The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Both men feared their respective leaders were being much too blasé about the potential consequences of toppling Saddam, what Powell called the ‘you broke it, you own it’ problem that would confront them afterwards. Straw did not expect to be made Foreign Secretary in 2001 and had struggled to find a powerful voice. Though a highly experienced politician of considerable guile, he was frustrated by how much of foreign policy was being personally driven by Blair and his impulse at all times to cleave to Bush. ‘Jack was under no illusions,’ says his adviser Ed Owen. ‘He knew that the crucial decisions are taken by the principals. That’s the true fact, I’m afraid.’13

  One senior Cabinet minister told me that autumn: ‘I am not at all happy about this march to war and, whatever he says in public, neither is Jack.’14

  Powell was becoming increasingly isolated and beleaguered as the hawks captured control of the President. ‘What’s going on?’ Straw asked Powell during one phone conversation. ‘I was hoping you could tell me what’s going on,’ replied Powell.15

  Straw’s August trip, made at Powell’s suggestion, was ‘very hush-hush’.16 It was even concealed from the Washington embassy for a time. The Foreign Secretary, taking just one official with him, flew across by Concorde and was then helicoptered from JFK airport to Long Island, where Powell was vacationing with friends at a waterfront house in the Hamptons.17

  The two men were effectively plotting against their leaders. Powell and Straw had tried to push Blair to be firmer with Bush about both using the UN to deal with Iraq and the Israel–Palestine crisis. They were repeatedly disappointed. Powell felt let down by the Prime Minister, whom he thought should be his natural ally against Dick Cheney, the Vice-President and hawk-in-chief. It was Powell’s lament that ‘Blair would express his concerns, but he would never lie down on the railroad tracks. Jack and I would get him all pumped up about an issue. And he’d be ready to say “Look here, George.” But as soon as he saw the President he would lose all his steam.’18

  Downing Street became reciprocally disillusioned with Powell. ‘The difficulty was that Colin Powell didn’t really have the traction on Bush that it would have been good to see a Secretary of State having,’ notes Sir Michael Jay, the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office.19 Tony Blair and his senior team were disdainful. ‘Colin Powell would urge Jack Straw to urge us to make Powell’s arguments to the White House. That’s the wrong way round. That’s not how it should be,’ says Jonathan Powell.20

  At the cloak-and-dagger meeting on Long Island, Powell briefed Straw about the arguments that had been raging between him and Cheney as they warred for Bush’s ear at a series of meetings over August. He warned Straw that the Vice-President and the other hawks were ‘hell-bent’ on an invasion and had no intention of seeking sanction from the United Nations. Straw came with the message that ‘the UN route was an essential prerequisite for British involvement’, a stance designed to ‘strengthen Powell’s hand’ in his own battles at the White House.21

  The hawks now over-reached themselves. In late August, Cheney delivered a speech which radiated intent to invade Iraq come what may. He dripped contempt on the idea that the UN offered any solution to the disarmament of Saddam.

  ‘A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions,’ pronounced Cheney, taking his internal battles with Powell out into public. ‘On the contrary, there is great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow “back in his box”.’ Making war sound inevitable, he declared that if US forces went into Iraq the streets of Baghdad and Basra would ‘erupt in joy in the same way as the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans’.22

  This speech ignited cries of protest from around the world and howls of frustration within Downing Street. Blair would sigh in exasperation: ‘The Americans are our closest allies and our most difficult friends.’23 Cheney’s clumsy intervention undermined Blair’s propaganda strategy, which relied on depicting Saddam as the aggressor. Cheney was making it sound like it was the allies who were spoiling for a fight because the Bush administration wanted to work off a personal grudge. Even Bush, who could be more sensitive to international opinion than he often appeared, registered the global backlash against his Vice-President.

  On 8 September, Blair flew in to the presidential retreat at Camp David. This would be a critical meeting decisive to the fate of Iraq. ‘The heart of the administration’ was waiting for him: Bush, Cheney and Rice.24 As they talked, thousands of tons of American military hardware were already being dispatched to the Gulf. The service and intelligence personnel accompanying the Prime Minister were briefed on the status of the American invasion planning.25

  Blair pressed vigorously, much harder than he had at Crawford, for using the United Nations as the instrument to confront Saddam with an ultimatum. Sitting in Bush’s study in the big cabin, Blair said that he had to have this to show his party and voters back home that he had tried the UN. Condi Rice says the President listened because ‘he knew that Tony Blair never asked for something unless it was absolutely necessary.’26

  Blair argued that it would make a big difference, politically and legally, if Iraq refused a demand to readmit the inspectors. They would be able to say they had given Saddam ‘a last chance’. Cheney always insisted on coming to these meetings ‘because he was afraid Bush would give too much to Tony’.27 The Vice-President sat there in ominous silence. ‘He didn’t say a word.’28

