Proof that Blair has blood on his hands
Drawing on exclusive interviews with ministers, military chiefs and senior civil servants, top investigative writer TOM BOWER’S devastating dossier on Blair’s messianic mission to invade Iraq will horrify and enrage you
FOR a major new book on the former PM, top investigative reporter Tom Bower interviewed dozens of senior government officials, all the Cabinet Secretaries from the Blair years and successive junior ministers and Cabinet ministers. For the inside track on Blair’s war-mongering, he also interviewed dozens of senior military officers and all four Chiefs of the Defence Staff. In total, he spoke to 200 people. Today, in the second part of our exclusive series, he reveals the devastating truth he uncovered about the build-up to conflict in Iraq . . .
SOON after stepping into Downing Street as Britain youngest Prime Minister since 1812, the 43-year-old Tony Blair confided to a senior RAF officer about the extent of his knowledge of military affairs. ‘I know we have an Army, Navy and Air Force,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know any more.’ It was an astonishing admission for a man who now had his finger on the nuclear button. To overcome this deficiency, he opted to rely on General Charles Guthrie, the Chief of the Defence Staff until 2001, to educate him. ‘Call me Tony,’ said Blair as they sat on the sunlit terrace of Downing Street’s garden. ‘I shall call you Prime Minister,’ replied Guthrie. Blair, who had avoided serving in the cadet force at school, was receptive to the blood-and-guts aura the general had acquired over his years of service. For his part, Guthrie understood the young politician’s ambition to change the world, using Britain’s military as what Blair evangelically called ‘a force for good’.
The men soon bonded over a mutual enjoyment of tennis and agreement about a newspaper article Blair had written, outlining his doctrine. ‘If good men do nothing,’ he had written, adapting Edmund Burke, ‘evil prospers.’ Neither Blair nor Guthrie anticipated to what degree those seven words would transform British politics.
From sending British bombers over Iraq in 1998 (the first evening of which, Blair spent watching the Harrison Ford thriller Air Force One), to the quagmire of Afghanistan, via Kosovo and Sierra Leone, Blair’s zeal for committing British troops to action was unprecedented, especially for a PM who neither understood nor particularly liked the military.
But of all his military interventions, none was to prove so controversial as the second Iraq war and the decisions that took us there.
The official inquiry into those events — chaired by Sir John Chilcot — is still not complete, more than six years after it began hearing evidence. Its findings are due to be published later this year. But now, based on exclusive accounts by many of those involved, the full devastating truth of the countdown to war can be laid bare.
The picture it reveals is of a PM who, through his messianic determination to tackle ‘evil’, dragged Britain to war through wilful deception of senior officials, his Cabinet, Parliament — and his country.
September 11, 2001: The day that changed the world
THE day two hijacked planes crashed into New York’s twin towers changed everything for Tony Blair. In the battle between good and evil, he decided, his responsibility was to embark on a worldwide crusade to save civilisation. ‘We shall support America in anything they do,’ he excitedly told a meeting of ministers and the military.
Five days later, President George Bush informed Blair in a phone call that Al Qaeda — now known to be responsible for 9/11 — had possible links with Iraq.
Could it be true? As Blair busily flew around Europe, conferring with leaders, he was accompanied by MI6 chief Richard Dearlove, who was already convinced — without any concrete evidence — that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
A suicide bomber, he told Blair, might even trigger a nuclear explosion in London. The warning sank in. Dearlove quickly became ‘unusually close’ to Blair, according to shocked officials.
Late November
SEEMINGLY out of the blue, Blair told his foreign affairs advisers: ‘I’d like a strategy paper on Iraq.’ The seeds for an invasion were already being sown as officials searched for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan.
The White House noted that Blair was more hawkish than its President. And at least one British military chief was seriously disturbed.
Fearing an invasion of Afghanistan would end in a quagmire like Vietnam, Admiral Mike Boyce — the newly appointed Chief of the Defence Staff — used one of his regular meetings with Blair to explain the pitfalls of invading distant Muslim countries.
