper. They were excluded from the crucial conclaves about Iraq and they knew it. But like anyone sentient, they could hear the drums of war being beaten in Washington.

  George Bush served notice to the world, and did so in language that didn’t need an expert codebreaker to decipher it, when he delivered the State of the Union address at the end of January. He now conceived and projected himself as a ‘War President’. ‘What we have found in Afghanistan confirms that, far from ending there, our war against terror is only beginning,’ he told Congress.

  He was further emboldened by the apparent ease of the Afghan campaign and his stratospheric popularity with the American public. In the immediate aftermath of the toppling of the Taliban, and despite the continuing failure to locate Osama bin Laden, Bush’s approval ratings surged to over 80 per cent.

  Having told Americans that ‘our nation is at war’, Bush went on to name North Korea, Iran and Iraq as America’s most mortal enemies. In early drafts of the speech, they were described as an ‘Axis of Hatred’. That became intensified to an ‘Axis of Evil’, the sort of biblical language that he liked and an echo of Ronald Reagan’s condemnation of the Soviet Union as an ‘Evil Empire’.5

  ‘States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred,’ declared Bush.

  ‘I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.’6

  The blow to America’s sense of security caused by 9/11 created a culture in which war seemed like a logical way to prevent further attacks. In the words of Jack Goldsmith, an official at the Department of Defense:

  Fear of another attack permeated the administration. Everyone felt it. It led to the doctrine of pre-emption, which has many guises, but basically means that you can’t wait for the usual amounts of information before acting on the threat because it may be too late. They were really scared. They were afraid of what they didn’t know.7

  Bush claimed the right to take pre-emptive military action against any country which the United States deemed to be a threat. ‘It was that speech which made us all sit up and pay attention,’ says Andrew Turnbull.8 Before then, according to Michael Boyce, ‘we were only getting hints that Iraq was in America’s sights.’9 It also made stark the price of sticking close to America. To stay in tandem with Bush, Blair would be asked to commit Britain to indefinite conflict in any theatre where the Americans might consider themselves to be menaced.

  The bellicosity of Bush in the State of the Union was widely applauded in his own country, but the speech rang fire alarms in capitals around the world. The with-us-or-against-us test set by the President potentially placed in the column of America’s enemies any country that merely differed with the United States about the appropriate policy response to terrorism. Chris Patten, the Tory European Commissioner, scorned Bush as ‘simplistic’. The Foreign Minister of France shuddered that America had become the ‘hyper-puissance’. The Foreign Minister of Germany complained that European countries were being treated as ‘satellites’. Much of Europe saw America as a swaggering behemoth. Much of America dismissed Europe as an axis of appeasers. As the continents drifted further apart, Tony Blair would have to become ever more gymnastic to straddle the widening chasm.

  He already knew that Bush was intent on going after Saddam, but he was taken aback that the American President should telegraph his intentions so obviously.

  Well before 9/11, it was no secret that the Bush administration was deeply hostile to Saddam Hussein. ‘He tried to kill my Dad,’ the President had been heard to say in reference to a plot by Iraqi agents to assassinate George Bush senior on a visit to Kuwait. Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, had been party to the first George’s decision not to drive on to Baghdad after the liberation of Kuwait in the first Gulf War. Regret about what they came to regard as an act of weakness fired their zeal.

  ‘They wanted to do Saddam,’ notes Sir Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador in Washington. ‘Paul Wolfowitz was particularly obsessed. He’d been brewing this for ten years. They thought it had been a mistake in 1991 not to march on to Baghdad and topple Saddam.’10

  Regime change in Iraq had been a public aim of American policy since October 1998, when Bill Clinton was in the White House. Congress voted for the Iraq Liberation Act, which explicitly gave US support to attempts to remove Saddam. Under Clinton, though, this indicated ‘no intent of going in’ because they did not see him ‘as posing an imminent threat’.11 Action was confined to trying to enforce the UN resolutions which declared limits on Saddam’s military capability and demanded that he give up all attempts to equip himself with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, the weapons of mass destruction short-handed as WMD.

