by Tom Bower
‘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.
Before applying to become Cabinet secretary, Turnbull knew that Wilson was being excluded from Blair’s meetings with Dearlove and Scarlett, and even from Blair’s meetings with Boyce. He interpreted the prime minister’s abolition of the constitution’s checks and balances as the result of ‘a man in a hurry who didn’t want to be bogged down by having to carry people along’. Rather than attempting to restore the Cabinet secretary’s traditional role, Turnbull had set out a winning prospectus to secure his new job. He pledged to focus on managing the civil service and reforming Whitehall and the public services, and further suggested that the prime minister should appoint a security co-ordinator to manage defence and intelligence. Blair agreed, and appointed David Omand. The former director of GCHQ assumed that he would be present during the prime minister’s defence and intelligence briefings.
During his last months, Wilson’s penalty for protecting the traditionalists was further exclusion from the inner circle. Although he was based in Downing Street, he was unaware that on 2 April Blair was at Chequers being briefed by Boyce and the intelligence services about Iraq. Hoon and Straw were also absent. Dearlove fed Blair reports about Saddam’s brutalities and his development of WMDs. ‘I didn’t know what was going on,’ Wilson would admit. ‘It is humbling.’ To an extent he blamed Jonathan Powell, who ‘despised him’.
Amid that small group, there was no secret that the invasion of Iraq was being planned for the new year. Everyone also knew that Blair wanted to stand alongside Bush. Dearlove was in no doubt, as he later said, that Blair ‘wanted to lead, not just support the process of regime change’. Or, as ‘C’ explained, ‘It’s keeping our hands on what’s going on and not letting the Americans run away with the ball.’ At that stage, the notion of Blair acting as Bush’s poodle was fanciful to Dearlove, Manning and Powell.
‘I resolved to be part of the planning from early April,’ Blair would write, adding in self-defence, ‘But war was not decided.’ Boyce suspected that Bush had already committed to the invasion and, to his mind, that was against Britain’s interest. To avoid the admiral’s objections, Blair hid his intentions behind a facade, replying to Boyce’s protest that regime change would be illegal, ‘Well, it’s both regime change and his WMDs.’ With time, Blair calculated, Boyce would be assuaged or manipulated into obedience.
Blair’s ambition was fixed. ‘I had resolved in my own mind’, he would write, ‘that removing Saddam would do the world, and most particularly the Iraqi people, a service.’ But he also admitted that ‘I knew that regime change could not be our policy.’ Pertinently, he continuously mentioned ‘strategy’ but never asked in London what would follow Saddam’s removal.
Those secret discussions with his restricted group in Chequers and Downing Street prepared Blair for his meeting in April at the Bush family ranch in Crawford, Texas. He was seeking reassurances over the president’s intention to protect the sanctity of Britain’s alliance with America. In advance, Manning and Meyer were tasked with describing the mood among Bush’s confidants. They discovered an unbridgeable division between Colin Powell at the State Department and Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, and between Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney. Since Rumsfeld and Cheney were unapologetic sponsors of American power and unfriendly towards Britain, the British diplomats attached themselves to Powell and Rice. Their choice made no real difference after Rice revealed that she too was committed to regime change. ‘Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out,’ Bush had reportedly told her. In Crawford, Blair would be meeting the ‘reasonable’ Bush, who only turned ‘aggressive’ after spending time with Cheney and Rumsfeld. But, regardless of his company, as Bush would admit before Blair arrived, ‘I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go.’ After Colin Powell’s conversations with Meyer and Manning, he reported to Bush that Blair agreed. ‘On Iraq,’ Powell wrote on 28 March, ‘Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary’ and would expect Bush to behave as if ‘Britain and America are truly equal partners in the special relationship’.
Mindful that the Labour Party was suspicious – 140 MPs had signed a Commons motion expressing ‘deep unease’ after Blair refused to allow a parliamentary debate on Iraq – and that the country as a whole was not convinced that war was in Britain’s interest, Blair needed Bush to present the invasion as part of a commitment to promoting the Middle East peace process. Since chairing an unsuccessful summit in London in 1998 between Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat, Blair’s success in Ulster had convinced him that he could now broker a deal between Israel and the Arabs. More recently, Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, had encouraged him to remove Saddam. ‘You’re saving the Middle East from a madman,’ Sharon told Blair. ‘He could wake up in the morning and decide to invade Israel. His army of one and a half million needs just an hour to reach our borders. In the Middle East, nothing is predictable. If you have a problem, deal with it. Get rid of Saddam.’
Blair would also explain that Britain’s participation would depend on Saddam being proven to have broken the UN’s 1991 resolution about inspections. He needed Bush to maintain the impression that America supported Britain’s diplomats finagling agreements with disparate governments, especially the French, Germans and Russians, in order to legitimise the invasion with a UN resolution.
