Blair was also animated by sheer terror of an atrocity on British soil. He told me once: ‘What changed for me post-9/11 was that you no longer wait for the thing to happen. You go out actively and try to stop it.’26
If a nuclear, biological or chemical attack on Britain occurred on his watch, he feared ‘they’ll be booing me in the streets in a decade that I was the appeaser. I was the Stanley Baldwin who did nothing.’27 One instant product of this fear was new anti-terrorist laws, more draconian than measures passed anywhere else in the democratic world, which would put him on a collision course with liberal opinion and the judiciary.
Before 9/11, MI5 were principally focused on Irish republican terrorism. Sir Stephen Lander, the head of the security service, warned him: ‘We’re not talking about the IRA who wanted to go off and have a Guinness after they’d let off their bombs.’28 Suicide bombers were a threat of a different order. About Islamist fundamentalism ‘there wasn’t a huge amount of intelligence,’ says a senior adviser at the Home Office. ‘There was complete ignorance about what we faced. We had no clue what might happen next. It was all the Rumsfeldian stuff about unknown unknowns. The more the security service delved into it, the more worrying it became.’29
A lot of extra funding was released to MI5 and MI6. ‘Until 9/11, Blair had not been very interested in the intelligence agencies. It wasn’t one of his priorities,’ noted the Cabinet Secretary. ‘After 9/11, they got what they wanted.’30 A team at the Ministry of Defence compiled a secret dossier of every outrage that might be conceivably perpetrated by dedicated suicide killers. According to one of the committee’s members: ‘They dreamt up such lunatic scenarios that the JIC suppressed the document.’31
Blair would tell visitors to Number 10: ‘If you could see some of the stuff that is put in front of me, the hairs would stand up on the back of your neck.’32
While it looked improbable that terrorists would manage to obtain a thermonuclear device, there was horror that they might get their hands on the ‘poor man’s nuclear bomb’, a ‘dirty bomb’ which uses conventional explosive to spread radioactive fallout. He had been ‘alarmed’ by evidence that the Taliban and al-Qaeda had made ‘primitive efforts’ to construct a dirty bomb.33
‘A bomb in central London – we’re saying goodbye to a thousand years of British history,’ Sir Stephen Lander said to Sir Richard Wilson. ‘Oh God,’ shuddered Wilson. ‘Don’t say that.’34
Blair became ‘very disturbed’ when he was briefed about the effects of a dirty bomb exploded in the middle of the capital.35
To amplify his nightmares, most of Britain’s contingency planning to deal with a massive attack was a relic of the Cold War. ‘The only planning was based on a war with the Soviet Union,’ says Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London.36 David Blunkett and the Home Office were feverishly working from scratch to put in place measures to cope with a 9/11-style atrocity. According to Huw Evans, one of the Home Secretary’s senior advisers: ‘We were not remotely prepared for a large-scale incident on British soil.’37
Blair feared that he would be condemned, both by his contemporaries and by history, if such a horror occurred on his watch. ‘I for one do not want it on my conscience that we knew of the threat, saw it coming and did nothing,’ he said that autumn.38 He later explained:
If all this evidence was there and something did happen and nothing had been done, what then would people have said? If you’re the American President, and you lost 3,000 people in the attack on the World Trade Center, what are you expected to do? Sit there and just wait for the next one?39
Saddam Hussein, whom neither MI6 nor anyone else in the Government believed could be linked with 9/11, was not the most clear and present danger. Jack Straw argued with Blair that North Korea and Iran were more advanced in their nuclear ambitions, which would indeed turn out to be the case. But America’s crosshairs were on Saddam. ‘They had his zip code.’ Blair bought into the idea that defanging the Iraqi dictator would send a strong deterrent message to other rogue regimes.
