Authors: Tom Bower
In late November 2001, Whitehall’s foreign service was unprepared for reports that General Tommy Franks, the American chief responsible
for operations in the Middle East, was drafting plans for an invasion, dubbed ‘Phase Two of the war on terror’. Ever since 1997, Blair had supported the toppling of Saddam. The removal of Milošević had broken any taboo, but he also believed that threatening force was a deterrent. Like Milošević, Saddam might eventually succumb and co-operate fully with UN inspectors. If not, then a rogue dictator could not be allowed to threaten the world. Those minded to contradict that assessment were excluded from Blair’s den, while David Manning, a mild career diplomat, lacked the independent spirit to explain to Blair with any real force the risks of Britain engaging in the widening ‘war on terror’. Success in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and, more recently, Afghanistan had reinforced those who spoke about Britain being able, in Douglas Hurd’s phrase, to ‘punch above its weight’. Only the military chiefs were disturbed.
Admiral Boyce in particular was troubled by Blair’s promise to commit thousands of extra British soldiers to Afghanistan. He understood the risk of waging war against ideologues. During his early life in South Africa, Boyce had learned about Britain’s ragged campaign against the Boers. Now, he feared that an engagement in Iraq would end in a quagmire like Vietnam. That wretched conflict had proven the inability of a superpower to defeat defiant nationalist guerrillas.
The admiral used one of his regular meetings with Blair to explain the pitfalls of Western counter-insurgency operations in Third World countries. As so often, Blair nodded politely. His instinct, he replied, convinced him that Afghanis and Iraqis would embrace Western-style liberal democracy once the ruling dictatorships had been destroyed. Uneducated about Vietnam, Blair was unaware of how America’s involvement had escalated from a handful of advisers in the late 1950s to an army of 550,000 men under President Johnson. He never asked why the communists were victorious, despite the US air force dropping 7 million tons of bombs onto the country.
Frustrated by the prime minister’s disregard of history and the limitations of Britain’s armed services, the admiral decided to publicise his warnings. On 11 December, Boyce’s public speech to a respected military
audience in London fired a broadside at Downing Street. Bombing, he warned, would not defeat terrorism but would radicalise the Muslim world against the West. A conventional invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, he added, would fail to win ‘hearts and minds’ and would drag on for the next ten years. ‘The world’, he said, ‘cannot afford non-states, black-hole states or failed states because such states breed terrorism. Therefore, we have to attack the causes, not the symptoms, of terrorism.’ He went further, parodying Bush’s policy against terrorism as ‘a high-tech twenty-first-century posse in the Wild West’. It would be in Britain’s national interest, he suggested, for Blair to lay down red lines in his relationship with America and not be unequivocally associated with Bush’s putative adventure.
The instant reaction from an irritated Donald Rumsfeld was to ridicule Boyce’s prediction that allied troops would still be fighting in Afghanistan the following summer. America’s high-tech war, he said, would crush the Taliban within weeks, and his country’s soldiers would all return home before the spring.
Unknown to Boyce, Blair was also irritated. He did not understand the admiral’s argument, but he did appreciate that annoying Rumsfeld was not in Britain’s interest. Boyce, he complained privately, had form. Some weeks earlier, in a joint press conference with Geoff Hoon, he had contradicted the politician about the military’s preparedness for war. ‘The army’s killing cows and we’ve got 20,000 on stand-by to fight fires, so we’re not ready,’ he told journalists, alluding to foot-and-mouth disease and the army preparing to cover for firemen who were threatening to strike in pursuit of a 40 per cent pay rise.
‘Is Boyce looking for a reason to quit?’ noted Alastair Campbell after the speech. ‘CDS [chief of the defence staff] doing nothing but giving TB headaches.’ But, despite his anger, Blair said nothing to Boyce. The admiral, he knew, would snap back that the government should increase the spending on the military to the agreed sum and avoid letting the annual deficit amount to £2 billion.
A week later, Blair committed British troops to the International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a UN operation in Afghanistan. The deployment was criticised in the House of Lords by General Charles Guthrie and other former chiefs of the defence staff. The British army, they complained, was being overstretched to serve Blair’s desire for media coverage. He ignored their complaints, being more concerned by European leaders opposing ISAF if it fell under the control of America’s hawkish commanders.
