The Bush White House was being confirmed in its prejudice, expressed by the arch-hawk Richard Perle, that the UN was nothing but a ‘looming chatterbox on the River Hudson’.103 The British could now see that ‘the Americans were not bothered’ about getting a second resolution. ‘They’d come to a view long before that the legal case for war had been made.’104 With the trigger date for an invasion very close, Bush declined to make any further serious effort. The American military juggernaut was revving up for an invasion to a timetable determined in the White House and the Pentagon. Bush dismissed calls to give the process any more time as ‘like a re-run of a bad movie and I’m not interested in watching it’.
The Cabinet Secretary says: ‘Blair really thought he’d get the second resolution.’105 This failure would haunt the rest of his premiership. He would ever after be accused of leading Britain into an illegal war. The atmosphere in Number 10 was bleak. Jonathan Powell: ‘When we couldn’t get the second resolution, Tony thought, we all thought: “Oh fuck, what are we going to do now?” ’106
Blair and everyone around him were ‘exhausted’ and ‘distressed’.107 Jack Straw came round to Number 10 to issue his starkest warning yet to Blair. The Prime Minister was told by his Foreign Secretary: ‘If you go without a second resolution, the only regime change that will be taking place is in this room.’108 This was not said in a threatening tone; more one of despairing concern. The next day, Campbell was wobbly. Was it, he asked Blair, ‘really worth sacrificing everything’ for this?109 More than once, Sally Morgan said directly to Blair: ‘This could be the end of you.’
‘I know, it may be,’ he responded. ‘I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do. It’s the right thing to do. We have to see it through.’110
After a deadlocked meeting of the Security Council on 7 March, in the words of Straw, ‘we were just drawn down inevitably towards war.’111
All the tortuous and febrile activity over a second resolution proved to be merely a speed hump on the road to conflict. Every aspect of Blair’s strategy – in terms of the Americans, the Europeans, the UN, the British public and the Labour Party – appeared to lie in ruins. He was now confronted with the hideous choice that he had spent months trying to avoid: either break with the Americans or follow them into Iraq without the express endorsement of the UN and in the face of the opposition of much of his country and party.
Watching with great concern for an old ally’s plight was the former American President, Bill Clinton. He later remarked to me: ‘Tony was caught naked in the middle of the room.’112
9. With You to the End
‘I’m going to call him,’ George Bush said to his Chief of Staff and his National Security adviser. ‘I’m going to tell Tony that he doesn’t have to do this.’1 On the afternoon of Sunday, 9 March, the secure line at Chequers started to ring. Bush and Blair were about to have one of their most significant and revealing conversations.
The White House was suddenly waking up to the scale of the jeopardy facing its British ally. They’d been getting warnings for weeks. ‘This is really difficult stuff,’ Jack Straw told several members of the administration in an attempt to get them to ‘understand the risk the Prime Minister is taking here’.2 David Manning was so apprehensive about the peril facing Blair that he phoned Condi Rice the day before the Bush call to warn her that the Prime Minister was ‘prepared to go down’ over Iraq.3
The Americans didn’t want that. On Sunday morning in Washington, Bush discussed what to do about it with Rice and Andrew Card. ‘We didn’t want to put Britain in an awkward position,’ says Card. ‘Would we want the British troops to be there? Yes. Did we need the British troops to be there? We needed them in the context of the world, but we didn’t necessarily need them in the context of the military victory.’4
Rice agrees that Bush ‘didn’t want to put at risk’ such a loyal brother in arms.5 To lose a crucial ally at this juncture – the start date for war was less than two weeks away – would be a very bad development for the White House.
When Blair picked up the phone to Bush, the President told him: ‘My last choice is to have your Government go down. We don’t want that to happen under any circumstances. Tony, I really mean that.’
‘It’s difficult here,’ Blair acknowledged. ‘But I’m with you.’6
Bush said he understood the ‘burden’ on Blair and persisted with his offer of an escape route. ‘Perhaps there’s some other way Britain can be involved.’ The British troops could stay on the Kuwaiti side of the border and participate after the invasion by helping with policing and reconstruction.