Blair’s ambassador in Washington says: ‘He was the neo-cons’ neo-con. He was more neo-con than the Americans. This was not the poodle being pulled by the leash. This was a true believer in the threat of Saddam who had instinctive and immediate sympathy for what George Bush was planning to do.’40
He was also fired by a genuine revulsion at Saddam. ‘Tony thought Saddam was an atrocious dictator, the Pol Pot of the Middle East,’ says Sally Morgan, one of his most senior aides.41 He could never fathom why so many on the left could not see a moral imperative to act against such a tyrant when opportunity presented itself. When protestors against war massed opposite Downing Street, he would react by asking: ‘Why aren’t they out there demonstrating against the junta in Burma? Where are the protests against North Korea?’42
An associated argument in his head was the belief that such regimes would be encouraged if Saddam was not made to pay for his repeated violations of UN resolutions. This meshed with his fears about America under Bush. To Cabinet allies like Tessa Jowell: ‘He always said that you couldn’t let America do something as major as this on its own.’43 He knew that the President loathed most of the European leadership and despised the UN. Blair was frightened that Bush would entirely surrender to his unilateralist impulses and step outside the international order altogether. This played to Blair’s conceit of himself as the one leader uniquely equipped to bridge the Atlantic. Bush liked to call himself ‘The Decider’. Blair saw himself as ‘The Explainer’ – interpreting the world to Bush and speaking for Bush to the world.
‘The thing that really turned him on about power was the opportunity to be on the world stage and to tackle situations and problems which had defeated everyone else,’ notes Richard Wilson.44
There was another element of vanity. Blair was in thrall to the idea of the strong leader. He had recently consumed biographies of Winston Churchill, Oliver Cromwell, Charles de Gaulle and David Lloyd George.45
Layered with that was a conviction that it was strategically imperative to stay in lock step with America. Blair declared to the Commons, in one of his many bursts of passion on the issue, that the Special Relationship was ‘an article of faith with me’. Yet he was also often reminded that Britons used the phrase ‘Special Relationship’ a lot more than you ever heard it in Washington. For all his talk about standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’, Britain’s military capability didn’t even come up to America’s kneecaps. In private conversation, Blair would often refer to the staggering statistic that America was as militarily powerful as the next nine nations put together.46 The US did not need allies in order to act. So what influence Britain did possess had to be maximised by staying close to the White House. Fatalism and hubris were both in the mix.
To all of which was added personal history. Leaders often have a defining success in their past which they seek to replicate in the future, whether or not the example is a good guide to action. The major conflict of his first term was Kosovo. He made himself very exposed during that war by issuing unambiguous demands that the West deal with Slobodan Milosevic while Bill Clinton talked in weaselling equivocations. ‘He felt he was out on a limb and there was Clinton some way back sawing away.’47 When that conflict seemed to be going horribly wrong, some wondered whether it might even cost him the premiership. ‘It is shit or bust,’ he would respond.48 When the Serbs were thrown out of Kosovo, Blair’s lonely stand during the conflict appeared absolutely vindicated and it increased his belief in the beneficient application of force against dictators. ‘He felt that his determination, his sense of mission on that occasion had been vindicated,’ notes the senior diplomat Sir Jeremy Greenstock. ‘He had been the one who sustained the determination of the allies to see it through to the end. I think that increased his confidence as an international statesman that his judgement was good.’49 Christopher Meyer agrees:
If I’d been Prime Minister and come out of that testing time, worrying time, and realised that I had been righ
t and we had won, I would have thought: ‘Hey, I can do this foreign policy stuff, I can do it.’ It was his coming of age. You have to conclude that it must have been a huge boost to his self-confidence that he could handle a major international crisis and that he was right.50
The apotheosis was when he went to a refugee camp in Kosovo and was greeted as a saviour by people rushing up to him and crying: ‘Tonee! Tonee!’ One of his Cabinet thinks that was the moment he ‘got some iron in his belly’ and conceived of himself as a ‘heroic’ actor on the international stage.51 ‘Without Tony Blair, the likelihood is that we wouldn’t have had that campaign,’ says William Cohen, US Defense Secretary at the time. Blair was instrumental in dragging Clinton to a position where he didn’t want to go.52 In the eyes of Paddy Ashdown, it was ‘one of the most remarkable achievements of any British Prime Minister in recent years’53 to persuade an American President to commit to action that many in his own administration vehemently opposed. The difficulties he had in doing that reinforced Blair’s conviction that it was imperative to stay close to America; his eventual success magnified his belief that he could be a uniquely persuasive voice in the White House.
