A Journey (70 page)

The first time we got to grips with it properly was on my visit to Crawford, George’s ranch in Texas, in April 2002. It is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, 1,600 acres with a house and guest house and various outbuildings. As usual, I turned up mob-handed, with Grandma and Leo in tow. It was all very odd. Cherie used to like the family to travel with me, but frankly when I was working, I preferred to be on my own and undistracted, able to concentrate entirely on the matter in hand, not having to worry about Leo feeling bored, Grandma complaining or making sure everyone got on together! So I was never at my best on these mixed business/social occasions, alternately irritable and intense.

However, George and Laura made us incredibly welcome, far beyond normal host duty. The weather, unbelievably and to my chagrin, was quite cold. I had assumed Texas was pretty much sunshine all year round (wrong, I know) and had been looking forward to it after the British winter. It was also rare for me to give up a weekend at home. I tried to keep those free of official functions unless absolutely necessary. However, this was an exception and I figured that the best way to get inside George’s mind on this was to do it out of Washington or even Camp David.

From my standpoint, by this time I had resolved in my own mind that removing Saddam would do the world, and most particularly the Iraqi people, a service. Though I knew regime change could not be our policy, I viewed a change with enthusiasm, not dismay. In my Chicago speech of 1999, I had enunciated the new doctrine of a ‘responsibility to protect’, i.e. that a government could not be free grossly to oppress and brutalise its citizens. I had put it into effect in Kosovo and Sierra Leone.

That said, because of the difficulties such an act required, because war should be the last not the first resort, I had come to a firm conclusion that we could only do it on the basis of non-compliance with UN resolutions. Tyrant though he was, Saddam could not be removed on the basis of tyranny alone.

In later times another myth came to light, based on observations by the then UK ambassador to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer. He alleged that while at Crawford, I had pledged ‘in blood’ that I would support America, had signed up for regime change and then articulated it in a speech in Texas the day after Crawford, for George Bush Snr.

Actually, he was never present at the Bush meeting; wasn’t even in the same building; I made no such commitment – in fact I emphasised the UN route; and my speech in Texas was entirely consistent with my other public pronouncements.

But there it is – the myth, once given birth to, becomes the reality.

However, I was clear about two things. The first was that Saddam had to be made to conform to the UN resolutions, that the years of obstruction and non-cooperation had to end. The second was that Britain had to remain, as a country, ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with America. This is not as crude or unthinking a policy as it sounds. It didn’t mean we sacrificed our interest to theirs; or subcontracted out our foreign policy. It meant that the alliance between our two nations was a vital strategic interest and, as far as I was concerned, a vital strategic asset for Britain.

It implied we saw attacks on the US as attacks on us, which I did. It argued for an attitude that did see us genuinely as at war, together, with a common interest in a successful outcome. I believed then, as I do now, that the US could not afford to lose this battle, that our job as an ally who faced a common threat should be to be with them in their hour of need. I know all this can be made to sound corny or even, as some would have it, self-deceiving in terms of our effect on US decision-making. I was well aware that ultimately the US would take its own decisions in its own interests. But I was also aware that in the new world taking shape around us, Britain and Europe were going to face a much more uncertain future without America. As the defeat of Communism showed – and let’s be clear, without America, it would not have been defeated – our alliance with the US mattered. My experience in needing Bill Clinton to act on Kosovo, which he did and which arguably saved the Balkans, had shown that we had recent and not merely historical reasons for knowing our need of America. So when they had need of us, were we really going to refuse; or, even worse, hope they succeeded but could do it without us? I reflected and felt the weight of an alliance and its history, not oppressively but insistently, a call to duty, a call to act, a call to be at their side, not distant from it, when they felt imperilled.

At the press conference in the Crawford school library, with the flags of the US and UK behind us, we delivered a strong message. It was basically: change the regime attitude on WMD inspections, or face the prospect of changing regime.

Behind closed doors, however, our talk was more nuanced. We shared the analysis about the nature of the Saddam government, its risk to security and also the wider problem of the region. My concern then and subsequently was to locate the question of Saddam in the broader context of the Middle East as a region in transition. Even then, though less clearly than today, I saw the disparate issues as essentially part of the same picture. Therefore I made a major part of my pitch to George the issue of the Israel–Palestine peace process. To me this was the indispensable soft-power component to give equilibrium to the hard power that was necessary if Saddam were to be removed.

That process was in a mess. Following the intifada of 2000, there had been a terrible passage of events with Palestinians engaged in terrorist attacks and severe Israeli retaliation resulting in a vastly increased weight of occupation. The process so near to breakthrough (or so it seemed) at the tail end of the Clinton administration was now in total disrepair. Patching it up and putting it back on track was, for me, utterly crucial to creating the conditions in which the tougher, harder measures could be taken without a revolt on the Arab streets and upset across the Muslim world. Already, just six months after the atrocity of September 11, the appetite for action was waning and enthusiasm for any sort of military confrontation minimal, to say the least.

Days before leaving for Crawford, I had had a meeting at Chequers with senior army officers. The meeting was not specifically in preparation for Crawford, but to kick around the basic questions about what military action might entail. There had been discussion about whether our aim was focused on WMD or regime change. I had emphasised that the two were linked, and also that it was hard at this point to say that the nature of the WMD threat specific to Iraq had changed demonstrably in the last few years. It was the assessment of risk that had.

