Authors: Tom Bower
‘Well, I’ve just been speaking to Tariq Aziz,’ said Dodge, referring to Iraq’s foreign minister, ‘and he warned that there’ll be a civil war if Saddam is deposed.’
‘And what do you think?’ asked Blair.
‘There’ll be a lot more violence than you imagine,’ replied Dodge, who nonetheless did not envisage the unprecedented slaughter that would occur.
‘You know it could take a generation to build a new country?’ another expert told Blair.
‘I’m committed to that,’ replied Blair, before adding, ‘but isn’t Saddam uniquely evil?’ Silence followed as his visitors wondered, ‘What does he mean?’ To justify a war on the grounds of ‘evil’, without understanding the profound complexities of Iraq, mirrored Blair’s conviction that a brief conflict would be followed by the overthrow of the tyrants ruling Syria and Iran. He offered no further illumination of his optimistic scenario.
Practically unmentioned throughout the three-hour briefing were WMDs. To the visitors, Blair was using the mention of such weapons in public as the excuse for removing the dictator. In hindsight, one of the guests regretted not being tougher towards his host. He would have been wasting his time. After the war, Blair was asked about the influence of that meeting. He looked blank. He had no recollection of it.
The final decision to invade was taken by Bush in December. ‘We invaded Iraq’, said Paul Wolfowitz, the neocon deputy secretary of defence, ‘because we could.’ He predicted there would be no sectarian violence.
In Iraq, the UN inspectors began visiting the sites identified by Western intelligence agencies as the locations for the manufacture of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The inspectors would be able to detect any trace of WMDs better than any clandestine agent reporting to MI6. In London, weight was placed on satellite photos showing the teams arriving at suspected facilities and Iraqis departing quickly from the other side of the compound. The inspectors regularly reported back on their failure to find the evidence. ‘He’s stored the WMD material in a bunker under a hockey pitch,’ Dearlove told Boyce. ‘We’ll find it.’ Ground-penetrating radar was dispatched to help. David Omand reported ‘tense discussions’ at JIC meetings as the repeated failures were logged. In reply to Desmond Bowen, a trusted civil servant in the MoD, challenging MI6’s reliability, Dearlove blamed the inspectors’ lack of success on Saddam’s skilful deception and their own incompetence.
Uppermost in London was the fear that inspectors would report that there were absolutely no WMDs. ‘That would have been bad news,’ admitted Omand, ‘because we had set our reputations on Saddam possessing the weapons.’ Instead of pushing the button for a fundamental reassessment of their previous reports, Scarlett said stoically, ‘Let’s see what we get over the next few days.’ He did not consider cautioning Blair about the implications of the inspectors’ negative reports. An independent official with a sense of civic duty would have been expected at that point to make such a challenge. Scarlett and Manning, however, both knew that WMDs were Blair’s legal excuse for regime change. To question their existence would have undermined the entire plan. The traditional means of self-protection would have been an appeal to Turnbull, but Blair had cut off that safety valve. Scarlett’s eventual explanation for failing to alert his prime minister was calculatedly bland: ‘I see that as a policy issue.’
Dearlove, however, was placed firmly in a vice. At the Wednesday-morning meetings of all the most senior civil servants, he was asked to explain the inspectors’ reports of finding no WMDs. ‘It’s going to take
us longer,’ he replied, ‘but George Tenet [the CIA director] tells me there’s no problem.’
No one challenged him. ‘Once you’re on the outside,’ admitted one permanent secretary, ‘you’re on the outside.’ With the prime minister’s support, Dearlove had single-handedly hijacked Whitehall’s safeguards for preventing a rogue decision. ‘Blair loved all that,’ said Turnbull.
‘SIS [MI6] had over-promised and under-delivered,’ concluded Omand, ‘and when it became clear that the intelligence was hard to find, they really had to bust a gut to generate it.’
Blair gave the impression of hoping to call Saddam’s bluff. He spoke of the dictator surrendering rather than suffering inevitable defeat, like Milošević. In the real world, while urging Bush to allow more time for Britain to organise support for another UN resolution that might legitimise the invasion, Blair was under pressure from Boyce to authorise proper preparations for war. The continued concealment of his intentions, said Boyce, was risking soldiers’ lives. Blair resisted. Before announcing the war, he needed more legal cover. Political cover relied on him displaying his involvement in domestic politics.