Idealism mixed with realpolitik, terror stirred with vanity, this was the cocktail of impulses that drew Tony Blair down the road to war.
*
In the first week of April, the Prime Minister flew to Texas for a crucial encounter with Bush at the President’s ranch in Crawford. The Sun blared the approved Downing Street interpretation: ‘Yet again Britain is punching above its weight – we may be a small country, but we are highly influential.’54 The International Herald Tribune, in its more sober way, echoed that thought: ‘A trans-Atlantic deal is possible and Blair is perhaps the only one who can persuade both [Europe and America] to sign on.’55
Blair’s Foreign Secretary was far from convinced. Jack Straw didn’t think the Prime Minister should be making the trip to Texas, fearing that he would be sucked even closer to Bush. Straw wrote him a letter just before he left. He warned: ‘The rewards from your visit to Crawford will be few. The risks are high, both for you and the Government.’ There was ‘no majority’ in the Labour Party for ‘any military action against Iraq’. He cautioned Blair to beware ‘potential elephant traps’ and warned that ‘regime change per se is no justification for military action.’56 Manning and Meyer were both briefing the Prime Minister about the battle for the President’s ear between the opposing factions in the American Government. Manning was gnawed by anxieties about the American planning. ‘How difficult was this operation going to be? What would it be like on the ground? What would happen on the morning after? All these issues needed to be thrashed out. I didn’t see evidence at that stage that these things had been thoroughly rehearsed and thought through.’57
The hawks were led by Dick Cheney, the most dominant Vice-President for decades. Lined up with Cheney was the erratic but also powerful Donald Rumsfeld. In the other corner was Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, a charismatic figure, popular and respected at home and abroad. Unlike any other senior figure in the administration, Powell had seen combat in the Vietnam War and was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the Gulf War. Cautious and internationally minded, Powell was not an enthusiast for war. If there was to be one, he was certain that the US needed allies. That made the position of Britain critical. Without British support for this enterprise, it was highly unlikely that America would find any other meaningful support. Bush was gravitating towards the hawkish pole, but he was still willing to listen to Powell’s argument that they needed a coalition. ‘Bush didn’t want to do it on his own,’ says Meyer.58 William Cohen agrees: ‘It was very helpful to have the British with us, it gave some credibility to the notion that we were not solo practitioners here.’59 Blair’s support after 9/11 had ‘meant an enormous amount’, according to Condi Rice. His willingness to be their global ambassador during the Afghan campaign ‘was very important’ and gave him more credit in the bank.60 He had become ‘the foreign leader with the greatest respect because Americans value someone who is an instinctive ally,’ says Stan Greenberg.61 The senior Democrat George Mitchell notes that he was ‘extremely popular across the entire political spectrum’.62 This gave Blair additional leverage if he chose to use it. That is precisely what the Prime Minister did not do.
As soon as they landed in Texas, Blair and his party were helicoptered to Bush’s Prairie Chapel ranch. The British press boosterishly reported that Blair was being extended the ‘ultimate honour’ of a two-night stay.63 Putin of Russia and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia got just the one night. Blair brought Cherie, his daughter Kathryn, and Cherie’s mother, Gale, who was there to help care for Leo. On the Saturday night, they joined Bush and some of the President’s personal friends for a dinner of pecan-smoked beef tenderloin and pineapple upside-down cake to the accompaniment of country music.
