Chirac was mercurial, proud, wily, sometimes avuncular, sometimes bombastic and prone to delivering overbearing lectures to fellow leaders. Entering his eighth decade, he was anxious to rescue the reputation of his scandal-splattered presidency and win a place in history which would compare with the founder of his party, Charles de Gaulle. An American invasion of Iraq was wildly unpopular in Gaullist France. Chirac’s opposition was helping to restore his stature with his people.
Chirac’s relationship with Blair was a complicated and combustible mix of fascination, irritation and rivalry. The French President was at first intrigued by Blair. The elected monarch of France then bridled at Blair’s competition to be the pre-eminent European politician of the day, a position that Chirac regarded as his of right.
In private, Blair was ‘a wonderful mimic’ of other leaders and would entertain friends with take-offs of the French President. ‘Whenever you saw him he’d give you a version of Chirac and Prodi and the others.’1
There was an ugly clash between Blair and Chirac at a European Council a few months earlier. ‘I’ve never been spoken to by anybody like that,’ the Frenchman yelled at Blair. ‘You have been very badly brought up.’ He’d also told him that if he went to war in Iraq ‘you won’t be able to look Leo in the face in twenty years’ time.’2
Relations between the two had now sunk into ‘deep distrust’.3 Blair was alarmed that the Frenchman seemed to want to put himself at the head of an anti-American bloc. ‘Tony had a visceral feeling against this Chirac bipolar view of the world,’ says Alastair Campbell. ‘He was very worried about the potential for Europe to go that way.’4 A senior Foreign Office official recalls it being ‘quite widely thought’ at Downing Street, as a result of ‘snippets of conversation’ picked up from within the Elysée Palace, that Chirac was deliberately setting out to exploit the divisions over Iraq to try to destroy Blair.5 Iraq ‘lit a fuse in Chirac’s mind’ because he felt he’d a ‘special relationship with Iraq over the years’.6
The two men made a reasonable effort to disguise the antagonism when they performed in public at Le Touquet. Chirac spoke of ‘a very warm feeling’ between the two and Blair of ‘a tremendous spirit of friendship’.7 That mask of amity was ripped off the moment they sat down for a private lunch. Chirac launched into the patronising lecture mode that so irked Blair. ‘We don’t need any more wars,’ declared the French President. War was ‘a nasty thing’. He’d been a young soldier in Algeria during France’s bloody struggle in its former colony. ‘I know what war is like.’ Unlike, he implied, his British guest. ‘If you go into Iraq you will not be welcomed,’ Chirac continued. He predicted ‘a civil war’. Majority rule by the Shia will not be ‘the same thing as democracy’. Blair absorbed this lecture more than he argued back. He knew that by now Chirac was beyond persuading. As they left the lunch, Blair turned to his senior adviser, Sir Stephen Wall. Rolling his eyes, the Prime Minister sighed: ‘Poor old Jacques, he just doesn’t get it, does he?’8
As it would turn out, Wall later concluded, Chirac had ‘got it’ about what might happen in Iraq ‘rather better than we did’.9
Europe was dividing into two hostile camps about Iraq, a split which left Blair’s position increasingly exposed. Initially, his diplomatic strategy appeared to reap great rewards. After eight weeks of wrangling at the United Nations building in New York, on 8 November the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 by a unanimous vote of its fifteen members. Even Syria, whose leader had publicly humiliated Blair twelve months earlier, voted for the resolution which declared Saddam guilty of violating earlier resolutions and in breach of his obligations to disarm. The Iraqi dictator was warned that failure to take this last chance to comply would result in ‘serious consequences’.10
Blair was euphoric.11 On the face of it, this was a success for his approach. ‘The first five minutes after its passage looked like a mighty triumph,’ says Christopher Meyer.12 If Saddam failed to comply, the international community was now signed up to dealing with the Iraqi tyrant. If Saddam capitulated, he would be weakened, perhaps so fatally that he would be overthrown from within, and it would be much harder for the Americans to justify an invasion.