On Saturday 25 January 2003, Blair telephoned Michael Barber. That week, applications for asylum had reached a new peak, and he was irritated that, despite new laws and threats, the problem had not disappeared. He was sure Home Office officials were to blame, as usual. Barber agreed to give a presentation the following Monday. Next, Blair rang David Blunkett. The Home Office, he cursed, was still failing. Only the previous week he had visited front-line staff in Croydon with Bill Jeffrey, who was responsible for the immigration department at the Home Office, and asked why so many bogus asylum-seekers remained in the country. ‘You’ve got so-called Iraqis claiming asylum,’ Blair told Blunkett, ‘and they can’t even speak the language.’
The focus of blame was on Jeffrey, the convenient scapegoat. He was accused of vacillating between those in his department who advocated ruthlessly removing illegal migrants and those who feared legal objections. ‘Why can’t we just sort this out?’ Blair asked Jonathan Powell. He called Blunkett: ‘Do you need more legal powers?’ Together, they cursed the judges for overruling a new law denying benefits to undeclared asylum-seekers and raged about incompetent Home Office officials. Both felt powerless. To conceal Blair’s frustration and rebut the media’s attacks, a senior official heard Alastair Campbell encourage Labour supporters to damn critical journalists as racists.
On Monday, Barber presented his latest graph. In 2002, 110,700 people had applied for asylum. He predicted that, while in November 2002 there had been 8,000 applications, by June 2003 they would fall
to 4,000 per month. He credited the decline to the closure of Sangatte and to the 2002 Act. But the fall was for a very different reason: it was the direct result of the increase in the number of work permits being issued, which would rise to 90,000 during 2003, compared to 25,000 in 1997. Despite his fluent jargon, Barber’s unit could not cure the Home Office’s failures.
In mid-January, Blair’s frustrations had boiled over. Four Algerian asylum-seekers living on welfare benefits had been arrested in north London and Manchester on suspicion of manufacturing a chemical bomb using ricin, a deadly poison. In the Manchester raid, a police detective – a father of three teenagers – had been stabbed to death. The tabloid headlines – ‘Hundreds of Terror Suspects on the Loose’ – plus Tory complaints that ‘the asylum system is a complete shambles’ were followed by the discovery of an arsenal of weapons and forged passports at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London. Britain’s Muslim community was under pressure, as was the government after a Taliban fighter claimed asylum in Britain. Amid the hysteria, Blair held a five-hour summit, and Blunkett lamented that, despite issuing 200,000 ‘temporary’ work permits, the number of bogus asylum-seekers was still rising. The media highlighted not only the thousands of foreigners working illegally in Britain, but also the tens of thousands who, thanks to well-organised criminal gangs, were unlawfully receiving benefits.
To put pressure on the Home Office, Blair deployed surprise. Early in the evening of 6 February, he telephoned Blunkett. ‘I’ve made a commitment on BBC TV about cutting down the number of asylum-seekers,’ he said. ‘I hope you understand.’
‘What!’ shouted Blunkett. ‘By how much?’
‘By half within six months,’ replied Blair, ending the conversation.
Blair knew Blunkett would be furious. That was his intention. ‘Using the media to tighten the screws on us,’ was Blunkett’s reading. Blair, he knew, governed Britain via the media. Broadcasting a shock on TV was like throwing a ball across the room, watching the scurrying and then advancing.
After the programme, Blunkett reflected that Blair was ‘under pressure to do something instead of waffle. He thought he could wave a magic wand and it would happen.’ He called Blair: ‘It’s best if I sophisticate this. I’m going to reinterpret this as an aspiration rather than a policy.’
‘Tony’s driving the policy now,’ the home secretary told his officials the following morning. ‘The facts show that such a reduction is impossible within one year.’ Nevertheless, under pressure from Downing Street, IND officials were told to fast-track asylum applications, speed up the approval of work permits and announce tougher sanctions against people-smugglers.
Four days later, Blair and Blunkett met for a delivery meeting. ‘TB was looking more worried and harassed than I had seen him for a while,’ noted Campbell. ‘TB could barely be in a more exposed place now.’
‘What’s happening?’ Blair asked Bill Jeffrey.
