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 Editorials | July 2005 
The Rush to Invade Iraq - the inside story | Part 5
 AlJazeera.com
| | Blair discussed with Bush the use of the UN to force Saddam to re-admit weapons inspectors. |
In the spring of 2002, the talk of an Iraq war in Washington remained limited to behind-the-scenes discussions and a smattering of speculative newspaper articles. But in London, talk of an American-led invasion was already widespread and gathering pace. Opposition was growing sharply, and loudly, in Parliament and in Tony Blair's Cabinet. Though few in Washington dwelled on its importance at the time, Blair's predicament would profoundly impact the Bush administration's war deliberations.
In April, Blair paid a visit to President Bush in Crawford, Texas, where the British PM made it clear he would back whatever America decided about Iraq. But, he added, any action against Saddam would need to proceed with the backing of the UN. Without the UN’s support, Blair explained, there was little chance Parliament, much less the British public, would ever support an invasion. He said that UN weapons inspectors would need to return to Iraq and confirm the Bush administration's fears about Saddam's weapons programs before he would be in a position to support a war openly.
Blair discussed with Bush the use of the UN to force Saddam to re-admit weapons inspectors, with the sanction of war if he refused. What the British prime minister did not yet understand was that, in the era of George W. Bush, nothing was ever that simple. For the British government, dealing with the administration was a novel experience.
"Usually, what the national-security adviser told one was gospel," one senior British official says today. "What you got from Condi was 'Hmm, that's a good idea-we'll talk about that. Let's see what we can do.' This put much more of a burden on the diplomatic staff to find out what was going on, who was up and who was down. And what we saw, more and more, was that power in the government swirled around the vice president and the Department of Defense."
Blair had not long been home when hawks in the Pentagon and in the vice president's office began to do all in their power to reverse both of the concessions Blair's staff thought he had secured from Bush: the commitments to go to the UN and to put pressure on Ariel Sharon to withdraw from the occupied territories and negotiate with Yasser Arafat.
"Our position, Bush's position, was that Saddam was an outlaw," says a senior official in Cheney's office. "We already had all the UN resolutions we needed to go to war. We didn't think we needed any more arguments to justify it, or its legality." The hawks' view, he says, was that by maintaining WMD programs, whether or not the weapons were ready for use, Saddam was in clear breach of UN resolutions passed during the 1990s. All that remained was to issue an ultimatum and to attack when (as everyone assumed) he refused to comply. As Sir Christopher Meyer puts it, "They didn't see why they had to prove what they already knew."
Even then, in the middle of 2002, says the Cheney official, it was clear to the hawks that "taking the UN route" contained a potentially disastrous pitfall for them. To make the case for an international invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration would need to prove that Iraq was an "imminent" threat. The only way Hussein's regime could be considered an imminent threat was if the world could be shown it had the capability to launch a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack on a Western country.
"The imminence of the threat from Iraq's WMD was never the real issue (for us)," says the Cheney aide. "WMD were on our minds, but they weren't the key thing. What was really driving us was the strategic conditions of the Middle East."
As the weeks passed with no evidence of any move by the Bush administration to engage the United Nations, Blair began to come under pressure. Within his Cabinet, the idea of supporting an American attack on Iraq without the backing of the Security Council seemed almost unthinkable. At the Cabinet's first meeting after Blair's April trip to the U.S., several ministers warned that the consequences would be dire. The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, evidently told Blair that an invasion without UN support would be in violation of international law. It’s said that Goldsmith advised that even with UN support, Blair would need to demonstrate that the threat to British national security was real and imminent. That meant one thing: proving Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
With no word from Bush by the end of July, Blair decided to press once more for engagement with the UN. In late July, Blair sent a letter stressing the need to make progress over Israel, and again urging Bush to put Saddam's breaches of earlier resolutions before the UN
Blair followed up by sending his chief foreign-policy adviser, Sir David Manning (now ambassador to the U.S.), to Washington to meet with Condoleezza Rice. Unexpectedly, while the two were speaking, Bush called Rice into the Oval Office. Manning followed and met with the president for about 20 minutes. "Manning reiterated the UN message very strongly," says a senior British official. "He said, 'This is very important to us, your main ally.'" Manning, in fact, warned that if Bush did not go the UN route Blair's political position might become untenable.
Several days after Manning returned to London, Bush and Blair spoke by telephone. A White House official who has studied the transcript of the phone call recalls: "The way it read was that, come what may, Saddam was going to go; they said they were going forward, they were going to take out the regime, and they were doing the right thing. Blair did not need any convincing. There was no 'Come on, Tony, we've got to get you on board.' I remember reading it and then thinking, OK, now I know what we're going to be doing for the next year." Before the call, this official says, he had the impression that the probability of invasion was high, but still below 100 percent. Afterward, he says, "it was a done deal."
But Blair continued to tell the British media and his own cabinet that no decision had been taken.
Blair kept his top ministers in the dark for weeks. According to former international development minister Clare Short's diary, "T(ony) B(lair) gave me assurances when I asked for Iraq to be discussed at Cabinet that no decision made and not imminent." Later that day, she learned from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, Blair had asked to make 20,000 British troops available for deployment in the Gulf. Still, she believed her prime minister's assurances, but wrote that, if she had not, she would "almost certainly" have resigned from the government. At that juncture, her resignation would have dealt Blair a very damaging blow.
