The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (16 page)

Pigott went on, said the inter-agency machinery wasn’t working, that there were constant arguments about who was in control, info ops not working, no clear understanding of how properly to use the coalition. He said there was a lot of praise in the American military for TB and the UK operation by comparison. TB said the Taliban would be feeling that they had a better chance than they thought as we go up to winter. He too did not like the idea of a pause because it indicated this was going on for a long time after and that would put pressure on the international coalition, including Pakistan who were getting worried that things were not going as they should.

He was still keen to step up the operations to take Mazar-e-Sharif. We kept being told it was about to fall. He said if nothing happens
between now and the half-time whistle, and by the time they get back on the pitch, we will be in difficulty. Pigott said we should not encourage half-time thinking. We need to be thinking of more harrying, looking at this not just in terms of bombs and territory but total domination. TB said it would look like the Taliban were tougher than we thought and the NA more of a ragbag than we thought. He said if we were the NA we would be thinking ‘Do these guys really know what they’re doing and might I be better off watching my own back?’ C said the US were using some pretty heavy power. That he had been at the CIA and seen live pictures of the C130 [gunship] attacks and that those big powerful drops had a big psychological impact. TB said he had used up a lot of political chips on Mazar-e-Sharif. Chirac and Schroeder both believed we would have taken it by now, but what were they using there? 2,000 horses! The SF guy said it was a mistake to think of the NA as an army in the conventional sense. He said it would take months to train them and even after that you wouldn’t want to risk your lives on them.

I said we had to get away from the idea that progress was only measured in bombs and territory, that we had to do more to shape the perception of events inside and outside. TB said GWB would soon surely be getting the fear in the pit of his stomach ‘that I’ve been having for the past two weeks’. The SF guy said Americans never lost a battle in Vietnam but they did lose a war. TB said again we had to strategise for the Americans. They were against using the Al Jazeera interview. It was classically the kind of thing that would give us a big media hit, and also unnerve them, but they were cautious.

TB was now more seized than ever that the information propaganda effort had become more important, not less. He summed up – first stage air superiority, better use of intelligence, reshape perception of progress, step up special forces operations and get alongside NA more, get them off the ground properly, start planning post-Taliban regime. He asked for a detailed list of everything these guys thought was needed to ensure success so that he could prepare another note for Bush. He and I went out for a walk in the garden. He said this was scary stuff but he couldn’t understand why the Americans weren’t focusing more on what needed to be done. Then the news came through that the US had hit an NA village. Another bloody mistake.

Spoke to Jack several times before
Frost
and we agreed it was time to crank up the line that the media had very short memories and
next to no humility about their predictions that had been wrong. We had to be getting the focus on the long term. Charles Guthrie agreed he would speak to Musharraf about making sure that our media centre out there would be allowed to operate properly. Tanya Joseph [Downing Street press officer] had volunteered for Pakistan and I briefed her before she left. TB sent through a nine-page note based on the meeting yesterday, setting out where he thought every aspect of the operation should be improved and tightened. Jim Wilkinson called, said that he had premises and was setting up units to cover liaison with us, central desk, terrorist funding, humanitarian, Internet, Grid [diary mechanism to co-ordinate announcements], Muslim opinion, key opinion formers, writers. They were on the right lines and said they would take as many of our people as they could get. The Americans were saying they would reconsider on the Al Jazeera interview if we could give them a real reason, but he was not sure.

I drove up to Wolverhampton for the Burnley game. The phone hardly stopped on the way up and it was difficult to talk, TB on re matters in general, Tessa re some of her concerns about how the families of September 11 victims had been handled, C re Al Jazeera and personnel for Islamabad, Guthrie and Geoff H re the same. TB spoke to Bush later and started to talk through some of the points in his note. Bush mentioned twice how grateful they had been that I had gone out there and was sorting out the media. DM felt it was in some ways the best call yet, because GWB sounded more mellow, keener to listen, more on the same wavelength again. But Rumsfeld was still going on about Iraq the whole time. We lost 3–0. I got home to do a note for us and the Americans on why I thought we should use the Al Jazeera interview.

