This thickening of the skin continued during the Afghan campaign. ‘You toughen,’ he told me.12 While it would be too facile to say that he enjoyed war, it is true that conflict injected an adrenalin rush that he didn’t get from the humdrumities of politics as usual. ‘War is life and death,’ he reflected. ‘In international crises, the defining moments loom very large and very clear and very inescapable. With the domestic agenda, it’s more of a process.’13 It was clear which he found more energising. Shortly after the conventional war in Iraq, he told another interviewer that he had experienced ‘fantastic highs and fantastic lows’.14
He was still capable of being pricked by its casualties. Fourteen British service personnel were killed in the first forty-eight hours of the Iraq conflict. All died in helicopter crashes. ‘God, it is awful, this war business,’ Blair remarked to Campbell, who acidly replied: ‘Yes, that’s why it is usually best to avoid it.’15 Against the wishes of Michael Boyce and contrary to the advice of civil servants, Blair insisted on writing personal letters of condolence to the families of all the British casualties. ‘It troubled his conscience that people died because of his orders,’ noted one senior officer.16 In writing these letters of consolation, he was hoping to find some for himself and perhaps seeking a form of absolution.
The Iraq conflict was officially being managed by a War Cabinet, but Blair didn’t have much more time for that institution than he had for the normal Cabinet. As ever was the case with him, the critical decisions were made at unminuted conclaves in his den. They met after breakfast each morning. The cast list was the intelligence chiefs, Dearlove and Scarlett; Hoon and Straw, the only two members of the Cabinet in regular attendance; and Admiral Boyce or, in his absence, General Jackson. They were joined by Alastair Campbell, David Manning, Sally Morgan and Jonathan Powell. It soon became apparent to the cannier members of the War Cabinet that all the important decisions had already been made before they met later in the morning. Gordon Brown often didn’t bother to turn up.17
By 22 March, leading American units were penetrating 150 miles into Iraq. In a call that day to Blair, Bush said that Tommy Franks and his commanders were upbeat. ‘No WMD has been shot at us, and we are looking and we’ll find the stuff.’
Thousands of Iraqi soldiers were just abandoning their uniforms and going home. ‘Yes, they are just melting away,’ said Blair.
‘Just melting away,’ agreed Bush.18
By 25 March, British forces were shelling targets in their primary objective, the southern city of Basra.
The consensus of the military predictions about the war was that it would take a month ‘if doing well’ and eight weeks ‘if more difficult’.19 But there were gloomier forecasts that it could be much longer and uglier than that. The biggest fear among the generals was of protracted fighting in urban areas. On the account of Geoff Hoon, ‘Saddam adopted a completely different strategy to the one we expected. His strategy was to hunker down in the cities. We were getting lots of pictures of tanks hidden up street corners. He thought it was going to be like Stalingrad.’20
Some in Number 10 feared that it could turn out that way, says David Manning: ‘We were also worried that Saddam would set fire to the oilfields. That they might smash the dams and flood the place. We were particularly worried about Baghdad. We thought that might be very difficult. Yes, a sort of Stalingrad.’21
As Blair scanned the maps in his den, he began to grow anxious about the rate of progress. Some elements of the media were already questioning why the war wasn’t yet won. Blair began to pester Admiral Boyce and General Jackson with the same question. ‘After about day four, there was a huge impatience. Tony Blair was getting worried that he wasn’t getting headlines that it was already done.’22 Reluctant, as military men usually are, to offer a hostage to fortune, Boyce was loath to guess how long it would take, but suggested that it could be a fortnight before Basra was in their hands. The Americans were getting impatient with the British ‘because we hadn’t bulldozed in there and flattened everything in sight’.23 Ten days into the conflict, Blair fretted to the War Cabinet that we are ‘getting bogged down’ and wondered whether they had underestimated the forces against them.24 The pace of the American advance appeared to be growing sluggish and the British had yet to secure their key targets in the south, prompting a lot of commentary from the first battalion of armchair generals in the press that the allies were running into difficulties. Apprehension was compounded by a series of friendly-fire incidents in which British personnel were killed by their American allies. In early April, I was having a conversation with a Cabinet minister in the back of his limousine. ‘Look, there’s a Union Jack,’ he remarked as we were driven around Parliament Square. ‘Don’t tell the Americans – they’ll bomb it.’25