  Bush, though, was now much more receptive to the case for using the UN. Influential Republican figures were speaking out, notably James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, respectively Secretary of State and National Security Adviser when Bush’s father was President, and Henry Kissinger, the high priest of realpolitik.29 Public opinion in the US was currently cooling about war. Other allies, such as the Australians and the Spaniards, were also sending the message that they could only support action if America went the UN route.30 Blair was pushing at an opening door. Sir Christopher Meyer, one of those present at the discussion, says: ‘I don’t think Bush needed much persuading in the end.’31 To Blair’s great relief, the President swallowed his distaste for the UN and overruled his Vice-President. ‘That was the only defeat Cheney suffered at the hands of the other camp.’32

  The price Blair paid in return was to make his strongest commitment yet to joining an invasion. Bush remarked that it was very likely that they would end up going to war whatever happened at the UN. ‘I’m with you,’ Blair responded more emphatically than ever. He was ready to do ‘whatever it takes’.33 Afterwards, Bush walked into a nearby conference room where the leaders’ entourages were waiting. Bush declared: ‘Your man has got cojones.’34 ‘That’s balls,’ Meyer translated for those who didn’t know their Spanish.35 The President later joked that he would remember this as ‘the cojones meeting’.36

  With this presidential testimonial to the size of his testicles, Blair came away from Camp David believing he had secured a significant victory. Visibly stressed on the way out to America, he was so ‘pumped up’ on the flight back that he would not go to sleep; nor would he stop talking so no-one else got any rest either.37

  On 11 September, a year to the day since the atrocities in New York and Washington, the White House faxed over to Number 10 a draft of the speech George Bush was planning to deliver to the United Nations the next day. The speech was searched with increasing palpitations for any mention of a new resolution being sought. There was none. ‘We got in a bit of a state,’ recalls Jonathan Powell.38 David Manning rang Condi Rice to find out what was going on. ‘What’s the news? What’s the news?’ repeatedly demanded a frantic Blair. Rice rang back late that night to say: ‘It will be in. I hope you’re pleased.’39 When Manning reported this to Blair the next morning, it relieved but did not entirely end the Prime Minister’s anxiety. He and his senior aides clustered around the television to watch Bush at the UN, a President of unilateralist instinct addressing an institution most of his administration disdained.
>
  The speech went on and still there was no reference to a resolution. They could not know why: the wrong draft of Bush’s speech had been typed into the autocue, an earlier draft omitting anything about a resolution.

  Realising that something was awry, Bush attempted to ad-lib it back in: ‘We will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions.’40 This caused some further confusion, because he was supposed to say ‘resolution’, singular, not ‘resolutions’, plural.

  Blair, though, could sigh with relief. A fierce counter-attack by Cheney had been repulsed. Bush was going to act through the UN. For Robin Cook, Blair’s severest critic in the Cabinet, this was the one occasion when there was solid evidence that the Prime Minister had influenced the White House.41

  The unilateralist hawks in Washington had their beaks temporarily blunted. The Prime Minister could now focus his attention on dealing with his doves at home.

  On Tuesday, 3 September, shortly before his trip to Camp David, he called a news conference in Sedgefield to ratchet up his case that confronting Saddam was ‘the right thing to do’, an early appearance of the phrase relentlessly repeated in the years to come. He announced that the government would imminently reveal why Iraq was ‘a real and unique threat to the security of the region and the rest of the world’. This dossier would be published ‘within weeks’ and it would be based on intelligence.42

  The idea of a dossier, designed to condition opinion in favour of action against Saddam, had been knocking around Number 10 for several months. The starting point, according to Campbell, was that Blair was ‘impressed by the work the intelligence services did, and the way they did it. He was seeing a lot of intelligence which increased his basic concerns about Saddam. It is very hard for a Prime Minister to just push that aside and say it does not matter or it is all likely to be wrong.’43 One dossier had already been published, to very little contention, laying out the sins of the Taliban and the crimes of al-Qaeda in the run-up to the campaign in Afghanistan. That set the precedent for using intelligence material to sell war.

  The initial plan was to publish a dossier about Saddam in March, but Blair drew back then because the material was weak, the Americans were not enthusiastic and it would ‘ramp up’ controversy about Blair’s intentions at a time when he was ‘trying to calm it down’.44

  Now his imperatives were reversed. The private polling and focus groups done for him by his soothsayers of public opinion gave the same message as the published polls. A big majority of the country were against war. As Stan Greenberg, who did that polling for him, says: ‘He knew the public was not with him on going into Iraq. He was convinced that he had to stand with the United States and knew he had to bring the country with him if he was going to persuade the Labour Party and the Commons to support him.’45

  Blair and Campbell believed that ‘secret intelligence’ had a magical, hypnotising power that might convince sceptical voters and Labour MPs of the case for acting against Saddam. One very senior official notes: ‘They always had a hankering to use intelligence going back to Kosovo. They thought it was one of the best ways of convincing people that things were true.’46

  After declaring his intention to publish the dossier, the Prime Minister conferred with his aides in the garden at Myrobella, his Victorian villa in the constituency. He explained what they needed to Campbell and Tom Kelly, one of the Director of Communications’ lieutenants. The West had tolerated Saddam’s existence for many years and other rogue states were arguably more threatening. So the dossier had to answer two questions: ‘Why Iraq? Why now?’47