By Christmas, with Boyce’s help, those concerns had been soothed. Exhausted by arguments and ceaseless foreign travel, Blair celebrated Christmas at Chequers with his family, then headed for the sunshine in Egypt. On 5 January 2002, he and Cherie arrived in India from their holiday to speak about being proud of Britain’s role as a ‘pivotal player’ in the new world order. Two days later, he flew to the Bagram air base near Kabul to emphasise Britain’s commitment to transforming impoverished Muslim tribes into liberal democrats. He departed three hours later, having visited his twenty-second country in six months. Ostensibly, Blair was committed to nation-building, while Bush, he knew, was focused on the hunt for bin Laden – and Saddam.
On 28 December, Bush had received a memo from Franks outlining plans for invasion. Five days later, he made his ‘axis of evil’ speech, identifying Saddam as an architect of international terror. In the aftermath, Washington’s newspapers reported that the president was preparing to invade Iraq.
Blair returned to London excited about the new challenge. Joining with America in another battle against evil was a worthwhile cause but, he decided, it was best considered in secret. Richard Wilson and other senior officials were not told that the Cabinet Office had prepared an ‘Options Paper’ outlining how the existing containment policy based on sanctions could escalate to a ground offensive.
Foreign Office lawyers had anticipated Blair’s response to Bush’s speech, and the Whitehall machine delivered a formal legal opinion, should Blair decide to join America’s invasion. War, wrote the lawyers, was legal only on three grounds: in self-defence; to prevent ethnic
cleansing; and to enforce UN resolutions following the first Gulf War. Blair received the advice with indifference. As a lawyer himself, he knew that legal opinions are not cast in stone but are subject to interpretation. Nevertheless, political realities required any invasion to be justified. The best option would be to prove that Saddam had broken UN resolutions to protect his WMDs. To satisfy Blair’s requirements, MI6 intensified the search for the evidence.
On 16 February, President Bush set off on a tour that would include Japan, South Korea and China. Under the headline ‘The Countdown Starts for Operation Saddam’, William Rees-Mogg predicted in
The Times
that Bush intended to invade Iraq. Rees-Mogg’s mistake was to assume that Blair would give the White House ‘some support … but without the enthusiasm he showed over Afghanistan’. Nine days later, Downing Street confirmed to journalists that Blair was ‘bolstering’ Parliament and the country for an invasion. A dossier on Iraq’s responsibility for international terrorism was being drafted. In preparation for US vice president Dick Cheney embarking on an eleven-nation tour, officials in Washington were openly debating regime change. ‘This is something we’ve got to deal with,’ Blair told Australian TV. On 11 March, the same day Cheney met Blair for lunch in London, Bush told 120 ambassadors in Washington that there could be no neutrality in the next battle against Saddam.
In early March 2002, the tenor of the JIC’s reports altered. Scarlett’s assessors described an ‘intent’ by Saddam to pursue a WMD programme and, although ‘hindered’ in his ambitions, reported on the possibility of a ‘break-out’ to develop WMDs. The JIC admitted the intelligence was ‘sporadic and patchy’, but it believed that Iraq intended to acquire WMDs by reconstituting its 1990s programme and creating a delivery system to reach Israel and the Gulf by 2007. Scarlett admitted there was ‘very little intelligence’ relating to chemical warfare, and ‘no intelligence’ about biological warfare. In summary, he was speculating. The intelligence services had failed to find a scrap of reliable information, let alone a silver bullet.
Blair recognised the conundrum in a message to Jonathan Powell on 17 March. ‘The immediate WMD problems don’t seem obviously worse than three years ago,’ he wrote, going on to complain that ‘I don’t have a proper worked-out strategy’ either to force Saddam to prostrate himself to the American and British governments or forcibly remove him. Facing that dilemma, he said, ‘We have to reorder our story and message. Increasingly I think it should be about the nature of the regime.’ As he would later admit, even if Iraq did not possess WMDs, ‘I would still have thought it right to remove him. You would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.’
Christopher Meyer received a briefing from Manning – a ‘chunky set of instructions’ – explaining that Blair favoured regime change. On reflection, the ambassador, who had been personally chosen for Washington by Blair, considered that his prime minister had become ‘more neocon than the Americans. This was not the poodle being pulled by the leash.’ Manning reflected the same judgement in a letter to Blair after a dinner with Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, on 14 March: ‘I said you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States.’
