The problem was that the British were talking to the wrong Americans. In the Pentagon, the State Department was derided as ‘the Department of Nice’. Powell’s department was frozen out and its planning cast aside as Rumsfeld seized control of the running of post-war Iraq even though the Pentagon did not have a properly conceived idea of what to do. It was indicative of Rumsfeld’s indifference to planning for the aftermath that he had only now brought a three-star American general out of retirement to run the operation. When Jay Garner tried to get to grips with the challenge he complained that he had been given ‘the impossible task’ of planning the reconstruction of an entire country from a standing start.59 The British general seconded to the Pentagon unit found that they were ‘still moving the chairs in’ just six weeks before the invasion.60 In the eyes of another senior officer, Garner was ‘an old man dragged out of retirement. He was completely beyond it.’61
In mid-April, Jack Straw made an eye-opening visit to Garner and his Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid (ORHA). ‘Is this it?’ boggled Straw when he was taken to see Garner’s headquarters. The Foreign Secretary was staggered to find that the retired US general was trying to run a war-shattered country of more than 20 million people with a staff no more than two dozen strong located in a small suite of rooms on the other side of the border in Kuwait. The Pentagon was not allowing the man now supposed to be in charge of Iraq into the country on the grounds that it was still not safe. Straw was also ‘very concerned indeed about the lack of proper planning’ for the embryonic provisional authority that would take over Iraq. He reported back to Blair that neither Garner nor his operation was up to the task.62
The White House did not want to know. On May Day 2003, Bush was flown out to land on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier cruising off the coast of California thousands of miles away from the unfolding reality in Iraq. This stunt was conceived to give him triumphalist footage for his re-election campaign. Under a massive banner reading ‘Mission Accomplished’ he told the 5,000 crew, and the millions more watching on the TV news, that it was time to celebrate: ‘We do not know the final day of victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide.’63
If the tide was turning in any direction, it was for the worse. Wanting eyes and ears in Iraq that he could trust, Blair turned to John Sawers, a diplomat who had been his senior adviser on foreign affairs during the first term and was now the British ambassador in Egypt. Sawers arrived in Baghdad on 7 May. He sent his first chilling report back to Downing Street four days later. Entitled ‘Iraq: What’s Going Wrong?’, it could barely have been more alarming. ‘The problems are worst in the capital and it is the one place we can’t afford to get it wrong,’ Sawers reported. ‘The clock is ticking.’
He went on: ‘Garner’s outfit, ORHA, is an unbelievable mess. No leadership, no strategy, no co-ordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis … Garner and his top team of sixty-year-old retired generals are well-meaning but out of their depth.’ Untreated sewage was pouring into the Tigris. Uncollected garbage was piling up. There was no television service, depriving the allies of any means of getting their messages to Iraqis. Crime was endemic. Money was spent re-equipping ministries so they could resume work only for the buildings to be instantly looted again. Sawers was also very disturbed by what he was learning about the tactics of the American troops, who alternated between being trigger-happy and lethargic. The US 3rd Infantry Division was exhausted by the fight to Baghdad. ‘Frankly, the 3rd Inf. Div. need to go home now, and be garlanded as victors.’64 Sawers suggested the redeployment of British troops to the capital to assist with security and the training of the Iraqi police. British commanders on the ground were willing. They were overruled by London, which did not want to risk exposing British soldiers to the hazardous conditions in Baghdad.
Even Rumsfeld could see that things were not as ‘wonderful’ as he had proclaimed. His solution made them even worse. The US Defense Secretary put in another American over Garner’s head. This was Paul Bremer, a man with absolutely no experience of running a country, let alone one in the Middle East. This actually commended him to Rumsfeld. Bremer arrived in Baghdad on 12 May to effectively become the emperor of Iraq wielding near absolute power. ‘I am the law,’ he snapped at one British diplomat who found the American viceroy ‘allergic to any suggestion, from any quarter, that he should change a decision once he had made it’.65 Bremer took less than a week to issue the first of a series of catastrophic orders. His first was to ban the four top tiers of Saddam’s Ba’ath party from working in the government. Garner protested: ‘Hell, you won’t be able to run anything if you go this deep.’ The CIA station chief warned him: ‘You will put 50,000 people on the street, underground and mad at Americans.’66
Under Saddam’s long dictatorship, membership of the Ba’ath was compulsory for virtually anyone employed by the Government. While taking out the most senior members of Saddam’s regime was both inevitable and desirable, it was total folly to purge the middle-ranking administrators when there was no-one to take their places. The chaos intensified.