  The true answer was well put by Jack Straw in one of his many confidential notes to Blair. ‘If 11 September had not happened, it is doubtful that the US would now be considering military action against Iraq,’ wrote Straw some months previously. ‘Objectively, the threat from Iraq has not worsened as a result of 11 September.’ What had really changed was American ‘tolerance’ for Saddam ‘the world having witnessed … just what evil people can these days perpetrate’.48

  In international law that wasn’t a foundation for launching war. An amalgam of impulses was driving Blair, but he ended up resting his case almost exclusively on the claim that Saddam possessed and was threatening to acquire more weapons of mass destruction. This was partly because the Americans wound up in a similar place. It was one of the few points around which there was some consensus in the divided and dysfunctional administration. As Paul Wolfowitz subsequently admitted: ‘The Bush administration focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction as the primary justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force because it was politically convenient … because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.’49

  For Blair, it was also the only casus belli that might provide legal, diplomatic and political cover. The Attorney-General, Peter Goldsmith, was clear with Blair that regime change – toppling Saddam on the basis that it was a good thing to rid the world of a very nasty dictator – was not a legal basis for war. Jack Straw further warned him that ‘regime change per se is no justification for military action’.50 While the Americans thought Saddam’s violations of previous UN resolutions gave them enough legal cause, Goldsmith told Blair he couldn’t advise the same. In the end, Blair’s case became a mix of the moral case, the violations case and the menace case. In his public rhetoric he would shift the emphasis from one leg of the argument to another, depending on the exigencies of the moment, but for most of the time he placed the greatest weight on the alleged threat posed by Saddam.

  On 5 September and again on the 9th, Alastair Campbell chaired meetings with John Scarlett and other intelligence officials. Campbell’s chairmanship of these conclaves, the second being a full gathering of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was hugely revealing about the hierarchy of power within Downing Street. Campbell, the director of spin, sat in a superior seat to Scarlett, the intelligence chief. This was the quintessential example of how pre-eminent propagandists had become in New Labour and how willingly many senior officials deferred to them. Previous generations of intelligence chiefs would have been utterly contemptuous and incredulous if it were suggested that they should be at the beck and call of a spin doctor, however grandiosely he was titled. Campbell was a former tabloid journalist with no experience whatsoever of intelligence and how to handle the dry, contingent and often speculative material that was generated by agents and analysts. Yet it was Campbell who pronounced that the current draft of the dossier was not good enough, e-mailing Jonathan Powell that it needed a ‘substantial rewrite … as per TB’s discussion’.51 The spinner told the spooks what was expected of them. ‘It had to be revelatory and we needed to show that it was new.’52

  The trouble was that there was very little fresh and revelatory intelligence about Saddam. Clausewitz, the great Prussian military strategist, identified the problem over a century earlier: ‘Much of the intelligence that we receive in war is contradictory, even more of it is plain wrong, and most of it is fairly dubious.’53 For all the developments in intelligence gathering since the nineteenth century, it remained a foggy science in the twenty-first, especially when agents were attempting to penetrate a country as closed and controlled as Iraq.

  The JIC’s secret assessment in March admitted that intelligence was ‘sporadic and patchy. Iraq is well practised in the art of deception, such as concealment and exaggeration.’54

  Stalinist in both its brutality and control, Saddam’s regime was an intelligence black hole. Iraq was ‘such a difficult country to penetrate’ that the ‘intelligence base’ was ‘fragile’, says Robin Butler, the independent peer and former Cabinet Secretary who chaired the inquiry which Blair was later forced to set up.

  ‘The intelligence community warned the Prime Minister that, though they concluded that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was trying to develop more, their intelligence base for this conclusion was very weak. That was explicitly explained to the politicians, but it wasn’t the impression that the public h
ad.’55

  Another confidential assessment by the Cabinet Office’s Overseas and Defence Secretariat was also bluntly candid that ‘our intelligence is poor.’ The paper noted this was a problem because they would need ‘incontrovertible proof’ to convince the world of the need for military action.56

  In fact, the intelligence was worse than poor: much of it was seriously misleading or totally false. One source relied on was an agent with the suggestive codename ‘Curveball’. This source’s material was passed on from the BND, the German intelligence service. They refused to let SIS talk to him.57 Had they done so they might have discovered just how unreliable he was. The Germans had shared with the CIA their suspicions that ‘Curveball’ was a mentally unstable drunk and a fabricator.58

  The subsequent inquiry into the use of intelligence revealed that the sources relied on by MI6 were ‘few’ and there was ‘serious doubt’ about ‘a high proportion’ of them. ‘Untried agents’ were given ‘more credence’ than normal because of ‘the scarcity of sources and the urgent requirement for intelligence’. One main source was often ‘passing on gossip’. A second, who had provided a lot of material on chemical and biological weapons, was untrustworthy. The reports of a third were so discredited that they were officially withdrawn by SIS. Only two MI6 sources were judged to be ‘reliable’ and these were the two whose ‘reports were less worrying’ about Saddam’s capabilities.59