To clinch Blair’s desire of proximity to Bush – or, as Meyer would later describe his orders, ‘to get up the arse of the US government and stay there’ – the ambassador arranged to meet Rice. Repeating Manning’s script, he told her, ‘We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option.’ Rice was not surprised. By then, Manning had established a regular telephone dialogue with her pledging Blair’s support. Meyer repeated the script on 18 March, over lunch with Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy secretary of defence.
Blair kept those discussions secret from Wilson and Boyce. Similarly unaware but suspicious of Blair’s ambitions, Robin Cook and David Blunkett insisted that the Cabinet should discuss Iraq. Blair agreed, but told his staff that the ‘Options Paper’ should not be revealed. ‘I don’t think it’s necessary for them to have it,’ he said. ‘They can rely on the
media.’ The Cabinet was flying blind. In Blair’s opinion, the alternative to his position was the enemy’s position, and there was no reason to help his critics by engaging in a debate.
‘Can we have some papers on Iraq?’ Alistair Darling, the transport minister and former Treasury official, belatedly asked Blair to his face before a Cabinet meeting in March. There was no reply. Ministers would not be provided with a single policy paper on Iraq for eighteen months. Having dominated his party for nine years, Blair had haughtily told a confidant, ‘They know the score.’ Darling reflected that Blair, the global star, gave the impression on his occasional visits to London that, at best, he tolerated the Cabinet. ‘Before one Cabinet meeting,’ recalled Darling, ‘ministers joked that we should give him a full explanation about the function of that big hall with green benches facing each other.’
The Cabinet’s first substantial discussion that year about Iraq started on a false premise. On 7 March, Blair spoke only about ‘bombing Iraq’. Invasion was not mentioned. Curiously, not a single minister asked whether any secret papers had been prepared or why no papers had been presented for Cabinet consideration. Andrew Turnbull would call the deception ‘a mismatch’. Blair, he noted, was telling the Cabinet that ‘all options were still open, including peaceful ones, while telling Bush, who had already decided on military action, that “You can count on us whatever.”’ Twelve years later, Turnbull noted, ‘I wouldn’t call it a lie. “Deception” is the right word. You can deceive without lying, by leaving a false interpretation uncorrected.’ At the end of a robust two-hour discussion, Blair was even more suspicious than at the outset. Several around the table did not trust Bush or believe in the gospel of Britain’s unbreakable alliance with America. Robin Cook had pointedly warned that Europe’s leaders would oppose the use of military force against Iraq. Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, had openly denounced an American invasion without a UN mandate. Blair’s belief, continued Cook, that ‘we saw attacks on the US as attacks on us’ was dangerous, and his black-and-white conviction that he could reshape the Middle East ignored the facts.
To defuse the tension, Blair quipped, ‘I do want to assure you that the management has not gone crazy. The problem is, I really believe this stuff.’
Alastair Campbell understood his apprehension. ‘Not exactly division but a lot of concern,’ he wrote. ‘Where is it going?’
‘The party’, Blair told a confidant, ‘wants me not to believe Bush on Iraq, but I believe it more than Bush.’ Unknown to the Cabinet or across Whitehall, Blair was in constant telephone and video contact with Bush. With the notable exception of Powell, Manning and a handful of other advisers, those intimate conversations establishing the timetable for regime change were kept secret.
The following day, 8 March, the Cabinet met again in Chequers for a stock-take. Gordon Brown looked venomous. His sour mood was aggravated by that day’s newspaper reports describing the Cabinet’s divisions over Iraq and the various threats of resignation. The leaks confirmed Blair’s fears. Labour Party members, he knew, needed to be educated about Iraq. His distrust extended to Richard Wilson. During monumental arguments on the eve of his retirement, Wilson had prevented Blair appointing an outsider as his successor. In the choice between Michael Bichard, David Omand and Andrew Turnbull, Blair chose the latter. Many were surprised by the decision, as Omand was considered the best candidate. Some assumed that Blair’s choice had been guided either by impatience or by ignorance; others gossiped about Blair’s hope that Turnbull, the permanent secretary at the Treasury, would help improve his own relations with Brown; still others, with hindsight, suggested a rather less wholesome explanation.