Something else was beginning to prey on the British commanders’ minds. The battle plan anticipated an Iraqi counter-attack using WMD. Yet as each trigger point was passed, there was no sign of any response.26 ‘Why isn’t this happening?’ Michael Boyce asked the generals. No-one had an answer. Boyce ‘wanted to find something. WMD was the whole rationale for the invasion. The more days that went by without any, the more troubled I became.’27
Blair was struggling to get agreement with Bush about what should happen in Iraq after the war. As he flew to Washington at the end of March, he wrote a twelve-page note urging his ally to work at repairing relations with France, Germany and Russia, and trying to convince Bush that the UN should have a central role in post-war reconstruction. Blair believed UN engagement was both a desirable thing in itself and highly useful as a means of reuniting the international community. When they met at Camp David, Bush indicated that he had read the note, but said nothing that guaranteed that he would act on its advice. Blair was also pushing with frustratingly little success on the Middle East peace process. Bush had been persuaded to talk about publishing a ‘road map’, but the White House was not displaying any enthusiasm for driving along it.
By 2 April, US forces were slaughtering Republican Guard units on the outskirts of Baghdad. Saddam’s command and control was so totally shattered that his army was fighting as ineffectively as a headless corpse. The tanks he had parked in cities proved to be death traps as they were targeted by allied aircraft.28 Forty-eight hours later, the Americans seized Baghdad airport. ‘The Iraqi army was evaporating,’ noted Britain’s most senior military officer.29 But the Defence Secretary was becoming apprehensive that some of ‘the enemy weren’t conventional soldiers’ and they were unexpectedly ‘attacking from the rear as we advanced’.30
This made it even more imperative to get the White House to focus on what they might face after the conventional war. Blair had another chance on 7 April when Bush flew across the Atlantic for a meeting at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland. Downing Street chose Hillsborough as the location for two reasons. It might give a boost to the peace process in Northern Ireland. It might also convince Bush to see the merit of being as dedicated to resolving the Israel–Palestine conflict as Blair was to peace in Ulster.31 For reasons of personal conviction, international diplomacy and political expediency, Blair wanted to balance the war in Iraq with a major push on the Middle East peace process. He raised it at almost every meeting he had with Bush.32 Blair pressed so often on this issue that conversations would begin with Bush saying: ‘I know what you’re going to say, Tony.’33 His persistence could not be faulted; it was his effectiveness that was moot.
At Hillsborough, Blair took Bush for a long evening walk through the castle’s gardens. With the defeat of Saddam now apparently in hand, he pressed for a move on the Middle East. For once, the Prime Minister seemed to score a success. Blair and Bush returned from the walk with the President agreed that he would engage on both the UN and the Palestinian question. At the closing news conference, Bush commended Blair’s dedication in Northern Ireland and went so far as to declare: ‘I’m willing to spend the same amount of energy in the Middle East.’34
Blair was ‘buoyant
’ and ‘full of himself’ on his flight back across the Irish Sea to London. He thought he’d secured a major breakthrough on the Middle East as well as overcoming Bush’s reluctance to involve the UN in post-war Iraq.35 But there was a problem, the same problem which dogged the totality of his relationship with Bush and repeatedly made Blair delusional about how much influence he was truly exerting. The American President would make these promises to Blair, even repeat them for public consumption as he did at Hillsborough. Like Don Giovanni, Bush may even have been sincere at the time. But once he was back in Washington and in the company of Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the Vulcans, he would forget or neglect the promises to his British friend. Blair’s personal envoy in the Middle East concludes: ‘Tony always kidded himself that he had got from Bush more than he was really getting.’36
For the moment, Blair was on an upswing, his mood further lifted that same day when he received news that British forces were entering Basra. On 9 April, Baghdad fell to the American army. Saddam’s regime turned out to be as hollow as the broken legs on the twenty-foot bronze statue of the tyrant which was torn down to provide an iconic image of the fall of his hateful regime.
