by Tom Bower
‘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 th
e 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.
In the Home Office, Stephen Boys-Smith reflected on the debacle. ‘Deliberate obfuscation’, he observed, ‘requires considerable clarity of mind. But if you’re not careful, you deceive yourself.’
The argument against Saddam was barely improved by Colin Powell’s presentation of the evidence of WMDs to the UN two days later, on 5 February. Shaped to copy Adlai Stevenson’s dramatic demonstration in October 1962 of conclusive photographic evidence of Soviet missile sites in Cuba, Powell’s submission lacked conviction. Despite being directed by the CIA to suspected sites, the UN inspectors had still not found any evidence of sarin, mustard gas, anthrax or other weapons of mass destruction. Contrary to Blair’s assurances in September that ‘present intelligence confirms that [Iraq] has got such facilities’, inspectors had not even found a mobile laboratory, nor any trace of WMDs in machinery. The inspectors were raising doubts about MI6’s and the CIA’s reports and asking for more time. Pertinently, Blair did not ask Scarlett or Dearlove to reassess their intelligence. Instead, he was furious with Blix, the messenger delivering bad news.
‘I have to decide for war or peace,’ Blix told Blair.
‘No,’ replied Blair, ‘just give us your honest assessment.’
At that stage, Blair did not want to be told there were no such weapons. Manning even deluded himself that Blix had gone to ten out of nineteen identified sites ‘and found some interesting material’.
While the Anglo-American army was being deployed along Iraq’s borders, Blair embarked on a tour of foreign capitals, sustained by the Koran, books about Islam and the Bible. ‘I’m acting on the say-so of a greater power,’ he told journalist Trevor Kavanagh. ‘I feel the hand of fate on my shoulder.’ His powers of persuasion, he was certain, could deliver the vote in New York, despite the opposition of France, Germany and Russia. The unusual spectacle of a prime minister globetrotting between capitals misjudging other leaders did not enhance his image.
‘He didn’t get it,’ Blair scoffed about Chirac’s refusal to support the invasion.
‘Blair never listened to Chirac or took his warnings seriously,’ realised Stephen Wall, the senior civil servant responsible for Britain’s relations with Europe. The breakdown of his relations with the French president revealed Blair’s misinterpretation of history. In the 1960s, Chirac had fought in Algeria against Muslim nationalists. He had witnessed a bitter colonial war that scarred France and could foresee the turmoil in Iraq after Saddam. Blair swept his warnings aside as a personal insult.
Looking nervous, the prime minister arrived in Scotland on 14 February, on the eve of Labour’s spring conference in Glasgow and the anti-war protest in London. One million were expected to march, including Labour MPs who had pledged to vote against the government’s motion to join the invasion. Outside the conference hall a major anti-war protest was taking place. Donald Dewar’s devolution arrangements had unexpectedly empowered the Scottish Nationalists, which Blair was ignoring. Inside were the representatives of a disintegrating Labour party. The heavy make-up could not conceal Blair’s gaunt appearance and bloodshot eyes, and the usual excitement was missing as he strode onto the stage. His speech contained one memorable thought: ‘Ridding the world of Saddam would be an act of humanity. It is leaving him there that is inhumane.’ Recited with passion, the exhortation was received in silence. Blair successfully concealed his fear of humiliation. A week later, he flew to Rome for an audience with the Pope, who advised him to avoid war. Blair ignored his vows of obedience.
Mesmerised by the lessons he drew from Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, Blair had his ‘moment of truth’ highlighted by David Margolik during an interview in London for Vanity Fair in anticipation of his fiftieth birthday. Talk drifted towards Blair’s Christianity and his audience with the Pope in February. ‘As a private individual,’ Blair said, ‘I find prayer a source of solace.’
‘We don’t do God,’ Campbell interrupted sharply.
*
‘I do not want war,’ Blair told the Commons on 25 February. ‘Saddam should comply with the inspectors.’