War planning nevertheless went on apace. America’s senior military came over to the British command centre at Northwood to reveal more detail about their invasion plan. Admiral Michael Boyce in turn briefed Blair and lobbied to be allowed to start making serious preparations for conflict. Blair wouldn’t let him. Boyce was told by Blair ‘to keep my thoughts to myself’ for fear that if ‘anything about that breaks loose people will get wind of it’.13 This meant a delay in ordering up all the essentials for conflict such as ammunition, kit, spares, making tanks ready for desert warfare, ‘everything you can think of for a war’ and an inventory that took weeks to put together. Boyce was not even allowed to give warning of the requirements to the Chief of Defence Logistics.
Blair was afraid that evidence of war planning would make a conflict look inevitable and expose him to the charge that he was lying when he said he still sought a peaceful outcome. A side of Blair continued to hope for that. He was confronted with opposition and demonstrations on a scale he had never before experienced. He was also uncertain that the Americans knew what they were doing. His ideal result, so he would frequently say in private conversation, was the removal of Saddam without the necessity for conflict. In a phone call to Bush, Blair said: ‘If Saddam complies, you do realise we will have to take “yes” for an answer?’ ‘I do,’ replied Bush.14 The British got the impression that Bush would be content with a different route to regime change. ‘Cheney wanted a war,’ reckoned David Manning, ‘but I think Bush would have quite liked that.’15 Condi Rice told Christopher Meyer that the ‘implosion of Saddam’s regime’ was their preferred outcome.16 Egypt and Saudi Arabia were encouraged to convey the message to the Iraqi dictator and elements of his regime that America and Britain would be content to see Saddam step down and go into exile with his family.17
If this invitation was ever delivered, it did not get a positive response from Saddam. His reign of terror over Iraq had lasted for more than two decades despite his defeat in the first Gulf War and his earlier catastrophic six-year conflict with Iran. The butcher of Baghdad had not survived for so long without possessing both nerve and guile.
This helps to explain one of the great mysteries at the heart of the Iraq conflict: why did Saddam behave as if he had WMD when he hadn’t? One plausible explanation is that he wanted the world to believe that he still had an arsenal to deter the Americans, to frighten his neighbours and to keep his population prostrate with fear. In the words of one British official: ‘He was like a man who kept a “Beware of the Dog” sign on his front gate, but who had secretly shot and buried the dog.’18
The alternative thesis, as expounded by Geoff Hoon, is that ‘his generals didn’t dare tell Saddam that they no longer had the stuff.’19 Though Iraq did not have the weapons, Saddam continued to behave in a manner that suggested that they were there somewhere. He responded to the UN resolution in the way that any averagely crafty dictator might do. He did not fully defy the UN and he did not wholly comply either.
On 7 December, the Iraqis produced a 12,200-page dossier which claimed to account for what had happened to Saddam’s banned weaponry. This took a while to absorb at Number 10. ‘It was all in Arabic so we had to get it translated first.’20 Once they had, it was grasped that Saddam’s ‘completely inept’ response in this obfuscatory document was going to be a diplomatic disaster.21 Sally Morgan saw this moment as ‘the beginning of the realisation that things were going to be extremely difficult’.22 Heavy criticism of Iraq from the UN inspectors was topped by total condemnation from the Bush administration, which immediately cranked up the pressure on Saddam to give the inspectors access to his scientists and any site of their choosing. Bush told the Spanish Prime Minister that Saddam’s ‘joke’ declaration proved beyond doubt that he was ‘a liar’ who had ‘no intention of dis
arming’.23
Saddam’s manoeuvres tore apart the superficial unity at the UN. The price paid for unanimity over Resolution 1441 was ambiguity. It did not determine how long Saddam should be given to comply. Nor did it define what exactly the ‘serious consequences’ would be if he didn’t. France and Russia viewed the resolution as a brake on America; America regarded the resolution as a trigger for war.