  Saddam repeatedly tested the allies’ willingness to contain his regime. In December 1998, Clinton launched ‘Operation Desert Fox’, four days of punitive air strikes against targets suspected of being used in a continuing WMD programme. This was the first occasion in his premiership when Blair ordered British forces into military action. It was also the first time when he had a difference with the White House about how it should be conducted. Not then the hardened warrior he was to become, he argued with Clinton to postpone the bombing until after Ramadan. After a night thinking about it, he rang up Clinton’s Defense Secretary, William Cohen, to say: ‘We don’t think it is necessarily prudent, but we’re with you.’ Cohen concluded that Blair ‘was going to be with the United St
ates, come hell or high water, he was going to be there’.12 That pattern of behaviour was set very early on.

  Desert Fox was a failure. The dictator shrugged off the four days of bombings. The inspectors left Iraq. The sanctions imposed by the UN hurt the Iraqi people more than they did the regime. Saddam achieved a sort of victory.

  This was a sign of the chronic weakness of the West in the eyes of ‘the Vulcans’ who had become increasingly influential in foreign policy thinking in the Republican Party. They saw American interests and security being best served by a more muscular and unilateralist approach to the world, unencumbered by the anxieties of allies, unconstrained by the opinion of the UN and unrestrained to use the might of American power against her enemies. Gulliver would tear free of the bonds imposed by these Lilliputians at the UN and in Europe.

  Among a significant sub-set of them known as ‘the neo-cons’ this was married to an idealistic belief that America had a moral imperative to try to remake the world, especially the Middle East. For too long, the US had prized ‘stability’ in the region over ‘democracy’. That had meant allying themselves with tyrannies (as they once had with Iraq) or seeking to contain rogue states (as they had with Iraq since the Gulf War). The neo-cons argued that America had a mission to spread democracy and by force of arms where necessary. This would have the happy by-product, so they thought, of creating pro-Western governments in a region where so much of the world’s oil reserves were concentrated.

  The revolution they proposed had a name: ‘The Project for the New American Century’. Several of the leading ‘revolutionaries’ now occupied key positions in the Bush administration. Their aims were crudely, but not inaccurately, summarised by one of their adherents:

  If the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein next, it could create a reliable American ally in the potential super-power of the Arab world. With American troops so close, the Iranian people would be emboldened to rise against the mullahs. And as Iran and Iraq built moderate, representative pro-Western regimes, the pressure on the Saudis and other Arab states to liberalize and modernize would intensify.

  It was a version of the domino theory. Once the dominos had fallen in the Middle East, so dreamed the neo-cons, the entire region would be under the sway of an even more hegemonic United States. ‘An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein … would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe the Romans.’13

  Iraq had come up at the Colgate Summit before 9/11. ‘If he hadn’t raised it, I would have done,’ Blair would say defiantly.14 But Iraq had not been the predominant topic of that conversation; they’d spent more time talking about national missile defence.15

  9/11 changed everything. For the neo-cons, 9/11 was both demonstration of the correctness of their diagnosis of the world and opportunity to apply their military remedy. ‘The other idea was that the war would pay for itself because we’d have the oil fields.’16 By November, the Pentagon had secret instructions to update its plans for a war on Saddam.

  When Condoleezza Rice called a meeting in spring 2002 with several US senators to discuss diplomatic initiatives concerning Iraq, Bush poked his head in the room and said: ‘Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.’17

  The debate in the White House was already evolving into one about invasion dates: spring or autumn 2003?

  Knowing of this in the early months of 2002, Blair was trying to soften up his much more sceptical public opinion by cranking up the rhetoric about Iraq. ‘That there is a threat from Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction that he has acquired is not in doubt at all,’ he declared at a news conference after a Number 10 meeting with Vice-President Cheney.18

  At the same time, Blair was telling the public, as he had his Cabinet, that ‘no decisions have yet been taken’ about how Saddam would be dealt with. He knew differently. The White House, with Cheney one of the greatest zealots for the enterprise, was rolling the pitch for war and Blair was already giving a strong indication to Bush that Britain wanted to be part of it.

