Authors: Tom Bower
Towards the end of November 2001, Blair was discussing with his foreign-affairs advisers the bombing campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. A small contingent of British SAS soldiers was supporting the American special forces, who were guiding the US air force’s bombing raids and cruise missiles. Out of the blue, he asked, ‘Is there any danger that America will bomb Iraq?’
‘No,’ was the unanimous reply.
Blair’s question was surprising. No one had found a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. ‘I’d like a strategy paper on Iraq,’ he concluded.
Unknown to those advisers, Blair had heard from President Bush that in January he would name Iraq as one of the ‘axis of evil’ countries whose reigning government should be toppled. He was not entirely surprised. The Iraq Liberation Act passed by Congress in 1998 empowered the president to remove Saddam, and ever since their meeting in February the two men had been discussing the continued risk of Iraq developing WMDs, despite the Anglo-American bombing raids. Blair knew that the mood in Washington had changed fundamentally. Before 9/11, American policy had been to contain dangerous dictators, but Bush now supported confronting them.
Blair’s thoughts since September had moved in the same direction. An ideological war, he concluded, had broken out, a ‘fundamental struggle for the mind, heart and soul of Islam’. More accurately, he reduced the conflict to ‘our values versus theirs’. As he had told his party conference
later that month, ‘There is no compromise possible with such people – just a choice: defeat it or be defeated by it.’ He persuaded himself that the battle of values ‘required interventions deep into the affairs of other nations’, as well as ‘nation-building’ to promote democracy and freedom. ‘I thought we had to provide a comprehensive strategy for changing the world,’ he would write. ‘Not fighting until victory would have been cowardice.’ The ‘force for good’ would wipe terrorism and all the other evils off the face of the earth. Purposefully, he offered to ‘lead the world’ in restoring order and building a ‘coalition against terror’. ‘Mission creep and we haven’t even started,’ Simon Jenkins had noticed just two weeks after the attack. The same government that could not prevent a few handfuls of asylum-seekers creeping through Dover was ready to wage a global war against terror.
Even the White House noted that Blair was more hawkish than its president. Only later did Blair acknowledge, ‘I misunderstood the depth of the challenge.’ At that moment he was fired up to take on all his foes, and his speech to the party conference included among the villains both those who denied global warming and trade unionists who obstructed reform of the public services.
Of those who did formally warn Blair about the perils of his planned crusade one of the best informed was Admiral Mike Boyce. Boyce knew that the British military’s contribution to America’s war on terror would be minuscule. Even the government’s offer to send 6,000 troops to Afghanistan had been rejected by the Pentagon. Blair’s commitment was driven entirely by an untested philosophy, and he could not provide a definition of ‘victory’ that would end the war. In October, Boyce had described the fight against the Taliban as no different to the global war against communism after the 1917 revolution. Just as that war had been waged for seventy years, the one in Afghanistan would end up going ‘nowhere’ and could last fifty.
The first bombs and missiles had hit Kabul on 7 October. Within hours, bin Laden, dressed in a combat jacket and with a Kalashnikov rifle propped up against a wall behind him, had appeared on television
to boast of his responsibility for the attack on New York, which had ‘split the whole world into the camp of the believers and the camp of the unbelievers’. On the second day of the bombing, John Negroponte, the American ambassador to the United Nations, wrote that, in self-defence, America could decide to extend its attacks to other organisations and states. Blair acknowledged Negroponte’s code for Iraq and agreed that after victory in Afghanistan ‘the job is not over’.
In Baghdad, America was accused of using the bin Laden attacks as a pretext for settling old scores. In Britain, the public understood the effect of 9/11 on their lives, with 81 per cent telling a Mori poll that the world had ‘changed for ever’. On 13 November, six weeks after the bombing had begun, Kabul was taken over by American-sponsored warlords. Contrary to the scepticism of critics, the campaign had worked. Exhausted after his fifth foreign tour, Blair briefly expressed his satisfaction at a Cabinet meeting and anticipated Boyce’s frown. The admiral was indeed a pessimist, not eager to accelerate the hunt to find bin Laden or to combat militant Islam. He cautioned against hysteria. Pursuing the Taliban in the caves, he said, was a forlorn effort. The bombing, Boyce went on, had triggered fury in Muslim countries against America, yet Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary, was talking about a war ‘sustained for a period of years’.