‘Asylum applications are falling,’ replied Jeffrey (the number of applications would decline from 84,000 in 2002 to 49,000 in 2003). Blair looked satisfied. Pertinently, he ignored the increase in migrants entering Britain using work permits, the continuing annual arrival of 230,000 immigrants from outside the EU who were joining their families, and the imminent arrival of an unknown number of nationals from the A8 countries due to join the EU. He had other matters on his mind.
At the Cabinet meeting on 9 January, Blair’s plans for Iraq were not discussed. Nor were they mentioned at the following week’s reunion, although by then he was regularly seeking information from Admiral Mike Boyce, David Manning, Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon and Richard Dearlove. ‘Richard, my fate is in your hands,’ he said to Dearlove after their first meeting that year. Their relationship, the MI6 chief thought, had the negative effect of arousing Straw’s jealousy.
By then, some officers in both the BND (the German intelligence agency) and the FBI had unofficially classified Curveball as ‘unreliable’, and Curveball would later admit that he had fabricated his story about a mobile WMD programme because he wanted asylum in Germany and Saddam deposed. The account of Iraq’s interest in buying yellowcake in West Africa, accepted by Italian intelligence, was shown to be exaggerated and would subsequently be exposed as an attempt to earn money. Then, in the midst of those tremors, a senior Iraqi employed by Saddam told French intelligence officers while travelling through Paris that Iraq no longer possessed WMDs. Nonetheless, at no stage before the war did Dearlove or John Scarlett warn Blair of any reasons for doubt.
The military commanders were less amenable. In a series of meetings in Downing Street between 15 and 18 January, Blair did not disguise his intention to join the invasion. His decision would be made without considering all five of the tests he had listed in Chicago in 1999 to justify intervention. Although loyal, Hoon knew that the
chiefs were dissatisfied. Since Iraq was not a war for national survival, they wanted a genuine reason why servicemen should risk their lives. Similarly, they wanted Blair to stop posturing in public by saying that he was focused entirely on seeking a peaceful resolution. Maintaining the illusion, complained Boyce, would lead to the troops fighting with obsolete equipment. Blair needed to lift the last vetoes on the purchase of arms. Finally, the chiefs wanted to know the politicians’ plans for post-war occupation.
The opportunity to answer all these points came in January, shortly after the Turkish government had refused the British army permission to cross its territory as the soldiers made their way into Iraq. Blair was at the MoD for a briefing by Boyce about the latest plan for invasion. Britain would now join the amphibious and land invasion from the south as an integrated member of the American forces. Also present were the three chiefs, senior officials and Hoon. The atmosphere was tense – not because of the imminent war but because of the antagonism among those gathered deep below Whitehall.
To Boyce’s fury, Blair had brought Campbell. ‘How dare he come to a meeting in the Ministry of Defence,’ Boyce said to Admiral Alan West, ‘an unelected spin man who’s had a mental breakdown?’ Blair’s and Campbell’s dislike of Boyce had broken a threshold, and Blair now wished that Boyce would be replaced by Walker as soon as possible. Their antipathy spread to West, who was irritated by Blair’s gamesmanship and resented his refusal to meet the three chiefs to discuss the invasion and its aftermath. On 7 January, without waiting for Blair’s approval, he sent a fleet with 3,000 marines to the Gulf.
‘What about phase four?’ West asked during a rare meeting soon after, referring to the post-war occupation.
‘The Americans have it all sewn up,’ replied Blair.
Boyce had repeatedly pressed for the same information. He had also raised the problem directly with Donald Rumsfeld and the American chiefs. ‘The Americans’ eyes just shut down,’ he reported after a trip to Washington. ‘They didn’t want to hear what I was saying.’
Boyce’s was not an isolated voice. Since November, several delegations of Whitehall officials from the Cabinet and Foreign Offices had flown to Washington to impose conditions on the American government about post-invasion Iraq and the importance of a role for the UN. They returned to London with assurances. ‘I was told we should rely on the Americans,’ Walker would later say. General John Reith, responsible for directing the invasion from the permanent joint headquarters in Northwood, knew there had been no post-war planning.
‘Are we ready for war?’ Hoon asked Boyce.
‘We’re not,’ replied Boyce, making no attempt to pander to a ‘malleable Blairite’ whom he did not respect.
On 15 January, Boyce again told Blair that post-war planning was ‘immature’. The chiefs, he said, had offered to co-ordinate the post-war occupation with the American army, but discussions had fizzled out. ‘There could be trouble.’
