The Iraq War

by John Keegan

  Events in the military sphere were now moving to bring about the outcome he insisted was morally justifiable, as well as politically necessary. By early March most of the forces committed to Operation Iraqi Freedom (Operation Telic in mundane British phraseology) were in place in Kuwait; 170,000 troops were on the ground, dozens of ships on station, hundreds of aircraft deployed for action, some close to the scene of coming combat, some preparing to fly from bases thousands of miles distant. The obstacles to the inception of the operation were few, and all political. Saddam persisted in his refusal to placate his enemies; perhaps after his long years of successful defiance he did not know how. In Britain the Labour Party’s dissidents were demanding yet another vote on the transition to war and drawing on popular resistance – ‘Not in My Name’ was a favourite slogan – to justify parliamentary revolt. At the United Nations, Britain and America – Britain more insistently than America, which scarcely attempted to disguise its loss of faith in the Security Council’s commitment to maintaining international order – were pressing for what had become known in Britain as the ‘second resolution’ for war, to succeed 1441. The working out of these processes would occupy the early weeks of March 2003.

  On 7 March Hans Blix made a presentation – his third – of his findings in Iraq. He testified, to American displeasure and British disquiet, that the Iraqis were co-operating more fully with UNMOVIC than they had done in the past, though not to the point of full disclosure. He announced that he had investigated American claims of the existence of mobile biological warfare laboratories and underground facilities but had been unable to authenticate either. Turning to Iraqi delivery systems, he described what he had discovered about the al-Samoud missile. A development of the Russian Scud, itself an improved version of the German V-2 of 1944, its range undoubtedly, if slightly, exceeded 150 kilometres, forbidden under Resolution 687 (that range had been chosen because, subtracting the extent of Kurdish territory from Iraq proper, it would prevent Saddam from launching missiles against Israel); thirty-four al-Samoud missiles had been destroyed, about a third of the number he was satisfied existed. Given more time, at least several months, he could conclude his investigations. More time was precisely not what the Americans wanted Saddam to be allowed. Blix’s pedantic manner infuriated the Americans present at this speech; it reinforced their doubts about his suitability as head of UNMOVIC. Their frustration was reinforced when ElBaradei, speaking for the International Atomic Energy Agency, dismissed British intelligence claims that Iraq had obtained supplies of uranium from the African state of Niger. They were based, he said, on a patently forged document. As the British Prime Minister had based many of his arguments for carrying war to Iraq on an intelligence dossier, opened to the public the previous September, Britain even more than America was discountenanced by ElBaradei’s announcement. With other matters, it would return to haunt the Prime Minister when the September dossier became the centre point of a major political crisis, focused on the justification for having taken military action, in the aftermath of the war.

  Blix’s presentation of 7 March and ElBaradei’s footnote to it, inaugurated the final passage of political and diplomatic bargaining before the war began. It was not one which involved the Americans, who were now set on war and held firmly to the view that justification for it was provided by the UN resolutions already adopted, beginning with 678 over ten years before and confirmed by 1441. President Bush was concerned by UN politicking only insofar as it would help Tony Blair, his principal foreign ally, to sustain his base of support in his home country. The Prime Minister, by contrast, was desperately anxious for the ‘second resolution’ in the UN, for what threatened to be a demand for a ‘second vote’ in the House of Commons and for his legal experts’ assurance of the lawfulness of taking military action, in the increasingly complex arena of international law. In the early days of March the British government concentrated on securing the second resolution in the Security Council. Even optimists despaired at swinging the vote. There were fifteen votes, the five of the permanent members – the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China – and those of the ten alternating members. A majority of nine was required. The votes of the United States and Britain were assured. China, during the Cold War aligned with Iraq, was now more concerned to maintain its new Western friendships and would either support the United States or abstain. Bulgaria and Spain would back the Anglo-American position. Pakistan would probably abstain. Germany would be opposed. The ‘swing’ voters were reckoned to be Mexico, Cameroon, Angola, Guinea and Chile. The position of France, a permanent member, a political if not military member of NATO, a pillar of the Western world, would depend upon the decision of President Chirac. Not truly an Olympian, since he took a characteristically Gallic and realist view of the primacy of national power and armed force, for all his outward commitment to the legalism of the European movement, Chirac’s voting choice would be determined entirely by French prejudice.

