Adventures in Correspondentland (19 page)

After 9/11, and especially in the run-up to the Iraq war, the character of Correspondentland changed completely. A BBC colleague who accompanied me on that trip to Guantanamo was part of a new breed of journalists who had suddenly come into their own. Not only was he fluent in American politics but he was also an expert in nuclear proliferation, working in his spare time on an exposé of A. Q. Khan, the founding father of Pakistan's nuclear capability – the ‘Islamic bomb', as it was often called – who was believed to be trading secrets to rogue states such as North Korea and Libya.

Though we all tried to catch up by replenishing our Rolodexes with the names of spooks, academics who specialised in proliferation issues and chemical, biological and nuclear weapons experts, these kinds of journalists were way out in front, since they had courted them for years. Security specialists with good contacts in the intelligence community were at a premium. So, too, were South Asian hands who knew their way around Afghanistan and Pakistan. Former Kabul correspondents, who had been neglected for more than a decade after the withdrawal
of the Soviet Union, found themselves instantly rehabilitated and heading back to the Hindu Kush.

In this reordered hierarchy, Arabists vaulted to the top: correspondents who could pronounce, remember and link the names of terrorist suspects, and read for themselves the jihadist websites that fired their imaginations. Journalism had a new caste system, and previously obscure reporters rapidly found themselves in high demand. Washington had always tended to favour show ponies. Now, workhorses, with a methodical approach and unflashy prose, proved their worth.

This helps explain why, as the Bush administration prosecuted its case for regime change in Baghdad, so many journalists who lacked this kind of expertise came to rely so heavily on those who didn't. Of these, Judith Miller of
The New York Times
was the Brahmin among Brahmins – an obsessive reporter with razor-sharp elbows and a highly developed diva complex, who for years had been preoccupied with the destructive power of weapons of mass destruction. Now folkloric is the story of how she once invited her boyfriend to watch her swim laps at the pool of the Washington Hilton, and then pondered, as she stretched in the afternoon sun, which was the more destructive, chemical or nuclear weapons.

With attention shifting to Iraq, every news organisation craved its own Judith Miller. The Pulitzer Prize-winning article she had published eight months before the attacks, on the determination of al-Qaeda to equip itself with weapons of mass destruction, now seemed brilliantly prescient. So, too, did her book published that summer entitled
Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War
, which by Christmas topped her paper's own bestseller list.

Thus, when a series of eye-catching reports on Saddam
Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program appeared in late-2001 and throughout 2002 with Miller's byline attached, everyone took notice. Based on raw intelligence from the vice president's office, key Pentagon officials and their favourite Iraqi defector, Ahmed Chalabi, her stories warned that the Baghdad regime had taken delivery of a particularly virulent strain of smallpox, and that Saddam Hussein had started renovating his storage facilities for biological and chemical weapons.

More alarming still was the revelation that he sought to import the type of aluminium tubes that were essential components in the development of nuclear weapons. With the stories given pride of place in the top right-hand corner of the front page of
The New York Times
, the same fearful tone found an echo in everyone's follow-up stories. If the information had come from Miller and had the imprimatur of
The Times
, it must have the stamp of truth.

To this day, I think that one of the main reasons why journalists proved so malleable in the run-up to the war on Iraq was not because of the persuasive powers of the Bush administration but more down to the authority of
The New York Times
. When the two worked in tandem, they were an unstoppable combination.

To offer a word in our defence, it was not as if we had taken complete leave of our senses or were entirely unthinking or uninquiring. After all, our own sources validated much of Miller's reportage. Washington was heavily populated with former United Nations weapons inspectors proffering dire warnings of their own. Even French diplomats would quietly tell you, off the record and not for attribution, that they believed Saddam Hussein had built up a formidable stockpile of chemical weapons. Their disagreement with the Bush administration was not over the existence of weapons but in how to prevent their use. As for
the Bush administration's most vocal critic, the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, he appeared on the cable networks so frequently and at such a high volume that he tended to drown out his own message.