‘I’ll talk to Bush about this,’ replied Blair.
Even Kevin Tebbit could understand Boyce’s judgement that ‘the government didn’t understand what they were getting into, and they weren’t providing the means for their ends’. He could not help Boyce, however. His exclusion from Downing Street by Jonathan Powell, he acknowledged, ‘put me in a weak position against the CDS [chief of the defence staff]’.
Blair had isolated himself from Whitehall’s machine, unaware of the air of ambivalence. Military preparations were restricted, diplomats were chasing a mythical second UN resolution, the JIC was providing Blair with false information and Scarlett had not yet established a reliable back channel to the Iraqi government. Senior officials in the MoD hesitated to record their thoughts over whether Britain should sacrifice its independence in an American war. An Iraq unit established in the Foreign Office under Dominic Chilcott, an assistant secretary, was derided by defence officials for ‘having no bite except to pick around’. Michael Jay, mocked for being childishly excited by the rare invitations to Blair’s den, still spoke about avoiding a war. During his appearances
in Downing Street, he failed to confront Blair with the opinion of the Arabists that the fall of Saddam would be followed by chaos.
British officials in Washington knew they were being ignored. ‘Do it right, don’t do it fast,’ Christopher Meyer advised Downing Street about allowing Hans Blix, the Swedish head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, sufficient time to do his work. But Blair was hitched to Bush’s timetable for the war to start in mid-March. Other governments were less easy to corral. Based on their conversations with trusted Saddam officials, there was growing scepticism among French, German and Russian intelligence about the existence of WMDs.
Hoon’s announcement to the Commons on 20 January that 26,000 troops and a fleet would be sent to the Middle East had followed a deliberately pointless Cabinet discussion – except that, according to Stephen Wall, the civil servant who had sat through most of the previous year’s Cabinet meetings, Hoon’s statement did provoke most ministers to actually realise for the first time that Blair did intend to go to war. Hoon’s speech reflected the government’s euphemisms. The dispatch of the forces, he said, did not ‘represent a commitment of British forces to military action’. No decision to invade Iraq was ‘imminent or inevitable’. Blair told heckling Labour MPs that, after Iraq, ‘we have to confront North Korea’. The noisy response forced his concession that, at the mercy of events and people beyond his control, he was ‘risking everything’.
To reassert his influence in Washington, he arranged a quick visit on 31 January. The day before, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, had sent Blair a memorandum stating that a war without a second UN resolution declaring that Saddam had failed to disarm would be illegal. ‘I don’t understand this,’ Blair wrote in the margin of Goldsmith’s note. On the same day, a
Daily Mirror
poll recorded that only 2 per cent of Britons believed that war with Iraq would make the world safer.
During the flight to Washington, accompanied by Powell and Manning, Blair was briefed about the two issues to be discussed with
the president. The most important was securing a second UN resolution; the other was the plan for post-war Iraq.
In previous meetings, Britain’s military inferiority to America had been masked by Bush’s warmth towards Blair. Their understanding suggested equality based on their personal relationship. But the countdown to war noticeably changed their rapport. With some 300,000 American servicemen preparing to travel to the Gulf, Bush had wholeheartedly embraced his moment of destiny. Blair was still struggling, preparing for war but still appearing to fight for peace.
During their two hours together, Blair did elicit some sympathy from the American president. US diplomats, Bush agreed, would support Britain’s search for a second resolution but, regardless of the outcome, America would start bombing Iraq on 10 March and the invasion would follow soon after. The British prime minister was no longer an equal partner.
Before Blair left London, Boyce had warned him that the US army was psychologically unprepared for ruling post-war Iraq. The Pentagon was unwilling to act as a nation-builder and was ignoring the detailed plans for post-war government, as prepared by Colin Powell and the State Department. Condoleezza Rice, the ineffectual security adviser, had tried to push the issue in the White House, but had failed. Bush had been persuaded by Rumsfeld that the Iraqis would welcome the invaders as liberators and was already planning for his servicemen to return after securing their trophy – Baghdad.
Blair was pumped up by several advisers to challenge Bush. ‘George, shouldn’t we do something about the aftermath?’
‘We’ve got that in hand.’
‘Good.’