Colin Powell and Jack Straw were still desperately trying to avoid a conflict. ‘Colin and I see it as our job to stop the war,’ Straw told the British ambassador in Washington.24 The Foreign Secretary turned bookie and publicly gave odds. It was still ‘60 to 40 against’ conflict,25 he said early in the New Year, a declaration which even his own Permanent Secretary regarded as heroically optimistic. Michael Jay believes the ‘momentum was pretty much unstoppable towards the end of 2002, early 2003’.26
At lunchtime on Saturday, 11 January, HMS Ark Royal set sail from Portsmouth bound for the Gulf. Straw’s odds were wishful thinking, inspired more by what he hoped would be the outcome than by the reality. Events were running away from him and Colin Powell. They were reduced to moaning to each other about their failure. ‘By the end, Jack and Colin were like two men in a bar crying into their beer,’ says one Foreign Office official very familiar with their exchanges.27
Powell, trying to preserve some sway in the White House, joined the war party in mid-January at a meeting with Bush in the Oval Office. The encounter was brief – just twelve minutes long – and critical. ‘I think I have to do this,’ the President said to his Secretary of State. ‘I want you with me.’28 Powell was still wracked with doubt about the enterprise. But he was never going to resign. According to Richard Armitage, his number two, Powell would always be ‘the good soldier’.29 The last of the American doves had joined the hawks.
The differences between Washington and Paris grew irreconcilable when Dominique de Villepin, the Foreign Minister of France, ambushed Powell at a meeting of the Security Council, talked of an American ‘adventure’ and described war as a ‘dead end’.30
If that was intended to restrain Washington, it had the opposite effect. This made it even harder for an infuriated Powell to be a voice of caution within the administration. The hawks felt further vindicated when the UN’s team of inspectors presented its first report on 27 January. Criticism of the lack of Iraqi co-operation was seized on by the White House. At the end of January, George Bush was driven down Pennsylvania Avenue to deliver his third State of the Union address. ‘The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving,’ declared the President, beating the drum louder still. ‘If war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military – and we will prevail.’31
From the British embassy in Washington, Christopher Meyer accurately reported to Number 10 that Bush had taken such an uncompromisingly bellicose position that he had left himself no wriggle room. Short of Saddam fleeing or being toppled, the President had made it impossible for America to back down from an invasion. Meyer also warned that the Pentagon’s military timetable could not be synchronised with the laborious process of inspections. Barring a miracle, they were heading for ‘a train crash’ at the UN. On top of which, the Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians were telling the Americans: ‘If you are going to do it, do it quickly.’32
There was additional pressure on Blair from the British military. Admiral Boyce and General Mike Jackson told him that the armed forces would not be combat-ready without clear orders to create supply chains and plan for battle. Towards the end of January, Geoff Hoon announced to the Commons that Britain was now committing a quarter of the army and a third of the air force. The Defence Secretary had to concede to MPs that many of the troops still lacked equipment even as basic as desert kit.33 That was a consequence of Blair’s refusal to let Boyce order up supplies earlier.
George Bush acted in the confidence that he had the votes in Congress and the backing of most Americans, many of whom believed, albeit wrongly, that Saddam was connected to 9/11. There were isolated American voices condemning the idea of a ‘dumb war’. One opponent was the author of that phrase, a man called Barack Obama. But he was merely an obscure State Senator from Illinois, barely a household name in his own household. The great majority of America’s politicians were behind war.
For Blair, the political alignments were entirely different. In January, public opinion in Britain was hotly hostile to war with less than a third of voters backing action.34 It was widely conjectured that Blair might not survive in Number 10. Sally Morgan warned him that this could be ‘the end of you’.35 He thought so too. ‘This could cost me my job,’ Blair confided to Barry Cox and other close friends.36
The Prime Minister had driven into the yellow box without a clear exit. He urgently needed a way out. The answer he reached for was getting a second resolution from the United Nations which explicitly authorised military action. Sally Morgan and David Manning were most vehement within Number 10 in arguing that this was absolutely critical. Morgan believed it was essential if there was to be any hope of carrying the Labour Party and public opinion. She said to him directly: ‘If we don’t have a second resolution and this goes wrong, we are stuffed.’37 When Blair assessed the balance of opinion within the Cabinet, he reckoned that without a second resolution he could only ‘just about get to a majority … it was pretty much “future on the line” time.’38 A second resolution was vital to Blair to make the removal of Saddam look legitimate in the eyes of the world, vital to carry British public opinion with him, and vital to manage his Cabinet and party. Securing one became the absolute priority of his policy.