To win the call to arms required tenacity. Blair appeared to possess the necessary self-confidence, but the bewildering contradictions between his public and private life eluded even Delphic interpretation. There was the public politician preparing for a momentous journey; there was a media outcry about his office becoming embroiled in an ugly spat about the protocol for the Queen Mother’s funeral; and there was the private man in his Downing Street flat dressed in yellow and green underpants and greeting Alastair Campbell with the question, ‘How many prime ministers have a body like this?’ When he was in the apartment, he would don footballer’s kit or lilac pyjama trousers and a blue smock, or appear with a nude woman emblazoned on his shirt cuffs.
Just before his transatlantic flight to meet Bush he wrote to George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, saying, ‘I am one of the Western leaders the US will really listen to on these issues. That carries a price. It means that I don’t grandstand; I don’t negotiate publicly; and I don’t list demands. It’s a very difficult and delicate line to tread … My objective must be to pull the Americans towards a strategy that is sensible in Iraq and contemplate military action only in the right circumstance.’ As so often, he implied the importance of protecting Britain’s special relationship with America. He was unaware that Harold Wilson had refused President Johnson’s request to send British troops to Vietnam, without fatal consequences.
Blair’s prejudice, noted Om
and, was highlighted by the final intelligence brief presented before his departure. Its authors admitted there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda or any other international terror group. They also highlighted the absence of any evidence about Iraq’s development of WMDs. Finally, they revealed that the successful Islamic attacks on America had increased the radicalisation of Muslims. The message from Manning was that, on the advice of the hawks in Washington, Bush had moved from containment to confrontation. Those key advisers dismissed the UN route.
To other European leaders, Bush gave the impression that he remained undecided. ‘I have no war plans on my desk,’ he told the media. But to Blair, during their walks alone across the Texan countryside, he described his intention to remove Saddam regardless of WMDs. Mindful of their common attitude towards good and evil, Blair echoed his companion’s ambition, so long as Bush understood Blair’s domestic obstacles. Britain, he said, ‘would support military action to bring about regime change’ if attempts were also made to negotiate a Middle East peace settlement, and only after the UN route was exhausted. ‘The thing I admire about this prime minister’, Bush told the media in Crawford, ‘is that he doesn’t need a poll or focus group to convince him of the difference between right and wrong.’ Blair agreed: ‘Leaving Iraq to develop WMDs is not an option.’ As a believer, he had decided to join Bush in the cockpit.
‘What happened?’ Meyer asked Jonathan Powell soon after the prime minister’s party left Crawford.
‘We’ll debrief him on the plane,’ replied Powell, whose antagonism towards the ambassador was unhelpful.
Meyer interpreted everything he heard as proving that Blair had pledged ‘in blood’ to topple Saddam.
To eyewitnesses in Texas, Blair appeared to be a calm adventurer seeking close involvement in a historic drama to change the world. But the keen observer noticed something more. Travelling in long motor cavalcades accompanied by well-drilled protection officers was a prime minister who appreciated the privileges of office. Private jets, limousines and hassle-free travel were the perks of premiership, and in America the trappings of power were particularly congenial. Regardless of the cost, switching from helicopters to jets seemed appropriate for a leader discussing war. Not once did Blair question his advisers over whether Britain’s taxpayers would thank the government for spending billions of pounds on a distant war.
On his return to London, he did not reveal to his Cabinet any details about his discussions. He did not trust his ministers, especially Brown, Short and Cook. He was particularly distrustful of Cook’s blustering, because in 1998 Cook had issued a gung-ho warning to Saddam that the dictator would be ‘making a grave mistake’ if he doubted Western resolve to bomb the country and stop WMDs being produced. Four years later, Cook appeared to have forgotten those words.
Even Blair’s supporters were naive. Patricia Hewitt’s warning that an invasion of Iraq would ‘cause a lot of tension among the Muslim communities in Britain’ evoked a cursory nod from her leader. More disrespectful was Blair’s silence towards Hoon, Straw and Boyce. But he was careful not to lie outright. Instead, he reported that no action was imminent and that Bush had been persuaded to avoid an invasion while UN inspectors searched for WMDs. Britain was committed, they were told, to working through the UN. Blair’s ministers left his briefing convinced that an invasion was far away.
In early July, Colonel Paul Gibson, the British army liaison officer in Tampa, reported that the US military’s preparatory work for the invasion had suddenly intensified. Since Britain was not officially committed to the war, Gibson was excluded from any discussions. ‘The shutters are firmly down,’ he added. At the same time, Kevin Tebbit returned from Washington and, in a memorandum to Blair, wrote that there was a ‘sharp shift in attitudes’ among the Bush administration, which now intended to ‘topple the regime by military action’. Tebbit was surprised not to receive a reply.
After clarifying Washington’s position, Boyce told Blair, ‘Bush is going ahead,’ and described how Franks had been ordered to ‘gear up for action’. Blair waved the admiral’s assertion aside. ‘I knew Bush had not decided,’ he would write. In a bravura performance on 16 July, he told a Commons committee the same: while he supported Bush’s general policy of pre-emptive action, no decisions had yet been made.