Bremer persisted with his year zero approach to Iraq. He hadn’t been in Iraq a fortnight before he made another fatal executive decision. He ordered the disbandment of the entire Iraqi army, putting over 200,000 discontented soldiers on the streets with no employment. This fed recruits to the insurgency and deprived the country of any indigenous security structure. British post-war planning imagined that Saddam’s army would be reformed, retrained and reconstituted, not that it would be abolished at the stroke of a pen.67 ‘To have kept the army would have helped hugely with the security situation,’ thought a ‘very uncomfortable’ General Jackson.68 To the chaos created by sacking the middle ranks of administrators was now added the menace of sending on to the street thousands of resentful and unemployed Iraqi young men who had military training and access to arms. Bremer then used his ‘extraordinary power’ to ‘tear up’ all the plans to introduce local democracy in Iraq.69
Key members of the Bush administration, such as Condi Rice, would much later accept that Bremer’s purge of the administration and abolition of the army were ‘more severe than was wise’.70 Yet they did nothing to stop it at the time and some elements of the White House actively encouraged it. Blair was ‘worried’ and ‘debated and discussed’ what to do with his officials.71 Rice remembers hearing British ‘concerns’ that it ‘might be going too far’ but they did not make any difference.72 In so much as the British raised any protests, they were clearly too feeble to have any impact. Blair, who always had a weakness for men who were talented at sounding strong, even told his aides that he thought Bremer was ‘impressive’.73 In the Foreign Office it was being grasped that the right-wing Republicans who had seized control ‘didn’t want their mission undermined by British interference’.74 As General Jackson regretfully noted, the British were merely ‘a bit part player’ in the civil administration set up by the Americans.75 Blair had taken responsibility for events in Iraq without ensuring that he had any meaningful power to shape them.
There would be a colossal price, paid in many bloody instalments in the ensuing years, for the failure to plan properly for the aftermath. Tens of thousands of Iraqi people would pay for that tragic error with their lives. So too would many British and American service personnel. The political price, and an ever steepening one, would be paid by Blair.
In the build-up to the invasion, Peter Mandelson, one of his closest confidants, frequently asked Blair whether he was really confident there was a post-war plan. ‘Look, you know, I can’t do everything,’ Blair shrugged off the question. ‘That’s chiefly America’s responsibility, not ours.’76
Even as loyal a friend as Mandelson would later observe: ‘I’m afraid that, as we now see, wasn’t good enough. Obviously more attention should have been paid to what we would do once Saddam had been toppled.’77
Michael Levy, Blair’s friend and his Middle East envoy, was another scep
tic about the post-war planning. ‘What’s going to happen on the day after?’ he asked Blair. ‘It will be taken care of,’ the Prime Minister reassured him.78
Blair received repeated warnings from people he trusted. David Manning, his senior adviser on foreign affairs, cautioned as early as March 2002, in a memo written after a visit to Washington, that the Americans ‘underestimate the difficulties’. Manning said later: ‘It’s hard to know exactly what happened over the post-war planning. I remember the PM raising this many months before the war began. He was very exercised about it and we had been told that a lot of work was being done. It isn’t a question I find easy to answer. I’m not sure we had as much visibility of it as we thought we had.’79
At the end of July 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, reported directly to the Prime Minister at a meeting at Number 10 that the Americans were giving little thought to the aftermath. In November 2002, a multi-departmental team from Britain flew to Washington to talk to the Americans. The British team had to go and see the State Department and the Department of Defense separately because they were not speaking to each other. That was a further warning ‘that there was no agreed American plan for what happened once you got rid of Saddam’, says the British ambassador. ‘There were several people – not just me in Washington – saying to Downing Street that they are at sixes and sevens.’80
The former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, agonised over whether or not to support the war. He made three visits to Blair before the invasion to share his concerns. Kinnock told Blair that he agreed that it would be a good thing to remove such a monstrous tyrant as Saddam, but he needed convincing that the Americans had a coherent plan for the aftermath. ‘I said to Tony: “Are you certain that the Americans have made comprehensive, effective preparation for the conditions in Iraq after the war?” ’ Public opposition to the war from Kinnock would have been dangerous, so Blair told him what he wanted to hear. ‘He said to me that he was sure that was the case. That was a good enough reassurance.’81 It turned out to be a false one.