‘There won’t be any civil war,’ insisted Bush, dismissing the possibility of Sunnis and Shias fighting each other.
‘Good,’ said Blair again. Seated beside him, neither Powell nor Manning suggested that Iraq would collapse.
Blair returned to London to face a fractious Cabinet. Clare Short and
Robin Cook were outright opponents of the war. Short succumbed to self-interest to remain inside the tent. From his period as foreign secretary, Cook knew of the doubts about Iraq’s WMDs but was, as Helen Liddell, the Scottish minister, realised, ‘too arrogant to build an alliance around the Cabinet table’. His resignation was inevitable once Britain was formally committed to war. Blair was fortunate. If Cook had persuaded two other ministers to resign with him, he would have been vulnerable, but Cook went quietly. ‘A wasted opportunity,’ said one dissenter.
Blair’s support from the other ministers was fatalistic. None doubted that Saddam possessed WMDs and, even if critical of a war, they were restrained out of loyalty towards a leader who had won two landslide victories and by their loathing for the alternative – a government led by Brown. They would remain unaware that an MI6 officer had flown to Jordan to meet the head of Iraqi intelligence, who had travelled from Baghdad. The British officer, assumed to be Nigel Inkster, was assured that Iraq possessed no WMDs. The conversation was discounted by MI6 as ‘a provocation’.
Blair’s staunchest ally was Hoon. The minister supported a just war against Saddam, despite his loyalty being tested by Powell. During his presentations describing Boyce’s recommendations, Powell would repeatedly interrupt, saying, ‘I’ve spoken to senior army officials in the MoD and they say the opposite.’ Blair’s blushing chief of staff, his audience assumed, wanted to emulate his brother Charles, who had served Margaret Thatcher.
Powell’s interference was a minor irritation for Hoon compared to the battle between the generals and Boyce. The admiral’s unlikely ally was Tebbit. The permanent secretary sent a message to Hoon expressing reservations that ‘we’re running into this without full consideration. There should be a full Cabinet discussion because all the criteria cannot be met.’
‘Can we pull out of the invasion?’ Hoon asked.
‘It’s too late,’ Tebbit told him. Neither man could gauge whether Blair was troubled by Washington’s obduracy.
At the MoD, General Tim Cross, who was involved in preparations for the war and its aftermath, was frustrated by his meeting with Blair. The post-war planning for Iraq, Cross had patiently explained, was incoherent. ‘The plan was we did not need a plan,’ he would write. ‘I don’t think he understood what the possible consequences could be.’
Blair’s lack of awareness was shared by Boyce and all the chiefs. Neither the Foreign Office nor MI6 had predicted the quagmire around Basra, in southern Iraq, which had been allocated for occupation by the British. No one could imagine the consequences of the local Iraqi Shias’ allegiance to Iran. So far as the army was concerned, that was irrelevant. After the victory, control of the southern region would be handed over by the British to other NATO armies.
Post-war reconstruction of the area had been allocated to the DFID under Clare Short. Rob Fry had approached Short’s senior official about his plans after the army withdrew.
‘We should not be doing this at all,’ the official replied with moral disdain.
‘But you’re part of the government,’ protested Fry. ‘You must help.’
‘No, we don’t,’ replied the official.
‘You’re acting like the provisional wing of the government,’ concluded Fry.
The inevitability of war was strewn with challenges. The first was the public’s opposition. Its distrust gnawed into Blair’s self-confidence. He did not see himself as a career politician but as a hero making the moral choice to save mankind. To head off an anti-war march planned for the middle of February in London, he approved the publication of a second dossier compiled under Campbell’s supervision, ‘Iraq – Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation’. Blair presented the intelligence in the new dossier as further conclusive evidence of Saddam’s deception, but within days the contents were exposed as unreliable. Campbell had mixed a plagiarised and distorted ten-year-old PhD thesis taken without permission from the Internet with more unreliable intelligence collected by the JIC.
Scarlett had not agreed to Campbell’s publication of the JIC’s assessments. ‘It was a bad own goal,’ the PR man noted in the uproar, ‘especially as we didn’t need it, given the very good intelligence and other materials we had.’ Although Campbell’s second dossier was a fabrication, Blair did not consider dismissing his spokesman. Losing his master of the dark arts would have removed an invaluable shield. Secretly, he admired the gall of the quixotic risk-taker.