The new Chief of Defence Staff, Sir Mike Boyce, a submariner and former navy chief, and Sir Anthony Pigott, a general who had studied the military options, gave a presentation. They warned it could be a bloody fight and take a long time to remove Saddam. The US were engaged in preliminary planning, but it was hard to read where they were going with it. We needed to get alongside that planning and be part of it. Of course, as ever, this presented a dilemma: if you wanted to be part of the planning, you had to be, at least in principle, open to being part of the action. Early on, because I could see that this might have to end with Saddam’s forcible removal, I resolved to be part of the planning. From around April, we were then fairly closely involved even in the early stages of US thinking.

None of this meant that war was certain. It wasn’t and indeed a constant part of the interaction between George and myself through those months, probably up to around November, was acute anxiety that since we were planning for the possible, that meant, in the media mind, it was inevitable. We had the basic concepts ironed out: Saddam had to comply with UN resolutions and let the inspectors back in; he couldn’t, on this occasion, be allowed to mess about – his compliance had to be total; and if he refused, we were going to be in a position where we were capable of removing him. So the diplomacy and the planning proceeded along separate but plainly at certain points connected tracks.

It made domestic politics, however, highly uncomfortable. Naturally people were reading the reports, assuming everything was decided and taking positions accordingly. If we said war was not agreed, they asked if we were planning; if we accepted we were doing some form of planning, that meant war was indeed therefore agreed. The notion of a contingency was too subtle. And, to be fair, many of the noises emanating from parts of the US system did suggest that there was only one direction in which policy should go.

We flew back from Crawford with some really tough thinking to do. I made a statement on the Middle East peace process, following George’s commitment to me to re-engage with it. We had the Budget to get settled, on which I was having meetings with Gordon, on the whole reasonably satisfactorily. We had finally agreed a policy on the rise in National Insurance tax to pay for the NHS.

Around this time, also, and for the first time since we had been in government, relations with the press finally really soured. The frustration of the right wing at the state of the Tory Party was boiling over into ever more personal and vitriolic assaults on me, any passing minister who looked vulnerable and on those who worked closely with me.

We had the extraordinary saga of the Queen Mother’s funeral. The Queen Mum had died at the ripe old age of 101. The nation was generally sad at her passing. She had been such a familiar and solid British figure over the decades, much loved and remembered for her stoicism and grit during the war, when she insisted on staying in London through the Blitz.

The arrangements for a big state event such as this are always complicated. She was going to lie in state in Westminster Hall for a week, before the actual funeral service. From my office, Clare Sumner, a civil servant and a lovely, capable and very straight young woman, got in touch with Black Rod, a retired general, about the protocol. For some reason unbeknown to me, there had been an issue over what I did or where I stood or some such (I can’t even recall the detail it was so trivial), which had been resolved without any problem, so Clare thought, and she agreed to do exactly as Black Rod wanted. I never even knew of the issue until afterwards.

The
Telegraph
,
Spectator
and the
Mail
on Sunday
then ran stories about how I and Alastair (who had known absolutely nothing of it either) had interfered with the Queen Mother’s funeral, caused consternation and distress, how disrespectful to muscle in, etc. All complete rubbish. For once, and stupidly, I took it seriously and we decided to go to the Press Complaints Commission. It was the last time I made that mistake. To be fair, the person who was the full-time executive was perfectly sensible, but of course the PCC panel was made up of the editors. Then we were told that the source was very close to Black Rod. So the PCC felt they couldn’t adjudicate. But it left a bitter taste.

Then Steve Byers, who had been a good minister, decided to resign. He had endured weeks of constant battering, being called a liar and a cheat and a villain and the rest, over his refusal to sack his press aide Jo Moore (who had sent an email on September 11 saying it was a good time to ‘bury’ bad news), and various issues to do with the railways. There was absolutely no justification for his resignation but I could tell he had had enough. You have to be superhuman or maybe subhuman to endure it all, with your family reading it and your friends pitying and your enemies crowing, and I could tell he was just shot through. The reshuffle gave me a chance to bring in David Miliband as a minister, barely a year after his election as an MP.

We had a Cabinet in June at which John Prescott launched a scathing attack on Peter Mandelson and others who, he said, were upsetting the balance between New Labour and Old. I hit back pretty hard and said it was a difficult time but that’s what government’s like and we couldn’t, as I think I said at the time, ‘wet our knickers’ every time we hit a rough period.

Anyway, you get the picture: the usual mix of the historic, the transient and the trivial. And throughout, now an insistent and pervasive backdrop, Iraq and what we were going to do about it.

Iraq will be looked back on for many reasons, but one interesting study is around the fact that it was the first war fought on the ground in the new era of transparency and twenty-four-hour media. Literally every day, stories would appear moving the debate this way and that and in line with developing patterns of reporting, always hardening speculation into fact. At times we would not be sure whether we were driving the agenda or being driven by it. On holiday in France in August 2002, I took a call from George, who was equally frustrated by the fact that everyone assumed we had made up our mind and that the march to war was inexorable.

However, in one sense it was not surprising that they felt this way. At a meeting just before the holiday towards the end of July, Mike Boyce made it pretty clear that he thought the US had decided on it, bar a real change of heart by Saddam. Geoff Hoon, then Defence Secretary, described the options – basically for a generated start, i.e. slow build-up; or a running start, i.e. fast-moving; and also as to where the troops would move in, at that time the preference being for them to come in from the north. So it’s impossible not to read the accounts of the meetings during that time without an assumption of a decision already taken.

But here is the difference between everyone else and the final decision-taker. Everyone else can debate and assume; only one person decides. I knew at that moment that George had not decided. He had, as I say, concluded a conceptual framework in which the pivotal concept was that Saddam had to come fully into compliance and disarm, but he had taken no final position on the way to make him.