  In the first week of March British efforts to secure the nine votes necessary for adoption of the ‘second resolution’ giving UN authority to taking war to Iraq became almost frantic. The British ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, lobbied his fellow representatives on the Security Council constantly, offering changes of wording and calling on old friendships. He was also daily, sometimes hourly, on the telephone to the Foreign Office and 10 Downing Street. All the news he brought was bad. At one stage he reported that there might be only four votes, besides those of Britain and the United States, for their resolution. Finally, on 10 March the effort to win UN approval was brought to a full stop by Jacques Chirac. In a television broadcast to the French people from his presidential offices in the Elysée Palace, he announced that France would vote against, ‘whatever the circumstances’. He seemed to imply that France would use its veto if necessary. Later his officials indicated that he had been misinterpreted: counting voting intentions as they had been declared, he knew that the Americans and British could not win. He was merely aligning himself with the majority.

  That was not how his position was viewed by Britain and America. They chose to regard Chirac’s declaration as an act of betrayal. The Americans shrugged off the rebuff; they had always been prepared to act unilaterally and anyhow reposed no confidence in France. The Prime Minister was genuinely outraged. However self-deludingly, he had always believed in his personal ability to straddle the Atlantic divide, sustaining the special relationship with America while remaining on co-operative terms with his fellow Europeans, even in the face of Chirac’s Gallic nationalism. Now the friendship he believed he had forged with Chirac was shown to be hollow.

  The setback was not merely personal. It also objectively undercut his position as a national leader. His personal and press staff swiftly shifted their efforts, to represent Chirac as the cause of Britain’s difficulties in winning support for the war. They could not, however, rescue him from his troubles at home. An ungrateful Labour Party, which he had led to two electoral triumphs, was reverting to type, allowing its taste for anti-Americanism and anti-militarism to overcome its political common sense. Unwillingly Blair had promised the party yet another opportunity to debate the justification for going to war and this other ‘second vote’ now monopolized the energies of the Prime Minister’s entourage. Despite Chirac’s disabling declaration, diplomatic activity continued at the United Nations. Security Council members were still seeking means to postpone a military showdown. A delay of up to forty-five days was proposed, to give Saddam a final chance to prove his willingness to disarm. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, for Britain, attached to that timetable a list of ‘benchmarks’ Saddam should be asked to meet, the surrender of all his chemical and biological agents, his mobile WMD production facilities, the destruction of all remaining al-Samoud missiles and the transfer of the thirty most important Iraqi scientists to Cyprus for a UN debriefing. Hans Blix, enthused by the ‘benchmark’ scheme, went farther. He suggested that Saddam be required to broadcast a statement to the
Arab peoples admitting his faults, his evasions of the UN resolutions and his firm determination to comply with the UNMOVIC regime. For a moment the benchmark scheme looked hopeful. Then on 14 March Chile, a non-permanent Security Council member, formally proposed that Iraq be given thirty days to meet the benchmarks. The proposal was immediately quashed by the US ambassador to the UN. ‘I was asked several days ago about whether or not the President would be open to extending the deadline from thirty to forty-five days – now you could say that’s twenty-six to forty-one days. If it was a non-starter then, it’s a non-starter now.’ The Prime Minister at once told the President that he accepted the war should begin the following week, that of 17–24 March, but asked that they should have a final meeting to show common cause. The meeting was arranged to take place with the Spanish and Portuguese prime ministers in the Azores, the Portuguese islands off the African coast, on 16 March.