Blair did not thank Bush for his offer, say he would consider it and consult colleagues. He instantly turned down the opt-out.
‘No, I told you that I’m with you and I’m going to be with you.’7
Blair later explained the conversation like this: ‘He wanted regime change in Baghdad, not in London.’8
That Bush offer was one of several junctures when Blair had both reason and opportunity to disengage British forces from the invasion or at least make their participation conditional. At the Crawford Summit in 2002 he could have reserved his position until it was clearer whether the Americans had properly planned for the invasion and the aftermath. Another opportunity presented itself in the New Year of 2003 when he could have joined France and Germany in arguing for the inspections to be given more time. In early 2003, by which time it was already clear that some of the intelligence on Iraq was unsound, he could have rethought his strategy. Many in the intelligence services were by then getting cold feet. Eliza Manningham-Buller, who succeeded Stephen Lander as head of MI5, shared her predecessor’s fear that a war would make Britain more vulnerable to attack because it would radicalise young Muslims and recruit them to terrorism.9 In February, John Scarlett’s JIC sent a warning, circulated not just to Blair but also to Brown, Blunkett and Straw, that ‘al-Qaeda and associated groups represent by far the greatest threat to western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action in Iraq.’10
A further opportunity to exit was provided when it became clear there would be no second UN resolution to sanction war. Now, in March 2003, Bush himself offered an escape route only for Blair to turn him down.
As expressed to his Foreign Secretary:
Tony’s view was that it was a kind of cop-out because we were willing the end and could have ended up in the worst of all worlds. We would look really stupid if, having led people up to the top of the hill on the basis that there was this danger, we then said: ‘No thanks, we’re not going to take part in this.’11
Blair believed it would be fatal to his authority to back down now, according to David Manning:
He felt his own credibility was on the line. You couldn’t just be a fairweather friend and change your mind when things got tough. It’s also important that he did believe Saddam was a very evil man and somebody needed to do something about it. And it wasn’t satisfactory to leave the dirty work to someone else.12
The senior British officers, Michael Boyce and Mike Jackson, were strongly of the opinion that ‘either we were in or we weren’t up for it: you couldn’t go in for half measures.’13 Boyce and Jackson were very apprehensive of the way the US military operated. They had no appetite for following them into Iraq as peacekeepers ‘to try and make everything lovely after the Americans had trashed the joint’.14
A senior diplomat thinks the Bush offer was one of the psychological games that leaders play. ‘It was another of those little tests that leaders give each other,’ believes Jeremy Greenstock. ‘ “Are you going to be with me 100 per cent?” You go on asking as it gets more difficult.’15
A more cynical view was taken by a very senior civil servant who observed Blair at close quarters over many years. ‘Blair saw this as the big throw of his career. They would go into Iraq. They would have a glorious victory. People would shower them with petals. That would strengthen his hand in Europe as the bridge over the Atlantic and strengthen his hand
at home over Brown.’16
José María Aznar and Silvio Berlusconi, the right-wing Prime Ministers of Spain and Italy, gave the war their support, but did not provide any troops. Blair regarded that as morally cowardly. ‘He felt strongly that it was the right thing to do,’ says Sally Morgan. ‘He has a view that Britain has a role in the world and that we are a serious player. Britain should intervene and shouldn’t be people who stand by and let others do it.’17
That was certainly part of the reason, but it was fused with another. His bottom line was that he was never going to break with the Americans even when the Americans themselves were suggesting that he could. Jeremy Greenstock understood from his conversations with Blair that ‘he clearly believed that there is no ally of the United Kingdom more important to stick with on hard security issues than the United States.’18 General Mike Jackson agrees that it boiled down to Blair’s view of the ‘huge strategic importance of the relationship between the UK and US’.19
