Broken Vows (36 page)

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 relationship. 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.

Sullenness and a sense of crisis pervaded Downing Street. The chance of a second UN resolution was dead, and there was no likelihood of neutralising the opposition within the party. War was unavoidable.

‘You don’t have to do it,’ Manning told Blair.

‘No, David, I really do have to do this,’ came the reply.

‘I was wrong on every count,’ Manning would later admit, referring to his anticipation that the conflict could be delayed.

Either complicit or cowardly, Manning did not separate himself from the decision. Additional relief came for Blair after he persuaded Short not to resign. Her unique skills in managing humanitarian aid in Iraq after the war, he urged, demanded that she remain. The time and passion he devoted to an awkward woman suggested that the cause was no longer freedom but Blair himself. On the edge, he was focused on his survival.

Before Goldsmith returned from America, the lawyer let it be known that he would change his advice. He now said that Blair’s global dash to produce the second resolution was unnecessary. The British people, Blair would write, had ‘assumed wrongly’ that the government needed a second resolution. He forgot to mention that he was the author of that assumption, until Goldsmith changed his mind.

This new advice was given to Blair on 14 March. Goldsmith’s legal duty was to give his revised opinion to the whole Cabinet. Instead,
in what was interpreted as a clear breach of the ministerial code, he sent his new document directly to Blair, whom, he would later say, he regarded as his exclusive ‘client’. Blair showed the full thirteen-page version only to Hoon and Straw, while the Cabinet and Boyce were given a nine-paragraph précis that omitted the conflicting legal arguments. Based on previous UN resolutions, wrote Goldsmith, ‘Authority to use force against Iraq exists’ if Blair possessed ‘strong factual grounds’ that Iraq was in ‘material breach’ of the previous resolution. Fortuitously, Dearlove, citing Curveball’s latest offering, had produced those ‘factual grounds’. Goldsmith’s somersault persuaded Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a Foreign Office lawyer, to resign in protest.

To ensure that no minister complained about being misled, Blair held four unscheduled meetings to keep ministers onside. His Cabinet was shackled. The record would show that it had discussed Iraq twenty-four times over the previous year (including a gap of six months during which it was not debated), but without any of the authoritative papers prepared by Whitehall’s experts there was no ammunition to raise objections. To Blair’s satisfaction, at the formal Cabinet meeting on the eve of war on 17 March no minister ‘rose to the level of events’, as Roy Jenkins observed, and asked Goldsmith to explain why his advice had fundamentally changed since 31 January. Six years after Blair dismissed Robin Butler’s assumption that the system of collective government would continue, his docile ministers approved war without asking for the truth. The only person with the power to stop Britain’s involvement was Gordon Brown, but like Blair he was convinced about the importance of the special relationship with America.

Despite his dislike of the Commons, Blair could be an unrivalled performer at the Dispatch Box. In defence of war, his passion flowed. To neutralise his Labour opponents, he recited Saddam’s repeated deception of the UN inspectors. And then came the call to arms. With trembling hands but a steady voice, he asked, ‘Who will celebrate and who will weep if we take our troops back from the Gulf now? I believe passionately that we must hold firm.’

Persuasive and courteous, his battle cry was Churchillian: ‘This is the time … to show that we will stand up for what we know to be right, to show that we will confront the tyrannies and dictatorships that put our lives at risk, to show at the moment of decision that we have the courage to do the right thing.’ He was assured of the Tories’ support but was opposed by 139 Labour MPs, one of the biggest revolts by a governing party in parliamentary history. In the rebels’ opinion, the sincerity of Blair’s opinions did not make them less dangerous. Several dissidents were reminded of a play review in the Fettes magazine, in which the school was described as being ‘very fortunate in having so experienced an actor as Blair for the central figure’.

The majority for war was 263 votes. Blair looked relieved, the Tories cheered and Margaret Beckett was seen to cry. The prime minister’s brilliant oratory had won a majority in the House but had deeply divided the country. Among the outraged was Fiona Millar, who chose the start of the bombing campaign to announce to Blair that she intended to resign.

Britain’s war was being directed from Northwood, an hour’s drive from Downing Street. To the military’s surprise, Blair never visited the headquarters. ‘He’s not collegiate,’ General Walker noted. ‘Maggie even had the chiefs down to Chequers. This prime minister doesn’t want to meet them.’

Just as he rarely visited Whitehall departments or Parliament, Blair was uninterested in the machinery of war. Until WMDs were found and Saddam overthrown, he preferred to summon Boyce and Walker into the intimacy of his office. Daily, Powell gathered the ad hoc group for morning meetings, excluding the gossip-prone Cabinet critics. Daily, assessment papers and reports were prepared by the Cabinet Office and MoD, but few appeared to be read. To his military visitors, Blair displayed emotion over soldiers’ deaths and frustration at his powerlessness to make things happen. ‘Have they found the WMDs?’ he would ask Boyce every day. Daily, he was disappointed by the reply.

Walker would leave Blair’s office perplexed. ‘I couldn’t work out why
the UK was not on a war footing,’ he recalled. ‘No decisions were taken during the meetings. Ad hoc meetings were ad hoc in name and ad hoc in nature. We never seemed able to grasp this slippery bar of soap which was Iraq properly.’