by Tom Bower
‘I was disappointed that Blair was not moved by my warnings’, Essenhigh said later, ‘and that he lacked the stomach for more struggles with Brown.’ With Essenhigh’s retirement, the military had lost the only chief who could master the financial minutiae of its budget. Walker, a typical soldier, could only challenge Blair and Brown about the size of the total budget and not the details, although that would have been sufficient for his immediate purpose. He rejected that option. ‘That was playing politics and would not be honourable,’ the general explained.
Blair appreciated Walker’s aloofness. The amiable, solid soldier, whose bluff exterior reflected his unchallenging intellect, was a comfort. The combination of General Charles Guthrie and the army’s skill during the foot-and-mouth outbreak had enhanced Blair’s confidence in the military’s discipline, which stood in direct contrast to that of his own government.
The casualness of the ad hoc meetings in Blair’s office belied the gravity of the discussions about Iraq. Officials leaning on walls, perched on arm rests and squeezed onto sofas dispelled the rigour of formal committee gatherings. Often, during over twenty-five meetings about the war, no official was summoned to write the minutes, and the papers submitted by the Cabinet Office outlining the options remained unread. The untroubled mood concealed Blair’s quandary. He spoke about WMDs and the UN but never ‘regime change’. He rarely requested informed debates involving Arabists from the Foreign Office. Straw, it was gossiped around Downing Street, was being treated with contempt. To the amusement of those present, the foreign secretary had once been told to sit in a deep sofa while Blair stood over him. Straw’s status was not enhanced by Blair’s repeated decision that Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador in Washington, should report directly to the chosen few in Downing Street rather than to the Foreign Office. ‘I’m sure we received those messages eventually,’ Straw said later.
In mid-November, Blair could no longer ignore the debate about what should happen in Iraq after Saddam’s demise. Until then, he had eschewed the wisdom of those with an understanding of the Middle East’s history since the end of the First World War. In Blair’s opinion, Saddam’s fate was black and white. Regardless of history, intervention for the reasons he had explained in Chicago was justified. Nevertheless, at Professor Lawrence Freedman’s suggestion, he agreed that three academics – all Arabists who opposed the invasion – should be invited to Downing Street. Led by Toby Dodge, who had recently returned from Baghdad, the experts were asked to describe to Blair, Straw and Manning what would happen after Saddam fell. The fourth person invited to listen was Edward Chaplin of the Foreign Office’s Middle East section, who had not visited Iraq for several years.
Blair walked into the Cabinet room rubbing his hands. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said, exactly as parodied by Rory Bremner. ‘I really appreciate it. I want to listen to your opinions about Iraq’, he continued, looking tense, ‘but, first, don’t tell us not to invade, because we must and will; and, second, don’t tell us it’ll be bad after Saddam, just tell us how bad.’ He then described his vision. As the invasion unfolded, he expected Iraqi officers to execute a successful coup before the Americans arrived in Baghdad and to replace Saddam by an unknown leader, who, in turn, would appoint trusted followers to take over the functioning government. The new president, continued Blair, would champion liberalism and capitalism, changing Iraq into a proper democracy. ‘We will hand power to the people,’ he said. The region, as he later wrote, was ‘urgently in need of modernisation, fundamental reordering, [because] the chance of steady evolution was not good’. Thus the ‘modernisation’ of Islam was equated to the modernisation of Britain’s public services.
‘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 Brit
ain 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.
TWENTY-NINE
Juggling the Figures
* * *
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.
THIRTY
The Collapse of Baghdad
* * *
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,’ Boy
ce 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.