Some voices had also tried to caution Blair about the high risk of sectarian conflict breaking out between the Shias and Sunnis once Saddam was toppled. For one briefing at Number 10, Jack Straw took with him Dr Michael Williams, a Foreign Office official with great expertise on the Middle East. Williams gave a detailed account of the ethnic and religious tensions within Iraq and why the allies might not be terribly popular as occupiers. Blair casually brushed him aside: ‘That’s all history, Mike. This is about the future.’82
In early March, just before the invasion, Iain Duncan Smith went out to visit the British troops in Kuwait. On his return, the Tory leader talked to Blair in the Prime Minister’s office in the Commons. The British commanders had told him they had not been given any instructions about the aftermath. ‘There appears to be no clear plan. What is the plan?’ Duncan Smith asked Blair. ‘Don’t worry,’ replied the Prime Minister. ‘That’s all in hand.’ The Tory leader came away with ‘the impression that he really wasn’t interested in that. He’d just left it to the Americans.’83
Blair devoted nothing like as much attention to post-war planning – or the lack of it – as he should have done. One crucial reason was that his time and energy were so absorbed by the politics of the war. His fixation in the run-up to the invasion was with securing UN sanction and parliamentary and public support for the war. ‘The focus was on doing the deed and not coping with the consequences,’ noted one member of the Cabinet.84 Thinking about the day after went by default.
As Iraq began the descent into violent chaos, it also became starkly apparent just how little traction London truly had on Washington. On Sally Morgan’s account, Number 10 began to realise that they were only ‘a tiny player in terms of the aftermath’ and ‘we were nowhere in terms of influencing decisions.’85 Jack Straw sustained a good relationship with Colin Powell, but it didn’t count for much because the Secretary of State was an increasingly isolated figure in the administration and his department was frozen out. Powell relied on the British to send him reports about what was happening on the ground because the Pentagon would not tell him.
Cabinet ministers saw that it was ‘absolutely clear that we weren’t able to influence Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who effectively ran the aftermath’.86
The British never managed to work out how to have meaningful contact with the Vice-President.87 He and his notional counterpart, John Prescott, had nothing in common except their girth. Trying to get Geoff Hoon and Donald Rumsfeld alongside each other ‘was like trying to get pandas to mate. It was very slow. It took an awful long time. It was never clear whether it had been consummated or not.’88 They rarely spoke to each other and when they did senior British officers thought that the American treated Hoon ‘with contempt’.89
That placed ‘a very high premium’ on Blair’s relationship with Bush.90 The President was catastrophically incurious about the consequences of his war and the Prime Minister was never robust enough to force his ally to face up to what was happening. The abolition of the army and the administrative purge were discussed by Blair and Bush but never conclusively. ‘I don’t think anybody knew what the right view was,’ says Andrew Card, who was a witness to most of their transatlantic phone conversations and video conferences.91 As a result, the calamitous Bremer was left unchecked.
The gloomy prediction from Chirac that Blair had dismissed at Le Touquet was now beginning to come horribly true. Iraq became trapped in a bloody vortex of sectarian strife and insurgency.