  Neither the promise of the Azores meeting nor an American offer to embark on a new attempt to negotiate a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the ‘road map’ scheme, were sufficient to palliate the Prime Minister’s party troubles. On 17 March, immediately after his return from the Azores, where it had been agreed to give Saddam exactly twenty-four hours to comply with all outstanding UN resolutions if military action were not to begin, one of Labour’s most difficult figures, Robin Cook, formerly Foreign Secretary, currently Leader of the House of Commons, appeared at Downing Street to announce his resignation. It was not unexpected and, to his credit as a party loyalist, he indicated his willingness to minimize the difficulty it would cause the government. In his speech to the House later that day, he confined himself to expressing disbelief in the intelligence appreciation used to endorse the need for military action and to explaining his moral reservations. One of the best parliamentary speakers of his era, Cook received a considerate hearing from both sides.

  Nevertheless his resignation, together with that of eight other Labour officeholders and of a legal expert at the Foreign Office, did farther damage to the Prime Minister’s stance. His inner circle held firm and continued to provide dedicated support. Unlike President Bush, however, who could count on the wholehearted endorsement of his policies by his own circle, by the cabinet, by Congress and by the overwhelming majority of the American people, still in a fervently patriotic mood created by the outrage of 9/11, Tony Blair was in a precarious and exposed position. It was an odd predicament for a national leader. On the threshold of war, Britain usually rallies around its government, whatever its party label. The country had rallied, famously, in 1939–40, when the threat was Nazi aggression. It had rallied during the Korean crisis, distant though that event was, dramatically during the Falklands and once again during the First Gulf War. Only over what was still called ‘Suez’ in 1956 had the people wavered, and then because the Labour Party in opposition had declared the conflict with Egypt to be neo-colonialist. In 2003 the spectre of Suez reappeared, with a curious difference. The Labour constituency, the industrial working class, had been pro-war in 1956 as it was in 2003; it was Labour’s middle-class constituency which had opposed military action in 1956, while the rest of the middle class had supported the Conservative government. In 2003 wide sections of the middle class, much of it politically Conservative, went the other way. The most unlikely opponents of Labour’s war policy emerged, professional people, the comfortably retired, even ex-officers. Tony Blair, a public schoolboy with distinctively officer-like characteristics, found himself suddenly isolated, dependent for control of Parliament on apparatchiks who, if in opposition, would certainly have voted against the policy he was pursuing. The later-twentieth-century, early-twenty-first-century obsession with rights, legalities and the judgement of international institutions, with Olympianism in all its aspects, had touched the great British middle-class. Once sublimely certain of the correctness of how its government acted, middle-class Britain had fallen into doubt.

  It was therefore a great relief to the Prime Minister that, in the final days of the prewar crisis, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, entered an opinion that furnished legal support for his decision to join the United States in going to war against Iraq. There were other opinions: Matrix, the legal chambers of his lawyer wife, Cherie Booth, had already announced its view that a resort to war without a second UN resolution would violate international law. Lord Goldsmith, in the aftermath of Robin Cook’s resignation, argued differently. Basing his judgment on Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes the use of force for the purpose of restoring international order, he reviewed the effect of the resolutions affecting Iraq since 678 of 1990, which authorized the use of force against Iraq in support of ‘all subsequent relevant resolutions needed to restore international peace and security’. He went on to argue that a material breach of Resolution 687, which required the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction and means of delivery, such as missiles, revived authority to use force under 678 and that by Resolution 1441, ‘the UN determined that Iraq has been and remains in material breach of Resolution 687, because it had not fully complied with its obligations to disarm under that resolution’. The judgment might have been written at President Bush’s dictation. As delivered by Britain’s senior law officer, it gave full authorization to the Prime Minister to join with its fellow UN member, the United States, in opening military action against Iraq.