The press was wobbling even more. I told an 8.30 meeting that it was time for us to get more robust, challenge the fundamental flakiness of the media. TB was at Chequers, in full cry about the need for improved rebuttal. I had a good meeting with Jamie Shea [director of information and press] and Mark Laity [senior spokesman] from NATO and put together a note for George Robertson trying to persuade him to give us more people. Paddy Feeny and Peter Reid [press attaché, UK Embassy] were already installed in Washington. Jim Wilkinson had pretty much got the thing up and running and we had our first properly functioning conference call. Another round of calls on a regular basis was another big chunk out of the diary
alongside all the meetings already in there, added to which today I was trying to draft TB’s Welsh Assembly speech for tomorrow. I had forty minutes on the phone with Piers Morgan [editor,
Daily Mirror
], who was basically driven by spite re what he saw as favoured treatment of the
Sun
. I had an hour with the South-East group of [Labour] MPs and was beginning to curse Robert Hill for having talked me into doing these groups, though the feedback was pretty good.

TB’s note had further galvanised people, and was useful to me in making clear around the system that the demand for this new centre of operations was his, not mine. I fell in the road and ripped my suit and badly bruised my leg running back from a meeting at the FCO. I was also late home and walked into another huge row after I told Fiona I would probably have to go on the trip to Israel. TB, as was clear from the office meeting, was also frustrated about the public services stuff. He had seen GB for a meeting on tax credits, now costing £4 billion.

TB had left by the time I got in to go to Bristol, then Wales for the speech. He had married my draft to his and it worked fine. I did the usual morning meeting then took one separately for all the people in the new CIC [Coalition Information Centre]. I felt things were starting to motor. [Lee] McLenny had arrived. [Mark] Laity was starting, though there were one or two concerns about how much he seemed to want to be the front man. I spoke to the Australian high commissioner [Michael L’Estrange] to get some of his people. I was disappointed that Karen Hughes had not yet been on one of the conference calls. I got Phil Bassett [head of Number 10 Research and Information Unit] to agree to go over to the FCO war room. I wanted him to be circulating agreed lines to take on all the difficult running issues to the three centres and relevant capitals. It would take a bit longer before we had a real grip, but I felt it was coming. I went over and did a pep talk, felt they were a good bunch. I said it was almost impossible to imagine us losing the military battle but perfectly feasible that we could lose the battle for hearts and minds. There was definitely a mood in the media, who were talking up anything that went wrong. Nick Soames [Conservative MP, former Armed Forces minister] called and said TB should make another Commons statement before long. He felt we were doing well and said we should ignore the press who were just ‘loathsome creeps’.

I was starting to motor again but was also agitated that actually getting the three centres moving was too slow. I was still pressing on the Al Jazeera [Bin Laden interview] front but Condi wanted to wait because the president was going to try to get the Qataris to make sure it wasn’t screened. I was sure it would get out there at some point, and as we knew the content, and the Al Jazeera worries, far better we got it out there first. I spoke to Karen about the idea of generating big women’s events to talk about how ghastly the Taliban were. Bush had written to TB today and amid the other stuff had said explicitly how grateful they were for what we had done to change the approach. So it was beginning to work through and hopefully within a day or two we would be properly up and running. Mark Laity wasn’t getting on with some of the others and slightly driving people mad.

TB was out in Syria, and got a total banjaxing by President Assad, which was a bit of a problem.
²⁰
Assad had basically said enough for it to be seen as lambasting our entire approach. TB was giving him the benefit of the doubt, he said it was as much a clash of media cultures as anything, which was the line we tried to push to the hacks when we saw them on the plane later. I wasn’t wholly sure why we felt it worth him going there in the first place. TB was in danger of getting hooked on the international stuff, having at first promised to take it easy, though Jonathan was probably right in pointing out that he was as well placed as anyone to do this, and that a lot of people round the world would rather see TB doing it, even on Bush’s behalf, than Bush himself.