Among the ironies of American journalism in the run-up to Iraq was that this phase of suspended scepticism only began drawing to an end after the Bush administration delivered its most detailed presentation of the case against Saddam. When the US secretary of state Colin Powell went before the UN Security Council in February 2003, with the CIA director George Tenet sitting meaningfully behind, all of us expected an Adlai Stevenson moment: the dramatic, incontrovertible evidence that would register just as powerfully as the black-and-white aerial-reconnaissance pictures revealing the Soviet missile launchers on Cuba that the Americans had produced at the height of the missile crisis in October 1962.

Instead, the best that Powell could produce were a few PowerPoint graphics, some inconclusive satellite imagery and a mocked-up vial of anthrax that he dangled suggestively between his fingers. You could almost hear the collective cry of ‘Is that it?' echo across the newsrooms of the capital.

However, even if the Powell speech helped restore a greater sense of journalistic balance, there was still widespread press support for the war. For many, the Bush administration's ‘mushroom cloud' argument remained persuasive: why take the chance that Saddam might one day have a nuclear capability when his regime could be decapitated in a short sharp war?

With or without the press, with or without cast-iron evidence, and with or without an international ‘coalition of the willing', the Bush administration was about to wage war against Saddam
Hussein, and blood was about to be spilt. That much had become clear during George W. Bush's State of the Union address in January 2002, when he declared that Iraq was part of an ‘axis of evil' alongside North Korea and Iran. As part of our live coverage, I watched it from a radio studio alongside a former member of Bill Clinton's national security team, who physically recoiled when Bush delivered his ‘axis of evil' line. This dovish foreign-policy expert was so startled and agitated it was almost as if he was watching the second plane hit the South Tower. He thought it the most belligerent speech he had ever heard a president deliver and feared it ran the risk of squandering all the international goodwill that had followed 9/11.

The prescience of these fears became immediately apparent when the press corps and I travelled with Bush in the months after the ‘axis of evil' speech. Arriving in Seoul a few weeks later, we saw protesters gathered outside the military base where Air Force One touched down brandishing ‘No Bush, No War' placards. In the capital itself, South Korean Government officials were privately seething that Bush had so publicly trashed the ‘sunshine policy' of the then president Kim Dae-jung, which sought détente with Pyongyang.

Out of politeness to his hosts, Bush consciously decided not to repeat the phrase ‘axis of evil' while on Korean soil – in the filing centre, we dubbed it the ‘Don't Mention the Axis of Evil' tour. But we suspected he might not be able to bite his lip for the duration of the trip. Sure enough, early one morning we were all choppered in great hulking Chinooks to one of the American outposts in the demilitarised zone, the famed DMZ. There, the White House staged a photo opportunity, where Bush peered, Patton-like, through binoculars at the North Korean watchtowers
in the hostile distance. As he stood on the ramparts, one of his US military guides recounted the story of a deadly attack on American GIs in the 1970s, and how the axes used in the killings now had pride of place in a ‘peace museum' on the North Korean side of the DMZ. Bush relayed the harrowing story to reporters watching from below and then added, ‘No wonder I think they're evil.'

With 37,000 US troops still stationed in South Korea, guaranteeing its security, US presidents could normally expect a grateful welcome in Seoul. Not Bush after his ‘axis of evil' speech.

The same was true of a visit a few months later to Berlin, another bastion of the Cold War where successive US presidents suffering slumps in support at home had gone to boost their flagging morale. Here, the surname Bush also carried some weight, since after the fall of the Berlin Wall George Snr, the then president, had been welcomed like a liberator. Bush Jnr, however, was unable to tap into this reservoir of goodwill and was greeted instead by the now-familiar scene: thousands of protesters carrying placards such as ‘We Don't Want Your War', ‘Stop Bush's Global War' and ‘Axis of Peace', and those life-size papier-mâché puppets of Bush, bobbing manically from side to side. Europeans may have temporarily become Americans in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but not in the lead-up to Iraq.