To be certain of his arguments, he asked Dearlove to come to Downing Street, with Hoon as an eyewitness.
‘Are you sure Saddam has WMDs?’ he asked.
‘Yes, absolutely,’ replied Dearlove. ‘Categorically.’
The public’s hostility and Blair’s failure to gather international support for a second resolution encouraged Admiral West and General Jackson, who was designated to take over as head of the army, to query whether the war would be legal. ‘I don’t want a marine to appear in the International Court accused of war crimes,’ said West.
After visiting a City law firm for advice, West told Boyce that the military required a specific opinion from the attorney general about the legality of the war. So it was that, at the beginning of March 2003, Boyce, dressed in an admiral’s uniform, visited Blair, who greeted him in jeans and an open-necked shirt. The admiral demanded a formal assurance that Britain’s invasion of Iraq was legal.
This was an unprecedented encounter. Boyce was questioning Blair’s honesty. The mutual trust between the prime minister and the chief of the defence staff had vanished. Five years earlier, Boyce had formally opposed placing British servicemen under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. His protest, he believed, had been ignored by Goldsmith and Hoon, while Straw and Michael Jay had written a joint memo stating that the prosecution of a British officer could not happen. ‘I was told to “shut up”,’ Boyce said, ‘but now I feared an illegal war. If the invasion of Iraq was not legal, then all the military could go to jail. I told them, “If I go to jail, then Blair, Hoon and everyone else will be going with me.”’
He demanded from Blair the attorney general’s written opinion that war without a second UN resolution was legal. Without that document, Boyce made clear, he would resign, just as he would if there were any suggestion that the objective of war was regime change.
‘I understand,’ said Blair, not concealing his surprise from Hoon about the consequence of a fractured relati
onship. Forty-two thousand British soldiers would not advance an inch without Peter Goldsmith’s signed approval.
To Boyce and the military, Goldsmith’s previous advice was complicated by conflicting legal arguments and was inconclusive. ‘He [Boyce] wants a straightforward certificate ignoring the legal difficulties,’ was Hoon’s interpretation. Boyce, he acknowledged, ‘was not well-suited to present the case for war to the public as we required’. The admiral was too honest.
Blair had good reason to fear disaster. Goldsmith, in his first legal opinion, presented on 31 January, had expressed doubts about the legality of war without a second UN resolution unless Blair was satisfied on ‘strong factual grounds’ that Saddam had failed to comply with the UN resolutions to disarm Iraq of its WMDs and rockets. Since the JIC had failed to prove its case, Goldsmith could not approve the war. To be crystal-clear, he warned that an ‘unreasonable’ veto in the UN of a second resolution would not legalise the war. This, Blair knew, was too complicated, so he asked Goldsmith to reconsider. The attorney general agreed. Lawyer to lawyer, Blair and Goldsmith discussed how a different opinion might be produced. Their answer was for Goldsmith to consult those involved in passing resolution 1441, especially Jeremy Greenstock and the US government lawyers. The attorney flew to Washington.
On 7 March, a week before the unpredictable Commons vote, Blair considered resigning. Without his knowledge, Andrew Turnbull was investigating the mechanics of a handover of power. His preparations appeared justified after Clare Short invited herself onto a BBC radio show and, after describing Blair as ‘reckless’, threatened to resign herself if the UN failed to pass a second resolution. Blair jettisoned plans to fly to Chile, Moscow and Washington to gather support for the UN vote, and instead sent Manning on another hapless mission, while he contemplated defeat in the Commons, the return of the troops and the end of the special relationship.
His foreboding was not helped by a telephone call from the American president on 9 March. ‘Don’t come if it’s too much,’ Bush entreated Blair after listening to the hurdle the prime minister faced to win the Commons vote. Bush anticipated the answer. This was the challenge that Neville Chamberlain had botched. Two days later, Rumsfeld publicly dismissed Britain’s participation as unnecessary. Blair was embarrassed. The neocons, Jonathan Powell told Straw, didn’t care about Britain.