By the beginning of August 2002, it was clear to many of Bush's top advisers that the president was committed to using any means necessary to remove Saddam from power. But would the U.S. attack alone? Or with an international coalition, as Bush's father had? Or with a group of select allies? Above everything hovered the specter of the United Nations. Unless Bush secured UN approval, Blair was warning, the British could not join the war effort.
But it was Colin Powell who finally forced the issue.
On August 5, Powell told the President that international support was crucial both to legitimise the war in the eyes of the world and to lay the groundwork for postwar reconstruction. Furthermore, polls were showing that a majority of Americans favored seeking UN approval. Reluctantly, Bush agreed.
Meanwhile, Blair was putting pressure on MI6 to come up with Iraqi WMDs. In Britain, intelligence is channeled through a body known as the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which has always operated in isolation from politicians. Blair proposed to ignore this convention and publish his own dossier on Iraq's WMD based on secret intelligence.
Blair's chief spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, and the staff of the Downing Street press office were to have a huge influence on this project.
Their reactions to the JIC's draft report on September 9 were very critical. "Needs much more weight, writing, detail," wrote special adviser Philip Bassett to Campbell, "and we need to find a way to get over this a) by having better intelligence material, b) by having more material (and better flagged-up), and c) more convincing material." On September 11 an e-mail went around the intelligence community. The anonymous author wrote, "No. 10 through the Chairman want the document to be as strong as possible within the bounds of available intelligence. This is therefore a last (!) call for any items of intelligence that agencies think can and should be included. Responses needed by 12.00 tomorrow."
The MI6 chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, told Blair that he had the answer to the prime minister's prayers: a source inside Iraq saying Saddam had stocks of chemical and biological weapons which could be deployed within 45 minutes. There was no corroboration, and the source's contact with MI6 was not direct: his claim had been supplied via one of the INC's rivals, the London-based Iraqi National Accord. There had been no attempt to run the claim by the acknowledged intelligence experts on WMD "You just never do this," says one intelligence official. "It's Rule No. 1."
However, the 45-minutes claim was mentioned in Blair's 50-page dossier four times and was stressed in an introduction written by Blair. When the government's WMD experts saw it, they were appalled, but when they raised objections, they were told that MI6 had new information which refuted them, from a source so secret that they could be given no details.
The 45-minutes claim appeared in headlines around the globe. In the months to come, the dossier was cited time and again as the British and American governments argued their case through the media, to legislators, and at the United Nations.
In the late 2002 a group of MI6 staff from Washington joined Dearlove for an evening meeting at Downing Street. As the participants were leaving, Blair shook Dearlove's hand. "My fate is in your hands, Richard," he said.
The U.S. and UN have never been the best friends.
And so it was a momentous occasion when on September 12, 2002, President Bush addressed the General Assembly. Despite his obvious ambivalence, the president managed to hit all the right notes. He announced that the U.S. would return to the UNESCO (which it had left in 1984, citing poor management, corruption, and excessive spending), he singled out the plight of Palestinians. And one by one, he enumerated the Security Council resolutions that Saddam had flouted, and called the UN "the world's most important multilateral body."
But the president, in a rare moment of felicitous improvisation following a technical glitch on his teleprompter, managed to say: "We will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions."
It was a critical statement-the first time Bush had acknowledged the legitimacy of the U.N.'s role in a possible war against Iraq. The audience was impressed and took him at his word.
Kofi Annan went to work immediately, urging leaders of the Arab League to press Saddam to reinstate the weapons inspectors in Iraq, and helping Iraqi representatives draft a reply to the UN Four days later, on September 16, Annan stood before the microphones at the UN and announced he had received a letter from Iraqi authorities which said Iraq would allow inspectors access "without conditions." Powell read the text which it did not mention allowing unconditional access, as Annan had said.
White House staffers flew into a rage. In their view Annan was giving Saddam the kind of wiggle room that would allow him to avert military action. Reportedly, later that night, Powell and Rice, in a conference call, lambasted Annan for taking matters into his own hands. U.S. ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, was sent to talk to the French. "Did you know about this letter?" he demanded of French ambassador Jean-David Levitte who replied, yes, the French were fully aware of it. People at the White House were beside themselves. It was bad enough their plan was in the hands of Annan, now it appeared the French were involved as well.
Relations between the UN leadership and the White House deteriorated in the following days as word of American military preparations seeped out. The Central Command timetable was already in place, and by September 21 the existence of a war plan that included targets for U.S. warplanes and missiles, the size of U.S. ground forces, and potential lines of attack was being leaked to the press. Bush's UN strategy was becoming clear: the goal was not to get Saddam to disarm through peaceful means, but rather to get a the world body’s stamp of approval for American military action.
Indeed, Bush's speech before the General Assembly was soon seen by the delegates for what it was: a tell-'em-what-they-want-to-hear spiel even though you don't believe it.
On September 19, Rumsfeld, speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued that the current inspection team was weak, and that "the more inspectors that are in there, the less likely something's going to happen." Bush, meanwhile, told reporters that, "if the United Nations Security Council won't deal with the problem, the United States and some of our friends will."
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