Rather than prompting any great introspection, I suspect these visits merely reinforced the ‘for us or against us' bunker mentality that had now taken grip in the Bush administration. They also confirmed the existence, as Donald Rumsfeld described it, of an Old Europe, which was instinctively antagonistic towards Washington, and a New Europe to the east of Berlin, which was much more closely aligned.

Lending grist to the Pentagon's mill, just about the only place
where George W. Bush was guaranteed an enthusiastic welcome was in the former satellite states of the Soviet Union. Whereas in cities such as Berlin and Paris the president's image-makers rarely allowed him to step outside, in places such as Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and Bucharest they encouraged him to take part in massive outdoor rallies.

His speech in the Romanian capital, opposite the communist headquarters where in 1989 Nicolae Ceau
escu had to be lifted off the roof by helicopter, lingers in the mind because I had never seen Bush greeted with such delirium, even before a crowd of Texan Republicans. Under driving rain, in the most horrid of conditions, tens of thousands had gathered in Revolution Square, waving postcard-sized Romanian and American flags and bobbing their umbrellas up and down in time to the music. Loudspeakers belted out Elvis Presley's ‘A Little Less Conversation' – a rather neat musical summation, it could be argued, of the Bush doctrine.

Yet it was the president rather than the king that the crowd wanted to hear. ‘Salut!' shouted Bush, after bouncing onto stage wearing a hefty bullet-proof jacket under his overcoat that seemed for once an unnecessary precaution. Addressing freedom-loving new friends, Bush had rarely been more fluent at the podium. To wild cheers, he noted that ‘the people of Romania know that dictators must never be appeased or ignored. They must be opposed.' For a brief moment, rays of sunlight breached the charcoal skies and a rainbow started to form. Noticing the change in the weather, Bush interpreted it as a sign from the heavens: ‘God is smiling on us today.' Rarely in any doubt about the righteousness of his cause, he firmly believed it to be true. New Europe got it, I dare say he left thinking. Old Europe most definitely did not.

The Old European exception, of course, was Tony Blair.
From the moment at the Crawford ranch in April 2002 when he first signed up for the Iraq war, the British prime minister became the American president's most useful ally. With an eloquence and coherence that eluded Bush, Blair built the case against Saddam Hussein with far greater intellectual and moral force. It helped shore up not only international support at the United Nations but also Democratic support in Congress. Blair helped provide Bush with diplomatic and political cover, even if it earned him the scorn of much of the British public, along with the sobriquet ‘Bush's poodle'.

Another eloquent English progressive, accused by his friends and former comrades of lurching precipitously to the right, lent his voice as well. As he laid out the case against Saddam Hussein, Christopher Hitchens became a frequent visitor to our bureau, as he had been during the impeachment saga – although this time he appeared significantly more sober. With a bronze bust of Sir Winston Churchill sitting, shrine-like, in the Oval Office and Tony Blair regularly flying in from London, Englishmen had never received a warmer welcome in Washington.

This was more than could be said for the French – or the ‘cheese-eating surrender-monkeys', as the New York tabloids took to calling them, or the founding member of the ‘axis of weasels'. I, like everyone else who used the government cafeteria on Capitol Hill, found myself eating newly renamed Freedom Fries. So, too, did the reporters aboard Air Force One, where French toast was banished as well. French wine was poured down drains, while a newspaper suggested that couples refrain from French kissing and opt for a ‘liberty lip lock' instead. Even the wonderful little Parisian-style street cafe opposite where I lived in Georgetown came under fire for insisting still on flying the red, white and
blue of the
drapeau tricolore
. The butcher up the road hit back with the war-on-terror trifecta of Old Glory, the Union Flag and the Australian colours, in appreciation of Prime Minister John Howard's rock-steady support.