To clarify any misunderstandings, Richard Dearlove flew to Washington. His journey coincided with the arrival of a letter from Blair to Bush that began, ‘You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I’m with you.’ As Blair’s special emissary, Dearlove was told the truth. He returned to London, and an ad hoc meeting was convened in Blair’s office for 23 July. For the first time, Hoon, Straw, the attorney general Peter Goldsmith and Richard Wilson squeezed into Blair’s office alongside Scarlett, Powell and Boyce to hear facts that could no longer be confined to Blair’s confidants. The cosy atmosphere of the meetings among Blair’s friends was fractured by the inclusion of outsiders. Dearlove explained that ‘Bush’s public statements that war would be a “last resort” were untrue. Military action was now seen as inevitable.’ The invasion would go ahead with or without Britain. All that was missing was finding a way to sell the war so that ‘the intelligence and facts’ would be ‘fixed around the policy’.
Scarlett agreed. ‘It seemed clear’, he would later say, ‘that Bush had made up his mind to take military action.’ He asked Blair whether the reason would be Saddam’s link to terrorism, WMDs or the need for regime change. Blair was adamant: whatever the reason, Britain had to stand alongside America. Regime change was necessary to end the problem of WMDs. ‘It’s worse than you think,’ Blair told a sceptic. ‘I actually believe in doing this.’
Unhappy about the direction of the conversation, Straw, in his customary long-winded manner, mentioned that the case for war was ‘thin’ because Saddam was not threatening anyone with WMDs. That comment was unwelcome to Blair. Although he had told the Commons committee on 16 July that ‘Hussein is still trying [my italics] to develop weapons of mass destruction’, he wanted to draw dramatic conclusions from Saddam’s refusal to co-operate with the UN. Britain could not show ‘weakness in the face of a threat from a tyrant’. In Blair’s opinion, Straw was a process merchant rather than a constructive thinker. He also lacked the courage to resign.
Blair moved the discussion on to the ‘Options Paper’ that had been prepared in March but not shown to the Cabinet, which outlined how sanctions could escalate to a ground offensive. If Britain participated in the invasion, the military’s commitment was graded at three levels, or ‘packages’. Boyce, asked to describe the alternatives, did not conceal his disdain for all the politicians in the room, especially Hoon. The secretary of state refused to endorse Boyce’s advice to Blair that the British military was underfunded for an invasion. Even the Commons Defence Committee had criticised Hoon six days earlier for allowing Britain’s military to become dangerously overstretched. Boyce made special mention of Hoon’s invisibility in that discussion. Alone against Blair, he also recommended that Britain should choose package one, the smallest commitment, and even that would require extra funds. Blair replied that additional money would be granted after Britain’s commitment was formally approved. Boyce suspected that he was making an important distinction between preparing for war and the official declaration, and the prime minister’s calculated delay further strained their relations. Nevertheless, Blair counted on Boyce’s discretion not to reveal his intentions.
‘Right. Thank you,’ said Blair, wrapping up the meeting. The authority of his office had suffocated any questions about possible failure. The Americans would be told that Britain would join the invasion. All those in the room were sworn to secrecy. The Cabinet would not be told, as too many ministers were untrustworthy. Blair would consider how to win the public’s support over the summer. His emphasis on concealment prevented Whitehall from mounting the traditional Red versus Blue military exercise to scrutinise the risk.
Boyce departed the meeting with neither
additional funds nor Blair’s decision about the packages. Richard Wilson departed feeling ‘very startled’ about the prime minister’s secret progress towards war. ‘I was taken aback,’ he would say. ‘There was a gleam in his eye. I was worried that he was getting into a position which was dangerous. And I told him.’ Blair gave Wilson one of his wry grimaces. The Cabinet secretary clearly did not grasp that the decision had been taken.
Admiral Alan West, the commander-in-chief of the fleet, did understand. He immediately ordered the dispatch of mine warfare ships to the Gulf and signalled that the fleet and marines should be prepared for war by the end of the year.
Meyer called Manning to ask why Blair was giving Bush unconditional guarantees. ‘We tried to stop him, but he refused,’ Manning replied.
On 25 July, Blair appeared at his monthly press conference. Asked about Iraq, he answered, ‘I think we are all getting a bit ahead of ourselves on the issue of Iraq. As I have said before, action is not imminent, we are not at the point of decision yet.’
TWENTY-THREE
The Bogus Students
* * *
Towards the end of 2001, David Blunkett was told that over 500,000 migrants would have arrived in Britain during that year. ‘We’re going to be tougher,’ he told his officials, bearing in mind the government’s original estimate of 100,000. After twelve weeks of focusing totally on security in the wake of the Islamic attack on America, the Home Office resumed normal business.
The media pressure started again. Blunkett responded by publicly warning immigrants to ‘become more integrated by being more British’. The headlines dismayed Blair. He was not disturbed by warnings about the effect on housing, schools and the NHS of an additional half a million people. The actual numbers never concerned him. The majority of immigrants, he was told, would arrive ‘legitimately’ as members of a British family. His only interest was bogus asylum-seekers, and he chivvied Blunkett to enforce deportation orders. ‘We need to build fifteen detention centres,’ Blunkett replied, who expected the funding would be personally negotiated with Andrew Smith, the chief secretary at the Treasury.