At the end of January, he crossed the Atlantic to see Bush. He spent the flight over with Manning working on the arguments he could deploy to make the case for a pause for further diplomacy.39
This was Blair’s toughest meeting to date at the White House. David Manning took a note for the British side as Blair argued for pushing back the invasion. He was confronted by a united front of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, all of whom set their faces against that. Tens of thousands of US troops were mobilising, in transit or already deployed on the borders of Iraq. The largest naval armada assembled since 1945 was already stationed in the Arabian Gulf, the decks of the warships bristling with weaponry with a potency that no other state on earth could come close to matching. The planners at the Pentagon argued that they needed to invade in March to be sure of getting to Baghdad before the onset of Iraq’s broiling summer. Colin Powell privately regarded this as not conclusive, telling Manning that ‘they could always fight at night.’40 But the argument for war without delay had carried the day in Washington. Blair’s case for a pause was rebuffed and he did not anyway push it very hard. In his note of the meeting, David Manning recorded that ‘the start date for the military campaign was now pencilled in for 10 March.’41
Bush gave an insight into his state of mind when he mused to Blair about painting an American spy plane in UN colours and sending it over Iraq to provoke conflict. The President was insouciant about what might face the allies after the war, saying that the Americans didn’t expect an eruption of ethnic and religious sectarian fighting in Iraq once Saddam was gone. Blair asked about planning for the aftermath but did not probe further when Condi Rice responded that ‘a great deal of work is now in hand.’ As Manning later put it: ‘He accepted their assurances.’42 Blair was so focused on the politics and the diplomacy of going towards war that he was fatally distracted from thinking about what would happen afterwards.
He encountered more resistance from the Americans when the Prime Minister argued for seeking the second UN resolution he now desperately required. None of the Americans embraced that idea. Blair’s desire to go back to the UN complicated a stance that they wanted to keep simple. They correctly suspected that there was not enough support in the Security Council and it would be better not to attempt it than to try and fail. In the course of three hours of talks, Blair event
ually had to plead: ‘I need this.’ He told Bush that another push at the UN was essential to secure his position in Britain and would give them an ‘insurance policy’ and ‘international cover’ if ‘anything went wrong with the military campaign’. Bush then seemed to relent, saying: ‘If that’s what you need, we will go flat-out to try to help you get it.’ But he warned that if they failed ‘military action would follow anyway.’43 Richard Haas, a senior official at the State Department, remarks: ‘The administration went along with it to help Tony Blair. He was clearly politically out on a limb.’ Bush himself didn’t ‘see the necessity of a second resolution’.44
The President’s lack of relish for pursuing another resolution communicated itself at the joint news conference afterwards when he talked about it with no enthusiasm. ‘I don’t think they saw it as anything like as important as we did,’ says Sir Michael Jay, the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office.45 Bush was more interested in the countdown to conflict, declaring that time was running out for Saddam and he was talking ‘weeks rather than months’.46
David Manning, witness to the entire encounter at the White House, came to regret that Blair had not pushed his case vigorously enough: ‘I don’t think he impressed upon them enough the political problems and the costs if there wasn’t a second resolution.’47
It was becoming starkly obvious that Blair ‘didn’t really have any control’, says Sir Jeremy Greenstock. ‘He’d handcuffed himself to this wagon and he didn’t have any braking influence to slow them down when he felt that they should have slowed down.’48
Jack Straw, the optimist of a month before, was now a pessimist, believing that ‘unless we can get the Iraqis to back off, the die is cast.’49
On 5 February, Colin Powell addressed the UN to make the case that Iraq was in ‘material breach’ of Resolution 1441. The Secretary of State presented photographs, documents and audio tapes designed to establish Saddam’s guilt in the court of world opinion. As a suggestive prop, the Director of the CIA, George Tenet, was sat behind him as Powell laid out ‘evidence’ of Iraq’s failure to disarm. Powell warned the General Assembly that ‘this body places itself in danger of irrelevance if it allows Iraq to continue to defy its will without responding effectively or immediately.’50 Both the White House and Number 10 hoped that Powell’s presentation would be a dramatic ‘Adlai Stevenson moment’. It aimed for the same electrifying effect achieved by Stevenson in the 1960s when he went to the UN during the Cuban missile crisis to reveal the evidence against the Soviet Union.
The End of the Party Page 22