We were starting to get press calls about the CIC, so I put together a line. [David] Yelland [editor,
Sun
] was pitching for an interview with Bush. I sent him a blind copy of the letter I sent to Karen making the case for it and he sent her the most over-the-top CV-type letter I have ever seen, but he was basically being helpful at the moment. Also the
Mirror
seemed to be a bit more positive on the domestic front. I was flying out to meet TB for the Jordan and Israel part of his trip and was hoping not to be noticed because they would want to use it as part of the Syria crisis jigsaw they were trying to put together after Assad’s big whack at him. When I spoke to TB about it before leaving for the airport, he seemed OK about it, said it had
actually been quite comic to stand there having been promised the guy was going to be supportive and then watch him deliver an attack totally lapped up by our lot.

On the flight out, I did a stack of notes with Alison [Blackshaw] on things we needed to do at the three centres, areas for brainstorming, note to Geoff H re helping the
News of the World
with a shock issue on the Taliban. We arrived in Jordan and were driven to the palace where we had last been for the king’s funeral.
²¹
TB was now talking about going back via Rome because there was a trilateral planned for Sunday and he was keen to keep Berlusconi vaguely on board.

Amman. TB got an absolute mauling in the press for the ‘Syrian humiliation’, ‘Disaster in Damascus’ etc., way over the top in some ways, but there we are. I went out for a run round some of the hills near the palace, and loved the sounds of the city starting to wake up, particularly the calls to prayer. TB once said if I was religious I would probably end up as an Islamic fundamentalist, and I think I know what he meant. TB was trying to put his best face on after yesterday, and was comical in his description of it – ‘It could have been worse, he could have taken out a gun and shot me’ – but we also had a long chat with Jonathan and Tom K, later with the ambassador, Edward Chaplin, re how to retrieve the situation. All we could do was emphasise his willingness to take risks, get his hands dirty, do whatever it took, to work up and see through a plan. There was clearly no point trying to make out Assad had been anything but unhelpful, though TB was still of the view it was as much a clash of political and media cultures as a deliberate act of hostility.

We left for breakfast with King Abdullah. In common with others we had spoken to, he was worried about the impact of Al Jazeera, which was developing real sway among the broader Muslim community. We talked about the need to get clerics out emphasising the un-Islamic nature of OBL’s words and deeds, and the need to reframe the argument from Islam vs West to moderate vs extreme forms of Islam. He was in two minds about whether we should engage more fully with Al Jazeera. He felt we had to be careful not to be exploited, or get to a situation where the more we did, the more they felt they had to represent ‘the street’. It was an interesting take. He said that looking at the latest unbroadcast OBL tape, the problem was he ‘looked the part’, and we should not underestimate his appeal. The original
plan had been not to do media but in the end we did, and got him to push the line about the need for moderate Muslims to defeat extremists in argument.

It was a useful and very friendly meeting, and he certainly seemed like someone who grasped what TB was trying to do and wanted to help. His father was a hard act to follow, but he cut it as king, even if he could come across as being quite nervous at times. I sensed he agonised a lot, and at points I saw similarities with Prince Charles, though Abdullah has raw power. We boarded the helicopters and set off for Jerusalem, on the way discussing with TB how to develop this argument about moderate vs extreme, and how to challenge the assumptions, how to win round those countries basically supporting extreme views even if not always extreme actions. While he was seeing Shimon Peres [Israeli foreign minister], the Al Jazeera OBL interview was already circulating amongst his supporters in Pakistan. So it was out. I got DM to call Condi, and I called Karen H. She was very stroppy about being woken, while George agreed with me that we should just go for it, just do it. I was furious because it was now twelve days since we first knew of this interview, we had had all this time to sort it, and it just didn’t happen. Here we were discussing how we were going to react WHEN it came out. The Americans were negotiating with the Qataris to suppress it, which was crazy, as all that would happen was that it would get spread underground and in its own way have even more impact, whereas I was sure if we had got it out in our terms, we could neutralise it in the Middle East and turn it to our advantage in the West. I was particularly fed up with it because it meant in a way I had lost the first battle to mount a serious media job on a tricky issue, and I was worried they didn’t really get it.