The Prime Minister nodded politely. His instinct, he replied, convinced him that Afghanis would embrace Western-style democracy as Iraqis would later once Saddam had gone. Crucially, Blair already secretly supported ‘regime change’ in Iraq, which he knew raised legal obstacles. Iraq’s alleged possession of WMDs would become his smokescreen to overcome them.
Frustrated by the PM’s disregard of history and the limitations of our Armed Forces, the admiral fired a broadside at No 10 with a speech to a military audience in London.
Bombing, he warned, would not defeat terrorism but would radicalise the Muslim world against the West. A conventional invasion of Afghanistan, and by implication Iraq, would fail to win ‘hearts and minds’ and would drag on for ten years.
‘The world,’ he said, ‘cannot afford non- states, black-hole states or failed states because such states breed terrorism. Therefore, we have to attack the causes, not the symptoms, of terrorism.’
It would be in Britain’s national interest, he suggested, for Blair to lay down red lines in his relationship with America and not be unequivocally associated with Bush’s putative adventure.
The instant reaction from an irritated Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defence Secretary, was to ridicule Boyce’s prediction that allied troops would still be fighting in Afghanistan the following summer. America’s high-tech war, he said, would crush the Taliban within weeks, and his country’s soldiers would all return home before the spring.
Blair was also irritated. He did not understand the admiral’s argument, but he did appreciate that annoying Rumsfeld was not in Britain’s interest. ‘Why do you have to be so gloomy?’ Alastair Campbell would later ask Boyce. ‘So half full?’
The admiral looked at him with contempt. ‘I don’t tell people what they like to hear,’ he replied, describing Campbell later as ‘ irrelevant . . . he was trivial, not interested in real outcomes.’
December 4: A secret letter is sent to George Bush
BLAIR sent Dearlove and his foreign affairs adviser David Manning to Washington DC to hand over a personal letter to Bush, setting out his own ideas about ‘regime change’ in Iraq. None of the Prime Minister’s other senior officials was shown what he had written.
While in Washington, Dearlove — who knew he had Blair’s support — met CIA chiefs to discuss how to remove Saddam.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister shut the door on anyone who
advised caution. He excluded anyone who could have warned him about the complexities of the Middle East’s history. No one was asked for an independent analysis of Iraq — which Saddam ruled by controlling irreconcilable divisions between religions, tribal clans and family loyalties.
Nor did anyone warn him that Dearlove’s sources were questionable. That was up to the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett, but he would later say: ‘We didn’t see it as our job to second-guess the agencies on the reliability of their sources.’
As for Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, he was already being frozen out. Reports from the UK ambassador in Washington were now by-passing him and being sent directly to Downing Street.
Unusually, Blair was also encouraging Dearlove to bring raw intelligence straight to him. Not that there was much of it, as the intelligence chief lacked any sources close to Saddam. He could only speculate, drawing on second-hand and, more usually, unverifiable third-hand informants with questionable motives.
Whenever Dearlove arrived to brief the Prime Minister, Cabinet Secretary Richard Wilson was excluded. By flouting the tradition for a senior civil servant always to be present at meetings with intelligence officials or the military, Blair abandoned an essential safety net.
December 28
BUSH received a memo from General Tommy Franks, outlining plans for an invasion of Iraq. Five days later, he made his ‘axis of evil’ speech, identifying Saddam as an architect of international terror.
Keen to join the battle against evil, Blair resolved to keep his own plans secret. Even his Cabinet Secretary wasn’t told the Cabinet Office had been asked to prepare an Options Paper on Iraq — which included plans for British troops to invade. As cover, Blair asked MI6 to intensify their search for WMDs.
Blair keeps Cabinet in the dark: March, 2002
BRITISH intelligence chiefs admitted that the intelligence on WMDs was ‘sporadic and patchy’. In fact, they’d failed to find a scrap of reliable information.
The British ambassador in Washington, Christopher Meyer, was briefed by David Manning that the PM favoured ‘ regime change’ — and failure wasn’t an option. Meyer was surprised. Blair, he reflected, had become ‘more neo-con than the Americans’.
Suspicious of Blair’s messianic ambitions, Commons leader Robin
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