A Journey (67 page)

The International Red Cross, who did a detailed examination of all the evidence, concluded that the Iraq Body Count, plus the wealth of data from the Iraq Living Conditions Survey and Family Health Survey, is the most accurate estimate. The Brookings Institution, which compiled its own findings, came to a similar view as the Iraq Body Count (a group which, by the way, was against the war). The figures both came out with are between just over 100,000 and 112,000.

That is 112,000 too many, but a far cry from half a million. However, the additional point is their finding that the majority – almost 70,000 – were killed not by coalition forces but in the sectarian killings of 2005–7 that were the work of al-Qaeda and Iran-backed militia.

Again, this is stated not to prove that removing Saddam was therefore better for Iraq than keeping him, but just to put in the balance what Iraq was really like under Saddam, and what it was really like when he went. What it is really like today we will come to.

So this is not just a case of ‘if we knew then what we know now’. On the basis of what we
do
know now, I still believe that leaving Saddam in power was a bigger risk to our security than removing him, and that terrible though the aftermath was, the reality of Saddam and his sons in charge of Iraq would at least arguably be much worse. None of this in any way dismisses the force of the criticism that we failed to foresee the nature of what would follow once Saddam was gone. The planning for the aftermath is a point of fierce debate and I shall come to it. The truth is we did not anticipate the role of al-Qaeda or Iran. Whether we should have is another matter; and if we had anticipated, what we would have done about it is another matter again.

It is for these reasons that I am unable to satisfy the desire even of some of my supporters, who would like me to say: it was a mistake but one made in good faith. Friends opposed to the war think I’m being obstinate; others, less friendly, think I’m delusional. To both I may say: Keep an open mind.

Whereas I must accept the reality of what happened in removing him, those who take a different view must accept there would have been a reality if he and his sons were still in charge of Iraq. Look at the twenty-five-year history of his reign and tell me the next five, ten, fifteen or twenty years would have been better.

However, I am leaping ahead. Let us go back to the time of 2001–3 and begin at the beginning. There are two ways of describing what happened: one by reference to the psychology of the decision-making; the other by reference to the chronology of events. I will begin with the nature of the decision.

First, perhaps by way of a preliminary, we should dismiss the conspiracy theory part of the story. There was no big ‘lie’ about WMD. You can examine the intelligence I had received on various government websites. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) reports were spread over many years, and all assumed an active chemical and biological programme. There were those in the international intelligence community who disputed the extent of the programme, but no one seriously disputed that it existed. UN Resolution 1441 of November 2002, unanimously passed, said as much.

The reason for this was very simple. In 1981, Israel had bombed the nuclear weapons research facility at Tuwaitha near Baghdad, on good evidence that this was part of an active and accelerating programme to acquire nuclear weapons capability. The chemical and biological programme continued. In 1988, as part of the Arabisation policy, to clear Kurds out of the country just north of Baghdad, there were several chemical weapons attacks on Kurdish villages in which 100,000 or more people were killed, including one on Halabja in which several thousand were eliminated in one day.

In March 1990, the
Observer
newspaper journalist Farzad Bazoft was hanged, supposedly for spying on military installations. As part of the ceasefire after the Gulf War following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, weapons inspectors were put into Iraq in order to locate and destroy their chemical and biological munitions. Concern was less, it has to be said, about their use on the Iraqi population, but more about their potential use in Scud missiles, which had been fired on Israel during the course of the conflict, and the potential, therefore, for their use in wider regional battles.

The weapons inspectors listed the material they found, but also the material they didn’t. In a report in January 1999, subsequently much quoted, they said they listed the large amounts of WMD material unaccounted for.

From the outset there had been obstruction. By March 2003, when conflict began, there were no fewer than seventeen separate UN resoltions on the Iraqi refusal to cooperate with the inspectors. In 1998, the inspection team had left in protest. As I said earlier, in December 1998 President Clinton and myself authorised an air attack on Baghdad with the aim of degrading their facilities. It made the point, but no one was sure how effective it had been. The assumption, pretty much universal, was that the programme continued.

I write this not as the justification for the 2003 conflict, but to recall a sense, now stored deep at the back of the memory bank, of what Iraq under Saddam was really like. His government was, internally, a source of appalling brutality and oppression; and externally, a cause of instability and conflict. Some flavour of this can be found in reports from 1999.

The situation of human rights in Iraq is worsening and the repression of civil and political rights continues unabated. The prevailing regime of systematic human rights violations is contrary to Iraq’s many international obligations and . . . remains a threat to peace and security in the region. (Interim Report by Max der Stoel, UN Special Rapporteur on Iraq 1991–9, to the 54th Session of the UN General Assembly [UNGA], 14 October 1999)

Gross human rights violations are taking place systematically in Iraq . . . while the Iraqi government has used every opportunity to publicise the suffering of the population under the sanctions regime . . . it has exercised a complete news blackout on the atrocities that its security forces have been committing. (Amnesty International Report, 24 November 1999)

The point is that while none of this without more justifies war, it does underline the absurdity of the notion that Bush effectively stuck a pin in the atlas and decided, inexplicably, to go to Iraq. It is true that what happened in the first Gulf War, when the decision was taken not to go on to Baghdad after having expelled Iraq from Kuwait, influenced US thinking. It did so for a perfectly valid reason: following the March 1991 ceasefire, Saddam engaged in a further bloody suppression of his population in which thousands more died and in which his grip on the country tightened.