  One of his key linkmen with the White House was David Manning, the Prime Minister’s senior adviser on foreign affairs, who had a good relationship with Condi Rice, the President’s National Security Adviser. In mid-March, Manning flew to Washington for a frank face-to-face with Rice. He found that ‘Condi’s enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed’ though she was now more appreciative of the difficulties of carrying international opinion behind the idea. He reported back to Blair:

  We spent a long time at dinner on Iraq. It is clear that Bush is grateful for your support and has registered that you are getting flak. I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States. And you would not budge either in your insistence that, if we pursued regime change, it must be very carefully done and produce the right result. Failure was not an option.19

  Manning was grey-haired, cerebral, softly spoken, self-effacing, bespectacled and much more cautious about this enterprise than his master. He made a contrast with the brasher, more thrusting figure of Sir Christopher Meyer, the ambassador in Washington who had a penchant for wearing red socks and vivid braces. They were both picking up the same intelligence about American intentions and relaying the message to the White House that Blair was an enthusiast for removing Saddam. A few days after Manning’s encounter with Rice, Meyer met Paul Wolfowitz, the neo-con number two to Donald Rumsfeld. On Blair’s behalf, Meyer stuck to the script:

  We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe. The US could go it alone if it wanted to. But if it wanted to act with partners, there had to be a strategy for building support for military action against Saddam. I then went through the need to wrong-foot Saddam on the [weapons] inspectors and the UNSCRs [UN Security Council Resolutions] and the critical importance of the MEPP [Middle East Peace Process] as an integral part of the anti-Saddam strategy. If all this could be accomplished skilfully, we were fairly confident that a number of countries would come on board.20

  Several striking things ring out from these memos, which were never intended to see the light of day for years to come, if ever. Blair made a general commitment to regime change, and told Bush so, a full year before the war started. His concern was not whether military action was the appropriate way to deal with Saddam. His central worry was that it be executed properly. ‘Failure is not an option’ is the phrase which leaps out from both memos. He hoped to lever some concessions out of Bush in return for British support, notably about putting more energy into the Middle East peace process. He was also concerned about how to handle domestic opposition. About the merit of having a war, he raised no objection at all.

  Even some of his closest allies struggled to fathom exactly why Tony Blair committed himself to joining the invasion of Iraq. It became a caricature of his premiership, as pervasive as it was inaccurate, that he was ‘Bush’s poodle’. The truth about Tony Blair is that he was an enthusiastic accomplice in the project to remove Saddam from very early on. Because of the scale of the opposition to war, he had to advance crabwise, but he was always moving in that direction. He had his anxieties and reservations during the months that led up to the invasion, but at each turn he subordinated any apprehension to his desire to make Britain part of this enterprise. He would often feel the need to mask that objective to manage public opinion, but he never fundamentally wavered from it.

  He did believe, at least at this stage, that Saddam was a menace with ambitions to acquire nuclear weaponry who couldn’t be adequately contained by the sanctions regime and had successfully corrupted the oil-for-food programme run by the UN. David Manning found Blair worrying ‘that Saddam – who had, after all, used chemical weapons – would increasingly break out of the containment box’.21

  Blair was disturbed about Saddam bac
k in 1998, within a year of taking office, when George Bush was still a little-known Governor of Texas. Blair confided his fears about the Iraqi dictator to Paddy Ashdown, who recorded him saying: ‘I have now seen some of the stuff on this. It really is pretty scary. He is very close to some appalling weapons of mass destruction. I don’t understand why the French and others don’t understand this. We cannot let him get away with it.’22

  Blair singled out Saddam for condemnation in his important speech on liberal interventionism in Chicago in 1999. He was increasingly influenced by the argument that the greatest menace to peace and security in the foreseeable future was not ‘two big countries’ going to war, but rogue states conniving to equip terrorist associates with chemical, biological and possibly even nuclear weaponry. ‘The two coming together is the security threat of the twenty-first century,’ he told me. ‘We’ve got to root them out because they are incredibly dangerous, because they know no limits to the destruction they will cause.’23

  He was heavily influenced by one of his advisers on foreign affairs, the diplomat Robert Cooper, who contended that there would be circumstances in which ‘we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the 19th century world of every state for itself.’24

  Blair thought he could make a successful marriage of his liberal internationalism with Bush’s aggressive pre-emption to implement a new doctrine of justifiable intervention which would make the world a better place and a less threatening one. General Mike Jackson, who commanded British forces in all of Blair’s wars, notes how success in earlier conflicts influenced Blair’s thinking about Iraq: ‘It’s easier, having done it once, to do it again.’25