In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the Prime Minister continually stated that his objective was the disarmament of Iraq as laid down in Security Council resolutions, and not regime change.  For example, on 25 February 2003, he told the House of Commons:

“I detest his [Saddam Hussein’s] regime – I hope most people do – but even now, he could save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully.”

In fact, a year earlier, the Prime Minister had already offered his wholehearted support to President Bush in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

This is proved by documents leaked to the Daily Telegraph last September, which are now in the public domain.  Facsimiles of them are on my website (see links below).

The story begins …

“I said [to Condoleeza Rice] that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States [my emphasis].”

These are the words of Sir David Manning in a memo to the Prime Minister on 14 March 2002, when he was the Prime Minister’s Foreign Policy adviser.  Sir David was reporting to the Prime Minister on discussions in Washington with Condoleezza Rice, who was then President Bush’s National Security adviser.

In other words, in March 2002 the US administration was given an assurance that the Prime Minister was unflinching in his commitment to regime change in Iraq, and not merely to the disarmament as prescribed by Security Council resolutions.  Since Sir David remained the Prime Minister’s Foreign Policy adviser (and was subsequently promoted to be British Ambassador to Washington) after writing this memo, it can be taken for granted that Sir David had accurately transmitted the Prime Minister’s view to the US administration.

The Prime Minister’s unflinching commitment to regime change in March 2002 is confirmed by another memo, this one from the British Ambassador in Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, to Sir David himself.  This reported on a conversation with Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defense Secretary, on 17 March 2002.  The next day, Sir Christopher wrote:

“I opened by sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice. We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option.  It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe [my emphasis].”

Parliament not told

Of course, neither Parliament nor the public was told at the time, or ever, that “we backed regime change”.  On the contrary, on many occasions in the following 12 months, the Prime Minister specifically denied that “we backed regime change”.

For example, when he launched the September dossier in the House of Commons on 24 September 2002, he was asked if regime change was his objective.  He replied:

“Regime change in Iraq would be a wonderful thing. That is not the purpose of our action; our purpose is to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction …”

Speaking on Radio Monte Carlo on 14 November 2002, he said:

“So far as our objective, it is disarmament, not regime change – that is our objective … .  I have got no doubt either that the purpose of our challenge from the United Nations is disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, it is not regime change.”

On 25 February 2003, he told the House of Commons that Saddam Hussein could stay in power if he gave up his proscribed weapons:

“I detest his regime – I hope most people do – but even now, he could save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully.”

On 18 March 2003, in proposing the resolution for war, he told the House of Commons:

“I have never put the justification for action as regime change. We have to act within the terms set out in resolution 1441 – that is our legal base.”

These memos prove that the Prime Minister’s misleading of Parliament on Iraq was much more fundamental than merely exaggerating intelligence (which has been meticulously documented by Glen Rangwala and Dan Plesch in A Case to Answer).  They prove that his objective from the outset was regime change and that he dressed it up as disarmament in order to manipulate Parliament (in particular, the Parliamentary Labour Party) into supporting military action against Iraq.

The impression was given in the autumn of 2002 that the Prime Minister had persuaded President Bush to modify his position from regime change to disarmament.  In reality, from the outset he shared the President’s objective of regime change, but persuaded the President to co-operate in dressing it up as disarmament.

Is there any doubt that disarmament was merely the central element in a clever plan to manage the press, Parliament and public opinion into supporting military action with the objective of changing the regime in Iraq?

This was a deception on a par with Eden's prior to Suez.

US/UK blocks inspection

There was a good deal of circumstantial evidence in the months prior to military action that the US/UK were not going to settle for disarmament as prescribed by Security Council resolutions.  This began with their refusal to allow inspection to restart in September 2002.

On 16 September 2002, Iraq stated its willingness to admit UN weapons inspectors.  Up to then, the US/UK had been clamouring for Iraq to do just that.  But, when Iraq said Yes, the US/UK refused to take Yes for an answer.  Other members of the Security Council, for example, France and Russia, were in favour of inspection beginning right away.  But the US/UK opposed that.  See, for example, the BBC report here.

On 19 September 2002, US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, gave evidence to the House of Representatives International Relations Committee and was asked what the administration would do “if, within the Security Council, some of the permanent representatives, France, Russia, China, would insist on proceeding with inspections under the current existing UN regime”.  He replied:

“We would oppose it.  We would oppose it.  …  And if somebody tried to move the team in now, we would find ways to thwart that.”

Around this time, the Prime Minister was warning the British public of a growing danger from Iraq’s proscribed weapons.  On 24 September 2002, he told the House of Commons:

“… [Saddam Hussein’s] chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programme is not an historic left-over from 1998. The inspectors are not needed to clean up the old remains. His weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing.”

Despite this, he and his friends in Washington were at the same time preventing the inspectors re-entering Iraq.  This was not the action of someone committed to disarming Iraq by inspection.