‘I just felt it was slipping away from us from the beginning. There was no security force controlling the streets, there was no police force to speak of, and the vacuum that we left enabled the violent people to come out of the woodwork and exert an influence,’ says Sir Jeremy Greenstock. ‘When they saw they could not be stopped, they kept going. They multiplied men, materials and motivation and became unstoppable.’92
Blair routinely demanded of his officials: ‘Why aren’t the Americans gripping this?’ But he failed to do much gripping himself. Sir Hilary Synnott, a scholarly man who had been High Commissioner in Pakistan, was prevailed upon to delay his impending retirement to become Britain’s representative in southern Iraq. He recalls being sent to Basra with instructions covering just ‘half a side of A4’ and the general advice to ‘play things by ear’. He found the army ‘incandescent about the inadequacies of the civilian operation’ in the four provinces under British stewardship and withering about the ‘pathetic’ Foreign Office.93 Blair put relentless public emphasis on the importance and urgency of making progress in Iraq. But in the eyes of his own representative in Basra, the Prime Minister seemed ‘little interested in the processes within Government by which this might be brought about’.94
In the months after the war, as during the months leading up to it, Blair was fatally and doubly distracted. What leverage he had with the Americans he was trying to use to win their agreement to give the UN a role in postwar Iraq. He had some modest success on 22 May, when the Security Council gave its unanimous support to a resolution to that effect.95 Yet there was a profound reluctance among other powers to help America and Britain with reconstruction. Chris Patten, the European Commissioner, tartly summarised the attitude of France and Germany as: ‘You broke it, you fix it.’96
The other distraction was the growing furore around the weapons of mass destruction which had been Blair’s principal justification for the war. Where on earth were they? The question was raised in the most mocking fashion by Vladimir Putin when Blair travelled to Moscow at the end of April. He was hoping to heal some of the wounds to international relations that had been caused by the war. They were still too raw for that. When the two men had a caviar and cold meats dinner, Putin angrily turned on Blair, accusing him of making Britain an accomplice in an American bid for global domination. The rawness and vehemence of the attack stunned both Blair and the British officials.97 The Russian President was scarcely less abrasive in public when he
openly scorned his visitor in his opening statement at their joint news conference.
‘Where is Saddam? Where are those arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, if they indeed were in existence?’ Putin publicly ridiculed a stony-faced Blair. ‘Perhaps Saddam is still hiding somewhere underground in a bunker, sitting on cases containing weapons of mass destruction, and is preparing for blowing the whole thing up.’98
As the days went by, Blair became ‘more and more concerned’ that nothing was being found.99 Specialist teams of British and American forces were on the hunt for the WMD from the moment that Baghdad fell. Blair was ‘obsessed’ with the search, sending David Manning out to Baghdad to talk to the MI6 officers there and demanding a weekly written report on their progress and sometimes daily updates as well. He became ‘increasingly agitated’ when they kept coming up blank.100
There were no WMD and Iraq was sliding into murderous mayhem. The catastrophic lack of planning for the aftermath of war was already losing the peace. This was a terrible failure that would stalk him for the remainder of his premiership.
11. Broken Dream, Cabinet Nightmare
‘Do you think this increases the risk to me?’ Tony Blair asked the head of MI5 during the Afghan campaign.
‘Yes,’ responded Sir Stephen Lander. ‘Of course.’
‘Mmm,’ reflected Blair. ‘That’s what I thought.’1
Whenever the Prime Minister travelled in his armour-plated Daimler limousine, codenamed Pegasus, he was now accompanied by a security detail greatly augmented since 9/11. Police outriders sped ahead to dismount and stop the traffic, as yeomen of the guard would press back the peasantry to clear the way for a medieval royal progress. I travelled with this cavalcade on occasion, sometimes with Blair in his limousine, sometimes with his aides in one of the people carriers. As we hurtled past the stationary and frustrated traffic on our way to an airport, one of Blair’s senior aides sighed: ‘I can’t help feeling that every time we do this we lose a thousand votes.’2
The End of the Party Page 28