Through the oil-for-food programme, the international community had tried to alleviate the suffering of the people. Such a programme was necessary because of the sanctions that remained in place, precisely because of WMD and other concerns over Saddam. But it never really worked; the money was constantly filched by Saddam, his sons and his associates. The result, as I have said, was that the food and medicines often failed to get through.

The issue of oil raises another allegation: that it was all about oil. Although fatuous as an explanation, it gained enormous currency and still has its adherents today. In truth, if oil had been our concern, we could have cut a deal with Saddam in a heartbeat. He would have readily given more in return for the lifting of sanctions and the threat of inspections. After the 2003 conflict, and as part of the UN resolution, we established a UN-administered framework for ensuring that money from oil production went to the Iraqis, and today, for the first time in decades, that money is being used to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure, schools and hospitals; and is one reason why GDP per head in Iraq in 2010 is three times that of Iraq in 2003.

At this point it is perhaps worth dealing with the very serious charge that sanctions were containing Saddam and would have continued to do so, thus eliminating the threat he posed. So, the argument goes, war was unnecessary.

The fact is that by 2001, the existing sanctions framework was disintegrating. It was because of this that discussion began in the UNSC, in mid-2001, for a replacement sanctions policy. Saddam had successfully conned people into believing sanctions were responsible for the appalling plight of his people. Sanctions were being breached. He was taking billions illicitly out of the oil revenues.

The discussion focused on so-called ‘smart sanctions’, which were to be more targeted. The argument that those ‘smart sanctions’ would have constrained Saddam simply doesn’t stand up to detailed scrutiny. The ‘smart sanctions’, as originally conceived, depended crucially on the surrounding countries to Iraq changing policy and preventing leakage of illegal goods and services, which was a major factor undermining the original framework. To this end, the initial draft of the new ‘smart sanctions’ policy contained strong prohibitions on such trade and other key restrictions on Saddam.

I doubt the sanctions would have been effective, even with these in place. But without them, there was no chance. As the discussion proceeded, several countries objected to the tougher provisions and they were dropped. In particular, the strong prohibitions on surrounding nations were taken out. As Kenneth Pollack wrote in his book on the subject,
The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq
, this left the policy neutered. He said there were seven preconditions for sanctions to work, and concluded that none of them would have happened.

No, right or wrong, we did it for the reasons given, and for the thinking that lay behind those reasons. So: what were they?

But for September 11, Iraq would not have happened. People sometimes take that as meaning I’m saying Iraq posed the same threat as Afghanistan, i.e. there was a link to al-Qaeda. I’m not. It is correct that some in the US system thought there was such a link. It is also correct that there was strong intelligence that al-Qaeda were allowed into Iraq by Saddam in mid-2002 (with severe consequences later) and that he was certainly prepared to support terrorism, as he did in paying money to families of Palestinian suicide bombers. But the assessment of the threat was not based on Saddam’s active sponsorship of terrorism or terrorist groups.

(There is an interesting sidebar to this. It later emerged that al-Zarqawi, the deputy to bin Laden, had come to Iraq in May 2002, had had meetings with senior Iraqis and established a presence there in October 2002. This intelligence has not been withdrawn, by the way. Probably we should have paid more attention to its significance, but we were so keen
not
to make a false claim about al-Qaeda and Saddam that we somewhat understated it, at least on the British side.)

The link with September 11 arose in this way. As I wrote earlier, the real shock of that attack in which 3,000 people died – the worst single terrorist attack in the history of the world – was that it indicated a mindset on al-Qaeda’s part of unlimited destruction, i.e. if it could have been 30,000 or 300,000, the better from their perspective. This was not a targeted terror attack to achieve a definable and realisable political objective; it was a declaration of all-out war in pursuit of a religiously motivated objective. It was therefore of a different order from anything the world had faced before.

At the same time, the issue of WMD had grown. Again, now that history has been rewritten so as to impose the worst possible construct on the action taken, it seems almost as if the whole issue of WMD was a convenient invention to justify a decision already taken. In fact, the issue of proliferation – and not just of nuclear but also of chemical and biological weapons – was a source of growing anxiety even before September 11. The various conventions and treaties in force were conspicuously lacking in enforceability. The activities of A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who brought Pakistan to nuclear status, were the subject of a vast amount of behind-the-scenes discussion, debate and concern in the intelligence community. His expertise was alleged to be for sale. We were pretty sure that some countries like Libya had active chemical or biological or nuclear programmes.

After September 11, the thinking was this: if these terrorist groups could acquire WMD capability, would they use it? On the evidence of September 11, yes. So how do we shut the trade down? How do we send a sufficiently clear and vivid signal to nations that are developing, or might develop, such capability to desist? How do we make it indisputable that continued defiance of the will of the international community will no longer be tolerated?

In this regard, there grew up a distinction that was neither helpful nor sensible. Often, and most of all in respect of Iraq, people would say: is it regime change you are after, or WMD? The true answer is that though in one sense these are separate questions, in another, of course, the two are connected. If, for example, Iran was a well-governed, democratic nation at ease with the world and was trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability, our attitude would be very different. We would still have concerns and would still oppose it, but the context of risk and threat would be dramatically altered. And the point is if they were democratic, they probably wouldn’t be seeking such capability. In other words, the appreciation of the danger is in part governed by the assessment of the regime. In a very profound sense it was in the nature of the Saddam regime that the ambitions for WMD were to be found, and the risks to be judged.

An example of this muddled thinking is to be found in the constant assertion that whereas the US had a policy of regime change, the UK had a policy to do with WMD. Therefore, it is said, we were on different sides of the argument and eventually the UK was pulled on to the US ground.