The prime minister did not welcome a passive chief of the defence staff. Such an attitude risked opening up a debate he disavowed, and Boyce was not offering any ideas on how to prevent the Taliban remaining in Afghanistan. Blair wanted a plan to rebuild that country led by Britain’s military, even if Washington was against nation-building.
‘I think we need a strategy on Iraq,’ he told Richard Wilson on 1 December. Three days later, he sent David Manning, his foreign-affairs adviser, and Richard Dearlove to Washington to hand over a personally drafted letter setting out his ideas about regime change. Wilson and other senior officials did not see the message. Inside his den, Blair’s trusted advisers did not judge the prime minister to be Bush’s poodle. On the contrary, he appeared as an equal, advocating the interventionist doctrine he had
spelled out in Chicago two years earlier, albeit subject to UN approval. Notionally, Britain could escalate from bombing to an actual invasion only if there were legitimate reasons under international law.
These weeks formed a seminal moment in Blair’s life. Before 9/11, he had shown no deep interest in the intelligence community and had rarely met Dearlove. In the aftermath of the attacks, he allowed the ‘seductive spook’ to come very close. Within Whitehall’s and Washington’s tight circle of security chiefs, Dearlove had already won respect for organising blood-and-guts operations using mercenaries in Afghanistan. That success appealed to Blair, who now took Dearlove with him as he flew around the world to build a coalition to support a war against the plotters. ‘Dearlove seriously swam into Blair’s life,’ noticed Wilson. Not surprisingly, the spymaster was puffed up by his unprecedented access and sought to satisfy his master’s requirements. ‘Dearlove was a buccaneer who had lived in the shadows, and it was flattering for him [to be] exposed to a politician,’ observed former Cabinet secretary Robin Butler, who would scrutinise these events three years later.
During those flights, Dearlove emphasised his conviction that Saddam still possessed WMDs and rockets. When he and Manning arrived in Washington, he would discuss with the CIA the orchestration of a coup to remove Saddam, knowing he spoke with special authority; after all, he enjoyed an unusually ‘close relationship with the prime minister’.
Previous prime ministers, especially Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher, had allowed Whitehall’s institutional filters to cast automatic scepticism over MI6’s reports. By its very nature, the secret service obtained information from thieves, liars and traitors. That danger had been understood sixty-six years earlier, when the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) was created to rigorously assess the information collected by Britain’s intelligence agencies. John Scarlett, the current chairman of the JIC, was qualified to lead that task in the Cabinet Office. As a former MI6 officer, he had participated in a successful operation in Soviet Russia and masterminded its bloodless conclusion.
However, his operational experience in the Middle East was limited. Given their relationship, Blair would not have perceived that vulnerability. By the nature of his previous job, Scarlett had not become closely involved with politicians and would not have considered warning the prime minister to engage with caution in direct discussions with MI6’s chief. Remarkably, in his punctilious manner, Scarlett’s rigid interpretation of the JIC’s formal task to ‘assess’ the intelligence supplied by MI6 and the other agencies excluded natural scepticism. ‘We didn’t see it as our job’, he would say, ‘to second-guess the agencies on the reliability of their sources.’ Unaware of that unusual self-denial, Scarlett’s reassurance gave Blair confidence in the JIC’s judgements and Dearlove’s reports.
Unlike previous Cabinets, which had included wartime military officers whose personal misfortunes during action in Europe or Britain’s colonies had occasionally been caused by incorrect intelligence, Blair lacked the experience to penetrate the polished bluff of the intelligence community. Accordingly, Blair never probed the reasons for the failure by the British and American intelligence agencies to predict the 9/11 attacks; nor did he invite a vigorous debate about the nature of the Islamic threat. Pertinently, he never encouraged Whitehall to challenge the interventionist doctrine described in Chicago. One dominant memory of that speech was the resounding applause, the same approval received by the Good Friday agreement in Ireland. That success had owed much to his patient diplomacy with stubborn enemies and his understanding of their contradictory interpretations of history. He assumed that his expertise could be carried over to the Middle East.