In the view of the Cabinet Secretary, it was simply too late to back out:
Our forces were literally bobbing up and down on the ocean or sitting in the desert. We had said we would do certain things. We would do the south. We were doing certain intelligence operations. It was already complicated by the Turks saying the US couldn’t have land access through their territory. If we’d pulled back, the Special Relationship would have been dead for a hundred years.20
Many in the Prime Minister’s inner circle were desperately disappointed that he hadn’t seized on Bush’s offer. Sally Morgan never had moral qualms about the war, but was terrified about the consequences of doing it without explicit sanction from the UN. She chose nevertheless to ‘click into loyal servant mode’.21 Peter Mandelson, still advising from the wings, was highly queasy. Stephen Wall was against and came to regard the war as illegal.22 Andrew Adonis, the head of the policy unit, was opposed. David Manning repeatedly told Blair that he didn’t have to do it. Alastair Campbell never seemed completely convinced. Campbell says: ‘My big worry was his political position vis-à-vis what would be an unpopular war alongside a very right-wing American President. I was worried how it might affect his survival.’23 His partner, Fiona Millar, was passionately opposed. So was Sarah Helm, the partner of Jonathan Powell, who liked to joke that she would divorce him had they been married. The Chief of Staff, the son of an Air Vice-Marshal, was the only true believer around the Prime Minister.24 ‘Jonathan was the most gung-ho. He was more gung-ho than Tony.’25 The vast majority of the Prime Minister’s most senior aides did not share his conviction that this was the right course.
To the last, Jack Straw, whose wife and children were all opponents of the war, was still trying to persuade Blair that they could back out. Though he never showed his doubts in public, the Foreign Secretary bombarded the Prime Minister with ‘a whole series of minutes to set out various alternatives’.26 He later said: ‘You owe a Prime Minister, if you’re Foreign Secretary, the best advice you can give.’27
Two members of the Cabinet were known to be deeply unhappy. One was Robin Cook, sacked as Foreign Secretary in 2001 and shifted into the job of Leader of the House. Clever, spiky and self-regarding, an easier man to respect than to like, Cook did not have warm relations with many of his senior colleagues. But he found them being unusually solicitous towards him when he indicated that he would probably resign. He privately joked that his colleagues had ‘put me on suicide watch’.28
Clare Short, the International Development Secretary, had also been voicing her dissent in Cabinet. Both Cook and Short were hawkish supporters of the conflict against Slobodan Milosevic to save the Muslims of Kosovo. That had been conducted without a UN resolution.29 Their positions were not without moral ambiguity and political contradiction either. Both were vehemently opposed to military action in Iraq and believed, for slightly different reasons, that it would result in catastrophe. Neither had yet broken cover. Clare Short now did just that.
On 9 March, I arrived as usual at the BBC’s studios on Millbank, just down the road from Parliament, to present The Westminster Hour, my Sunday evening political programme for Radio 4. There was a telephone message from Short waiting for me. When I called her back, she had just finished serving Sunday lunch to her mother in Birmingham. I established from the conversation that Short appeared ready to say that she would resign from the Cabinet if Blair took Britain to war. She used a striking word about the Prime Minister’s behaviour: ‘reckless’. The challenge for me was to make sure that we had this on the record before her passion cooled or her nerve failed. John Evans, the programme’s ever efficient editor, arranged for a car to whisk her to the BBC studios at Pebble Mill so that we could record the interview quickly.
We sat down and the line went up at 5 p.m. I hoped she would repeat to a million listeners what she had said to me in the phone call. I couldn’t be sure. Politicians often flinch in front of the microphone.
She sounded hesitant and cagey at first. Then, deploying as a prompt the word she had used in our earlier phone conversation, I asked her whether she considered Blair to be acting recklessly. The dam broke. The dissent that had been building within her for months cascaded into the microphone.