  The only impediment to proceeding that remained was the need to win the ‘second vote’ on a motion for war in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister, anomalously, could count upon the votes of the Conservative opposition. The possibility of defeat was threatened only by his own dissidents, almost all on the backbenches. The ‘payroll’ vote, those MPs holding senior or junior government office or unpaid but semiofficial positions as parliamentary private secretaries, could be counted on to support the Prime Minister; there were 264 backbenchers, many of whom were loyalists and some, the ‘waverers’, who might be won over. Hidden in the parliamentary party, however, was a bloc of intransigents who would refuse to be moved. The party managers had been calculating its size on an almost hourly basis, analysing the politics of individuals and targeting those it hoped to win over for person-to-person interviews with senior ministers, sometimes with the Prime Minister himself. In the last resort, however, all turned on the impression Tony Blair would make in the speech he would deliver on the afternoon of 18 March as Prime Minister, leader of his party and spokesman for the nation.

  Tony Blair is both a complex character and a complex personality. Upper middle-class in manner and appearance, to the distaste of many in his party, he is populist in sentiment, but ultimately immune to the temptations of popularity. Not an intellectual, though highly intelligent, his centre of gravity is moral; he has deeply held religious beliefs and an unshakeable conviction in the necessity to do what is right. He speaks easily and fluently, too much so at times, succumbing to the seduction of his own voice, and he possesses elements of the actor. An enthusiastic member of his school dramatic society, he was also a highly effective performer in court during his career as a barrister. He has great charm and the priceless political gift of appearing not to be a politician. When, however, the need arrives to speak from the heart, with force and moral conviction, he rises toweringly to the moment. That moment came on 18 March and he was heard by the House with its full attention. A few unworthy attempts at interruption, all from his own side, were ignored or brushed aside. When he moved into his peroration he commanded silence. ‘In this dilemma’, he said, ‘no choice is perfect, no cause ideal. But on this decision [to support war or not] hangs the fate of many things.… This is not the time to falter [a Churchillian echo]. This is the time for this House, not just this Government or this Prime Minister, but for this House to give a lead, to show that we will stand up for what we know to be right, to show that we will confront the tyrannies and dictatorships and terrorists who put our way of life at risk, to show at the moment of decision that we have the courage to
do the right thing’.

  He said more, justifying his policy of alignment with the United States, assuring the House of his commitment to constructing peace between Israel and the Palestinians, referring again to the danger of weapons of mass destruction and arguing for the correctness of President Bush’s policy of pre-emption, of anticipating attack by carrying attack to the enemy. Pre-emption and the evidence for weapons of mass destruction formed controversial passages in his speech and touched on the deepest Labour sensitivities. Nevertheless, those passages were outweighed by the fervour of his evident moral conviction. At a most difficult time for his premiership, he showed himself to be a master of the British political process and a fine national leader. When the House divided, the amendment moving that the case for war had not been made was defeated by 396 votes to 217. These included 129 Labour votes, besides those of the Liberals and other smaller parties, but the government had won. The war could now begin, with British as much as American endorsement.

  6

  The American War

  History repeats itself, though no two historians agree quite how. Those who reported the First Gulf War of 1990–91 had an almost eerie impression of events replicating themselves between Iraq and its enemies twelve years later but, once the campaign began to unfold, it was the differences rather than the similarities which commanded attention and demanded explanation. In February 1991 a very large and high-quality Western army confronted an equally large but low-quality Iraqi army and, following six weeks of intense aerial attack, destroyed its military capability in four days of fighting. In March 2003 a much smaller but even higher quality Western army confronted an Iraqi army degraded and ennervated by its earlier defeat and by twelve years of isolation from its foreign sources of supply and, during three weeks of high-speed advance over long distances, brought about not merely its disintegration but its apparent evaporation from the field of battle. By the beginning of April the evidence of defeat strewed the Iraqi landscape, discarded small arms, shot-riddled military vehicles, burnt-out tanks and the pathetic, ragged bodies of Iraqi dead; yet not only had Saddam’s army disappeared from view. The signs lacked that it had ever been there. There were no columns of surrendering prisoners, no senior officers offering their capitulation. The war was over but where was the defeated enemy? For all the millions of rounds of ammunition expended, for all the thousands of tons of highexplosive delivered to targets, it was as if the Iraqi army had not existed in the first place. American and British soldiers could testify to the undoubted experience of combat, often at high intensity; but when the shooting stopped, their enemies had vanished.