Relief and triumph flooded through Number 10. The war was won in less than a month and with deceptive ease. ‘The manoeuvre war was the United States army at its best,’ comments General Jackson. ‘It’s what they do so well. It was a quite extraordinary achievement in three weeks in a country the size of Iraq.’37
There was not the feared humanitarian disaster. No chemical or biological weapons were unleashed against either the allied troops or Israel, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Sir Richard Dearlove told the Prime Minister that the intelligence services were ‘very confident’ that they would soon uncover Saddam’s stash of WMD.38 The fallen dictator was on the run; his army was surrendering or deserting; Iraq was in coalition hands. They could laugh in the faces of the doom-mongers who had predicted that the battle for Baghdad would be a replay of Stalingrad.
‘There’s a feeling of elation. There was a lot of surprise that it was so easy,’ says a senior staffer in Number 10 during those heady days. There was particular amazement that the Republican Guard, Saddam’s supposed shock troops, had ‘apparently melted away’.39
Opinion polls indicated that the national mood flipped patriotically once British forces went into action, as Blair always gambled that it would. At the outset of the war, the polls indicated a slim majority in support of the conflict. In the final week, as it became apparent that the allies were enjoying a swift victory, backing for the war rose to nearly two thirds of voters.
There was hubristic chatter that Blair could expect ‘a Baghdad bounce’. Some of the Prime Minister’s closest allies privately conjectured that he might now feel so emboldened that he would finally steel himself to move against Gordon Brown. Some of the Chancellor’s circle feared he might do just that.40
Those with a deeper comprehension of conflict were much more sceptical about the rosy view that Iraq was guaranteed a happy ending. ‘Everybody knew the coalition was going to win the initial battle, but then what?’ remarks General Charles Guthrie. ‘Conflict is easy compared with conflict resolution, which usually goes on far, far longer than the conflict itself and is much more expensive.’41
Admiral Boyce made himself very unpopular at the Pentagon when he told them: ‘This is not going to be the liberation of Paris in 1944. You may get half an hour with roses in your gun barrels. After that, it is going to be misery. We won’t be greeted as liberators.’42
It was not a message they wanted to hear; the shutters came down. The swiftness of the conventional war created a dangerous complacency. ‘It contributed to misunderstanding the aftermath. That’s true. It gave people an exaggerated sense of how easy this was going to be,’ acknowledges David Manning.43
The very rapidity of the advance on Baghdad caught everyone by surprise. ‘The march happened faster than people thought,’ says Andrew Card. ‘The tip of the spear made it all the way to Baghdad and there were no fronts along the way to establish order behind.’44
Something else was gnawing away at Admiral Boyce: they’d still not come across any WMD. ‘Where is it?’ he asked Sir Richard Dearlove. The head of MI6 replied confidently: ‘Don’t worry, it will be there. We’ll find it.’45
Blair was careful to strike a sober and untriumphalist tone in public, aware as he was that the war remained hotly contentious, not least within his own party. On 14 April, seven days after British troops entered Basra, he went to the Commons to tell MPs: ‘There is upon us a heavy responsibility to make the peace worth the war.’46
Even as he said this, the victory was being squandered. The euphoria of liberation was swiftly followed by an orgy of disorder. Within days of the fall of Baghdad, looting erupted across the Iraqi capital. Hospitals and schools were ransacked; shops and offices were stripped bare. Some of this was the uncoiling of the spring after decades of Saddam’s savage repression; some was rooted in the desperation of people trying to look after their families in a shattered country; some was sheer criminality. In a symbolically shocking example of the mayhem, even Iraq’s National Museum was pillaged as looters trashed and stole thousands of antiquities dating from the dawn of civilisation in Mesopotamia.47 American troops failed to intervene.