Once everyone was seated, Bush rose to toast his British guest. But Blair had gone missing. ‘Where’s the Prime Minister?’ Laura Bush whispered to the British ambassador. ‘He’s gone to adjust his dress,’ replied Meyer. Blair had arrived at the dinner to note with alarm that he was the only one wearing jeans rather than the ‘smart casual’ that was the style at Crawford. ‘I have to change,’ he told Cherie and dashed back to the guest house. He hadn’t returned yet. ‘Bushie, you’ll have to sit down,’ Laura said to her husband. When a breathless Prime Minister reappeared, Bush rose again to propose the toast.64
President and Prime Minister had several discussions that fateful weekend. Sometimes advisers were in attendance, but David Manning reports that ‘a lot of the time there was no-one present other than the two of them’, not even a note-taker.65 ‘There was quite a long time when Tony was alone with George. To this day, you can’t be sure exactly what they said to each other,’ says Christopher Meyer. ‘But I am sure that this is where Blair said: “Whatever you decide to do, George, I’m with you.” ’66
This was his golden opportunity to impress his concerns upon Bush and get guarantees that they would be addressed. These were not to do with the morality of war: Blair had made up his mind about that. They were to do with the practicality of action, the need to sustain international support and the absolute necessity of having a proper plan for Iraq after Saddam had been toppled. This was his chance and he did not take it.
Blair was not at his brightest that weekend. Just before he flew out, the Queen Mother died and he had been wrangling with Gordon Brown over the Budget, always an emotionally draining experience. He went without sleep for twenty-three hours in advance of the talks and was visibly fatigued with jetlag.
Bush then exhausted him further by insisting that they go out for a run together, an activity at which the President was fitter than the Prime Minister. Blair groaned afterwards that he hadn’t run so far since school.67
There was a more fundamental problem, which was about Blair’s personality and how it interacted with that of Bush. Sally Morgan, one of his closest aides for many years, says: ‘Tony found personal confrontation painfully difficult.’68 Charles Guthrie agrees: ‘He doesn’t like to have a row.’69 Blair rarely did confrontational and never with Bush. ‘He operates by charming engagement, getting under people’s defences,’ says David Manning.70
At Crawford, Cherie pestered her husband to argue with Bush about American opposition to the International Criminal Court. ‘Don’t fuss woman,’ he brushed her off. ‘I’ve got important things to do.’71 A very senior official adds another dimension: ‘Remember Blair liked to be liked and Bush was the most powerful man in the world.’72
The Prime Minister went to Texas fearful that he would be dumped by Bush if he showed a scintilla of hesitation. To his confidant Michael Levy, Blair explained why he felt compelled to take this approach to Bush. ‘You’re either with him or against him. That’s how he divides people. It is very black and white with Bush.’73 According to Jonathan Powell, Blair believed ‘he’d got to say he was with them to get Bush to list
en to him.’74 Tom Kelly, another of the officials in Texas, says: ‘He didn’t want to be seen as weak or vacillating. He did not want Bush to think he was backing away because that would lose Bush’s trust, Bush would begin to doubt him and he’d lose the relationship.’75 The result was that there was no proper expression of Britain’s terms and conditions at Crawford.
‘He never said to Bush, as Mrs Thatcher would have done, that this is not going to happen unless a, b and c happens,’ says Meyer. ‘He never said: “I can’t do this unless we have absolute clarity about what is going to happen.” ’76
This failure to be clear on the details was also of a piece with Blair’s personality. It was always Blair’s belief, says Peter Mandelson, that ‘the best way of persuading people was to look them in the eye, one on one. That was very much his style.’77 According to Kelly: ‘He put the weight on the emotional level of the meeting, the “looking into each other’s eyes”, not the analytical level. The analytical stuff could be left to David Manning. The emotional chemistry was his part.’78
Bush was a politician of some skill. This was rarely noticed by most people in Europe and wholly forgotten later when Bush became such a discredited figure. Yet it was true. Blair was once asked by a colleague: ‘What do you see in Bush?’ Blair responded: ‘He’s got charm and peasant cunning.’79 This was a potent combination when allied with the most powerful office in the world. ‘I think Bush genuinely liked Blair,’ says Meyer. ‘But he used Blair.’80
‘Bush was a very artful politician,’ agrees another senior official. ‘Blair thought he was running the relationship, but he was being run.’81 At Crawford and subsequently, Bush out-Blaired Blair. The Prime Minister thought he could ride the tiger; he ended up inside its stomach.
The End of the Party Page 15