The excuse given for this apparently bizarre behaviour was that the inspection regime prescribed in existing Security Council resolutions wasn’t tough enough and that there must be a new resolution laying down tougher conditions.  This makes no sense, since the presence of inspectors on the ground, even with restrictions on their movement, would obviously render the production and deployment of proscribed weapons more difficult.  As such, it would have been some form of constraint on what the Prime Minister said was the growing threat from Iraq’s proscribed weapons.  Yet, the Prime Minister worked to stop this constraint being applied.

The sensible course of action in these circumstances was to send the inspectors in as soon as possible and to lay down tougher conditions later, if necessary.  Because the US/UK prevented this happening, two months’ inspection time was lost – and Iraq had two more months to produce and deploy proscribed weapons, if we are to believe the Prime Minister.

Stopping inspectors entering Iraq in September 2002 made no sense if the objective was the disarmament of Iraq by inspection, especially since the danger from its proscribed weapons was allegedly growing.

Why block inspection?

So what were the US/UK up to in blocking inspection?  The clue is in Sir David Manning’s memo to the Prime Minister, where he writes that “renwed refused [sic] by Saddam to accept unfettered inspections would be a powerful argument” for military action.  In similar vein, Sir Christopher Meyer reported that, having assured Paul Wolfowitz that “we backed regime change”, he told him:

“The US could go it alone if it wanted to.  But if it wanted to act with partners, there had to be a strategy for building support for military action against Saddam.  I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors … ”

The hope was that the Security Council could be persuaded to prescribe an inspection regime that was so unpalatable to Saddam Hussein that he would refuse to allow inspectors in – which would, in Sir David’s words, be “a powerful argument” for military action.  In other words, Plan A was that UN inspectors would never enter Iraq again, that Saddam Hussein would refuse them entry, and by so doing provide a casus belli.

This strategy was obviously incompatible with allowing inspection to restart once Iraq gave permission on 16 September 2002, and therefore the US/UK blocked it.

Wrongfooting Saddam

In furtherance of the strategy to “wrongfoot Saddam”, the US/UK attempted to get the Security Council to pass a resolution which

(a)   laid down conditions which Iraq couldn’t possibly accept, and

(b)   clearly authorised military action in that event without further recourse to the Council.

The original US/UK draft of what eventually became resolution 1441 was geared to achieve this objective: specifically, it

(a)   allowed the US/UK to put their troops on the ground in Iraq as part of the inspection process, and

(b)   in the event of a breach of the resolution, it authorised UN member states “to use all necessary means to restore international peace and security in the area”.

Had the resolution been passed in its original form, and had Iraq refused to admit inspectors, a US/UK invasion of Iraq would have been unambiguously authorised by the Security Council.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, they were forced by France and others to modify their draft 1441 significantly

(a)   to soften the inspection regime demanded of Iraq (so that it wasn’t significantly different to that prescribed in earlier Security Council resolutions), and

(b)   to remove the authorisation of use of force, without further reference to the Security Council, in the event of Iraq’s non-compliance – the inspectors were required to report breaches of the resolution to the Security Council, which would then convene “in order to consider the situation”.

The US/UK had to accept these amendments, otherwise they would have suffered the humiliation of failing to get a new resolution.

Thanks to France and others, resolution 1441, passed on 8 November 2002, was acceptable to Iraq, which then allowed inspectors in.  The US/UK were denied an immediate casus belli.

Not co-operating fully?

Another had to be found: it had to be that Iraq was not co-operating fully with the inspectors.  It was difficult to convince the world of this, since Iraq allowed unfettered access to all sites, and even allowed the destruction of Al Samoud missiles that were only marginally beyond the permitted range, if that.  In the face of this evidence of Iraq's co-operation, it wasn’t surprising that the US/UK failed to convince 11 out of the 15 members of the Security Council to support military action because Iraq wasn’t co-operating.  As a result, they ended up taking military action against the will of the Security Council, in order, they said, to enforce the will of the Security Council.

By March 2003, after 3 months’ inspection, no significant quantities of proscribed agents or weapons had been found (apart from the Al Samoud missiles, which were in the process of being destroyed).  All of the sites named in the September dossier as possibly being used for agent/weapons production were visited by inspectors in December 2002 and January 2003.  They found no evidence of current, or recent, production activity.  Other sites, nominated to the inspectors by the CIA and MI6, were also visited with the same result.

Faced with this lack of evidence that Iraq possessed proscribed weapons, the Prime Minister’s response was to publish the largely plagiarised February dossier, entitled Iraq - its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation.  Its purpose was to explain that the UN inspectors’ failure to find any proscribed material was due to Iraq’s hiding it, rather than to its non-existence.

The Butler Report understandably expresses “surprise that policy-makers and the intelligence community did not, as the generally negative results of UNMOVIC inspections became increasingly apparent, re-evaluate in early-2003 the quality of the intelligence” (paragraph 472).