Blair became ‘very exercised’ about the anarchy breaking out in Baghdad. ‘For Christ’s sake, get on to Condi,’ he said to David Manning, who rang Rice to feed in a suggestion to the White House that they should mobilise troops to guard the hospitals.48
Supplies of fresh water began to run out. Power blackouts became frequent. Fuel grew scarce. The borders were not sealed, lacunae which permitted foreign fighters to enter the country to wage jihad against the allied troops.
‘I think that’s when the moment was lost,’ says Richard Haas, who was watching with mounting apprehension from the US State Department. ‘When you first win a battlefield victory there’s several weeks where you have a degree of momentum and an aura of invincibility. That’s when you’ve got to lock it down, you’ve got to get it right. We didn’t have enough troops, it went bad so quickly and it created a vacuum.’49
Sir Mike Jackson, who was in overall command of the British forces, had a useful doctrine which he called ‘the rule of a hundred days’. That was the timescale in which an occupying army had to establish law and order as well as deliver basic services if it was to win the respect of the local population.50 In that critical first one hundred days, the spoils of victory were thrown away. The mayhem legitimised the idea that the allies had brought chaos rather than freedom and a better life, and it destroyed the mystique of the potency of American military might. Jack Straw would later agree that there was ‘a three-month window of opportunity to get the country right’ between April and July. ‘The sense of optimism and gratitude towards the coalition forces was not capitalised on. It was a tragically lost opportunity.’51
The rapidity of the disintegration was only gradually appreciated in London. One reason for this myopia was because British forces were not in central or northern Iraq. In their sector ‘certainly initially, the very Shia population in the south were very pleased to see us.’52 Blair thought it most important to establish Basra as ‘an exemplar’ for the rest of Iraq. He failed to grasp early on that his war was bound to be judged by what happened not just in the sector under British control, but by the state of Iraq as a whole.
It was ‘accepted that the immediate aftermath of the war was going to be confused, messy and a bit tricky’, according to Ed Owen, the senior adviser to Jack Straw. ‘It took a few months to come to a proper realisation of how badly prepared we were.’53
On the other side of the Atlantic, there was simply blithe indifference to the mayhem that had broken out in Baghdad. ‘Stuff happens,’ shrugged Donald Rumsfeld in a notorious display of his criminal insouciance. ‘Freedom is untidy.’54
Rumsfeld conceived ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, as it was now designated, a
long similar lines to the earlier campaign in Afghanistan. His doctrine of invasion-lite envisaged going in fast and getting out quick. The Pentagon’s own manual said that pacifying a nation the size of Iraq required 500,000 troops. Rumsfeld believed it could be done with 130,000. Tommy Franks was under orders to rapidly draw down the forces in Iraq. ‘Shock and awe’ was a stunningly successful strategy for toppling Saddam, but no-one had thought through the sequel. ‘It was an assumption on the American side that the best-case scenario would happen without any insurance for anything worse,’ lamented one senior British diplomat.55 The ‘intellectually bankrupt’ Rumsfeld simply did not grasp that ‘you needed enough boots on the ground to secure order’, says a British general.56 In the very hierarchical US military structure, none of his commanders were prepared to challenge their reckless and ignorant boss. Regime change was not the same as nation-building. Rumsfeld had little interest in that. Fatally, he was not prepared to let anyone else do it either.
The British foolishly relied on the assumption that Colin Powell and his State Department would be supervising the post-war reconstruction. At a private dinner of foreign ministers at the UN in February, Powell reassured Jack Straw and others present that ‘America had a good record in rebuilding Germany and Japan after the Second World War and they were going to draw on that experience.’57 The State Department showed the British ‘very extensive and detailed plans’ which brought together ‘lots of expertise about what should be done’.58
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