‘The whole atmosphere of the current situation is deeply reckless,’ she declared, a slight quaver in her voice. ‘Reckless for the world, reckless for the undermining of the UN in this disorderly world, reckless with our Government, reckless with his own future, position and place in history. It’s extraordinarily reckless.’ By the end of the interview, I had her on the record saying that it would be ‘indefensible’ to take action without a UN mandate. In the event of war, she would resign: ‘Absolutely, there’s no question about that.’30
She later described it to me as ‘my last throw. All I’ve got left is to say I’m going to resign so I’d better say it in public.’31
The interview sent a deep shockwave through the Government. When the programme was broadcast after the 10 p.m. news that night, one Cabinet minister was so enraged by her behaviour that he hurled his radio against the wall. The next morning, she was driving her car on the way to the bank machine when her mobile rang. It was Blair, exploding with a fury that took her aback. ‘You never told me. You didn’t say you were going to resign,’ he lambasted her. ‘I’m sorry,’ responded Short, contending it should have been clear enough from what she had been saying in Cabinet. She offered: ‘I’ll resign now.’ ‘No,’ Blair replied. ‘I don’t want you to do that. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’ He was ‘angrier than I’ve ever known him, because he doesn’t usually do angry’.32
The interview was the splash in all of Monday morning’s newspapers, which speculated even more intensely about Blair’s chances of survival. It was a ‘stunning attack’ in the view of the Mirror,33 which ‘dealt a body blow to Tony Blair’ in the assessment of The Times.34 Tony Blair was left ‘facing the opening of floodgates to a catastrophic rebellion’, according to the Guardian.35
There was a widespread expectation that he had no option but to fire Short. She had publicly accused the Prime Minister of being ‘reckless’ – a word she used six times. That was as flagrant a breach of the conventions of Cabinet loyalty as there can be. Moreover, she unleashed this shot into his exposed flank at a moment of maximum vulnerability. So it was a demonstration of how imperilled Blair now felt that he did not feel strong enough to fire her despite the risk of looking even weaker. ‘I don’t want to make a martyr of her,’ he explained to colleagues.36
This did initially make him look feeble, but it was also a display of Blair’s tactical guile when in a corner. The resignation of both Short and Cook would be more threatening than losing just the one of them.
Within forty-eight hours of her appearance on The Westminster Hour came two more interventions, one from Washington, another from Paris, which further squeezed the vice in which Blair had placed himself. Geoff Hoon had made a call to his American counterpart during which he warned Donald Rumsfeld that Britain would not be able t
o commit its forces if the parliamentary vote went against the Government. The same message was conveyed to Colin Powell from Jack Straw.37
Expecting these exchanges to remain private, there was horror in London when Rumsfeld blithely declared in public that it wasn’t a problem if the British couldn’t join the invasion. ‘There are workarounds,’ he shrugged to a news conference.38
‘It took everybody aback,’ says David Manning. Commitments had been made, very difficult commitments for which Blair was ‘already taking a lot of flak’. Rumsfeld’s unhelpful intervention was ‘a pretty odd way of acknowledging that’.39
Wedded to his strategy of invasion-lite, Rumsfeld thought he could do the job with fewer US troops than there had been in the first Gulf War. He and the head of US forces, Tommy Franks, reckoned that allies, even their British ones, were more of a nuisance than an assistance. So naturally enough he didn’t regard British participation as essential for anything but diplomatic reasons. And diplomacy was of no interest anyway to old Rummy.
The British military regarded his claim that the Americans could do it on their own as ‘bollocks’ because ‘when we actually hit the button the British were absolutely integrated into the plan.’ The American forces were already thinned out. The US 4th Infantry Division, which was supposed to be at the cutting edge, was ‘nowhere’ because the Turks had denied land access. British withdrawal ‘would have unstitched the American battle plan’. Britain was contributing about a third of the armour. The British were also an essential feature of the airpower plan.40
Blair ‘went bonkers’ when he was told about Rumsfeld’s remarks. ‘He couldn’t believe how the US kept fucking things up.’41
The End of the Party Page 24