A Prime Minister committed to the disarmament of Iraq by inspection would have ordered such a re-evaluation.  He might even have ordered the intelligence community to explain to him again why they didn’t believe Saddam Hussein’s son-in–law, Kamel Hussein, when, after his defection in August 1995, he told UNSCOM (as well as the CIA and MI6) that all Iraq’s proscribed agents and weapons were destroyed on his orders in 1991 (as has now been confirmed by the Iraq Survey Group).

But the last thing a Prime Minister committed to regime change wanted to hear in March 2003 was any suggestion that Iraq had no proscribed weapons.  That would have removed his excuse for taking military action.

Leaked documents

The memos from Manning to Blair and from Meyer to Manning were among a group of six official documents from March 2002, leaked to the Daily Telegraph in September 2004.  They were the subject of Daily Telegraph articles on 18 September 2004.  Facsimiles of all these documents are now in the public domain. In chronological order, they are:

(1)   Iraq: Options Paper, prepared by the Overseas & Defence Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, dated 8 March, see here

(2)   Iraq: Legal Background, prepared by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Legal Department, dated 8 March, see here

(3)   Memo from Sir David Manning to the Prime Minister, dated 14 March, see here

(4)   Memo from Sir Christopher Meyer to Sir David Manning, dated 18 March, see here

(5)   Memo from Peter Ricketts, Political Director, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, to the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, dated 22 March, see here

(6)   Memo from Jack Straw to the Prime Minister, dated 25 March, see here

As its name implies, the Options Paper sets out the options regarding Iraq, one of which is regime change by military invasion.  It was one of what the Butler report (paragraph 610) called “excellent quality papers” written by officials on Iraq, which were never discussed in Cabinet or in Cabinet Committee.

The contents of the four memos reinforce the view that by March 2002 the Prime Minister was determined to support the US in effecting regime change by military means.  There is no discussion in them of the pros and cons of regime change, or of Britain’s taking part in the military action alongside the US to effect regime change.  The underlying assumption is that the US is going to take military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and that Britain will take part in this action.  The central concern in the memos is one of presentation, that is, how to dress up the process in order to secure public and parliamentary support for military action.

Sir Christopher says he lied

Sir Christopher Meyer addressed a meeting of the Politics Society at Peterhouse College, Cambridge on 8 February 2005, and the passage from his memo about backing regime change was quoted to him.  He didn’t deny the authenticity of the quotation, but said that there was such a thing as diplomacy which involved saying one thing to one person and something else to another [Mike Lewis, private communication].

So, we are supposed to believe that Sir Christopher (and Sir David Manning) told the US administration that the Prime Minister “backed regime change”, when all the Prime Minister ever wanted was that Iraq disarm, in accordance with Security Council resolutions.  And he told this lie with the authority of the Prime Minister, otherwise he (and Sir David) would have been dismissed from their posts.  Unfortunately for Sir Christopher, this is not borne out by the rest of his memo (or by the other memos), which speak of the disarmament issue, not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end, the end being to gain support in Britain and other states for military action against Iraq.

Peter Ricketts’ problem

In his memo to Jack Straw, Peter Ricketts identified the lack of evidence of a growing threat from Iraq’s proscribed weapons as a “problem”, which would make it difficult to secure this support.  He wrote:

“The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programmes, but our tolerance of them post-11 September. …

“But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW fronts: the programmes are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.

“US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qa'eda is so far frankly unconvincing.

“To get public and Parliamentary support for military options we have to be convincing that

    - the threat is so serious/imminent that it is worth sending our troops to die for;

    - it is qualitatively different from the threat posed by other proliferators who are closer to achieving nuclear capability (including Iran).”

The existence of this “problem” is confirmed by the JIC assessment of 15 March 2002, which didn’t suggest that Iraq’s proscribed weapons constituted a growing threat:

“Intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missile programmes is sporadic and patchy. [...] From the evidence available to us, we believe Iraq retains some production equipment, and some small stocks of CW agent precursors, and may have hidden small quantities of agents and weapons. [...] There is no intelligence on any BW agent production facilities but one source indicates that Iraq may have developed mobile production facilities.” (Butler report, Annex B)

However, the Prime Minister had a solution to the “problem”: it was to say that Iraq had lots of terrifying “weapons of mass destruction” and was an awful threat to his neighbours and the wider world.  The fact that this was not justified by the available intelligence did not appear to concern him.  A couple of weeks after Ricketts identified this “problem” to Jack Straw, the Prime Minister told NBC news on 4 April 2002:

“We know that he [Saddam Hussein] has stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weapons, we know that he is trying to acquire nuclear capability, we know that he is trying to develop ballistic missile capability of a greater range.”

The “small quantities” that might exist, according to the JIC assessment of 15 March 2002, were transformed by the Prime Minister into “stockpiles” that definitely did exist.  Problem solved.  This was not an isolated instance of gross prime ministerial exaggeration, which had accidentally slipped out: he made several statements in a similar vein around that time – and he continued to make them over the next 12 months.

www.david-morrison.org.uk

Labour & Trade Union Review

April 2005