No one warned him about the complexities of the Middle East’s history. He did not request an independent analysis of Iraq, a country artificially created by Britain and France in 1916 that Saddam ruled by controlling the irreconcilable divisions between languages, religions, tribal clans and family loyalties. Previous British prime ministers had relied on the Arabists in the Foreign Office, who understood the suppressed violence between the Sunnis, the minority led by Saddam, and the Shias. That experience was diluted after the Foreign Office switched
its focus from the Middle East to Europe. Without an embassy in Baghdad, the Foreign Office and MI6 had gradually lost their Iraqi experts; simultaneously, the foreign department lacked an authoritative ambassador in Downing Street. Sir Michael Jay, the permanent secretary, was disliked by many in his department for being a ‘politically correct’ time-server incapable of representing the Foreign Office’s arguments and interests with real authority, although he was to become its head in 2002. Having failed to protect the department’s finances from the Treasury, Jay represented a diminishing influence, which was not helped by Jack Straw, the new foreign secretary. Reflecting Blair’s attitude, Christopher Meyer, the smooth British ambassador in Washington, welcomed David Manning’s request that his reports should be sent direct to Downing Street, without copying in Straw.
The seeds of fate were sown during Blair’s discussions with Dearlove and Scarlett. The two intelligence officers knew each other from MI6 but were not friends and showed little mutual respect. Dearlove belonged to the ‘camel drivers’, a group of derring-do adventurers whose James Bond projects won either praise or suspicion. By contrast, Scarlett was ‘Moscow school’, trained to run meticulously orchestrated operations to outwit Russian counter-intelligence surveillance. In Scarlett’s opinion, Dearlove was a cowboy, while Dearlove regarded Scarlett as boring. In theory, the deep-rooted tension should have produced an ideal combination; in fact, they united to lead Blair astray.
‘What if he gets nuclear weapons?’ Blair asked about bin Laden. A rogue state, he speculated, might supply a fanatic with the means to destroy the world. The scenario was validated by his two intelligence chiefs, despite the absence of any information to justify that fear. Both echoed their patron’s conviction that Islamic terrorism needed to be destroyed to protect democracy.
One unknown was whether bin Laden was associated with Saddam. In Blair’s judgement, if there were a relationship, Saddam would supply the terrorist with WMDs. Dearlove lacked a prime source who could supply eyewitness accounts on Saddam’s thoughts and activities.
He could only speculate, drawing on second-hand and, more usually, unverifiable third-hand informants with questionable motives. For an MI6 chief to discuss raw intelligence alone with a prime minister was most unusual. The established tradition was for the Cabinet secretary to be present. ‘I would always insist on sitting in,’ recalled Robin Butler. ‘I wanted to provide the counterbalance to the enthusiasm of the heads of the agencies, to prevent the prime minister being misled.’ His successor, Richard Wilson, was excluded by Blair and Jonathan Powell. By downgrading him, they had cast aside a safety net, which meant that one discrepancy, instantly spotted by Blair, was not properly explained by Dearlove.
In 1998, the JIC concluded that international agencies had ‘succeeded in destroying or controlling the vast majority of Saddam’s 1991 weapons of mass destruction capability’. The Anglo-American bombs and UN inspectors had also destroyed Iraq’s Russian-built rockets with ranges of less than 150 km. The JIC’s only reservation was that Iraq had probably hidden some stocks of WMDs and possessed the ability to resurrect its WMD programme, but the JIC admitted there was no evidence to support that assumption. Thereafter, the JIC regularly minimised the likelihood of Iraq running an active WMD programme. Six years later, even that possibility was described as a ‘worst-case scenario’.
In 2000, the JIC reported that Iraq’s WMD programme had been further reduced, although a limited research facility might exist. Based on inconclusive reports, the committee speculated that Iraq was restarting a nuclear programme. If Blair had read the JIC reports during that year, he would have noticed that Michael Pakenham, the committee’s chairman, omitted any reference to such a project. One year later, the JIC’s assessment had not changed, yet Blair ignored the committee’s last evaluation, not least because of Dearlove’s emphatic certainty and Saddam’s refusal to deny the existence of WMDs. Blair could not imagine that a murderous despot would disguise his weakness. The momentum grew.