The Blair mission

Those preparing for Tony Blair’s appearance at the Chilcot inquiry must know that, in parts of Britain, there is an overbearing need to see him reduced to stammering incoherence, or even soul-baring confession: to make him pay for his supposed dishonesty. Of course, they also know that this is never going to happen.

During 2007 I spent months preparing for a two-hour interview with Blair for the BBC documentary Blair at War. I heard from nearly everyone who has appeared before Chilcot, many off the record, including former weapons inspector Hans Blix. We even interviewed President Bush. I too was striving for that “gotcha” moment. I didn’t achieve it. Why? Because Blair didn’t lie—not straightforwardly anyway.

The invasion of Iraq was a catastrophe; a study in hubris. Badly conceived and executed, it was the greatest foreign policy disaster since Suez. It will forever stain Blair’s reputation. But he, like the world’s intelligence agencies, believed Saddam had WMD. The charge against him is more complex and subtle—and not one that makes for a cathartic courtroom moment.

People believed Saddam had WMD because he behaved as if he did. In the 1990s he obstructed UN inspectors. He invited nuclear scientists to receive awards, even though his nuclear programme was dormant. He went out of his way to behave like he had something to hide. He was a gangster, a man whose career was built on terror. The UN asked him to spread his arms and say: “Behold, I am disarmed, I am weak, I am powerless.” Yet he was incapable of doing this without winking, both towards his own people and the Iranians. Among world leaders only Jacques Chirac—an “earthy” politician himself, in Hans Blix’s words—saw through him, disregarding the conclusions of his own intelligence services. Blair was merely voicing the consensus, even if he did state it with a conviction that made many uncomfortable.

Blair’s problem came when Saddam agreed to allow the inspectors back, in the autumn of 2002. Paradoxically, this was also Blair’s greatest triumph. He had persuaded Bush—against the advice of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney—to pursue the UN route. But over the next six months they found nothing. By the start of 2003 it was clear to Blix that there were doubts over whether Saddam had biological and chemical weapons. He told Blair this explicitly in a telephone conversation on 20th February, a month before the invasion. But Blair brushed him aside.

This conversation may be among the most fertile areas for those wishing to probe Blair’s intentions. How could he justify invasion when the chief weapons inspector was telling him there were doubts? And especially when the Iraqis, unlike in the 1990s, were placing no obstacles in the way of the inspectors. Weapons, had they existed, would have been found.

But Blair has an escape clause. UN resolutions not only required Saddam to disarm, but to prove that he had. In 1991 Saddam destroyed half his chemical and biological weapons, but kept the rest, hoping to conceal them. He quickly realised this would be impossible, and ordered the destruction of the remaining half—in secret, without informing the UN. When the UN subsequently discovered evidence of this second half, he came clean. But they wanted proof of its destruction. The Iraqis claimed there was none. Blix never believed this, and felt there must be documentation, or scientists who could give evidence. Saddam’s failure to provide this was all part of his insane, winking game-playing, his deliberate cultivation of doubt. Technically, then, he was not in compliance with the famous resolution.

Even so, these are desperately thin grounds on which to launch an invasion. Blair had also committed a strategic mistake. The two government dossiers on Iraqi WMD (of September 2002 and February 2003) have been rightly criticised for over-egging the intelligence, or (“removing the caveats” in Lord Butler’s words). But their publication also meant that, as far as public opinion was concerned, Blair had shifted the burden of proof away from Saddam, and onto himself. It was Blair who now had to prove that Saddam had not disarmed. Here he has failed, and his attempts to pretend otherwise will forever discredit him.

Such intellectual contortions would be forgotten if the invasion had been a success. Blair’s true crime was his failure to plan for the postwar period, or to persuade the US to do so. He had been warned by senior officials that there was a disastrous gap in the preparations. He shared the Americans intoxication with their own power and their blithe optimism that Iraq would somehow sort itself out. Even after the invasion he appeared slow to grasp the scale of the unfolding disaster. Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s top official in Iraq from September 2003, recalled a private meeting in Basra in January 2004 with his US counterpart Paul Bremer and Blair. Beforehand, Greenstock had laid out the problems facing the coalition in unsparing detail. But as Bremer launched into a surreal, upbeat summary of the situation, Blair simply grinned and nodded. “It was the one opportunity for the prime minister to grill the person who was actually implementing British objectives in Iraq,” Greenstock said. He flunked it.

To be fair, managing a relationship with an ally immeasurably more powerful than yourself is complex. Left to himself Blair would probably not have prioritised Iraq, in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan. The tortuous neocon reasoning that made toppling Saddam a rational response to 9/11 was not something that occurred spontaneously to him. But Blair seemed psychologically hardwired to side with the powerful. Once it became clear the Americans had made their minds up, he displayed what was his defining characteristic: an ability to convince himself of the moral virtue of his course of action, and to believe it fervently.

In my hours of interviewing Blair, what emerged most strongly was the sheer intensity of his religiosity. One word cropped up again and again: “mission.” His mindset was that of a 19th-century evangelist. If you wanted to interest him in an issue, you had to present it as a moral cause. And once he had the bit between his teeth he was loathe to admit any ambiguity. “I don’t believe that what is happening in Iraq today is anything other than an absolutely visceral, profound struggle between what is right and what is wrong,” he said in an extraordinary passage of his 2007 interview with us—this at a time when the war had descended into an impossibly complex struggle between Iraqi factions, in which Britain and the US were little more than bemused bystanders.

Blair is a man of great gifts. A brilliant communicator, he has an agile mind, an ability to grasp a range of issues and to reach decisions swiftly and decisively—virtues sadly lacking in his successor. But he is not a deep thinker and is notoriously uninterested in detail—“lightweight as a butterfly, skimming along the surface,” in Hugo Young’s memorable phrase. Had he known how to delegate, and lead a team, he might have been a superb prime minister. Tragically, his lack of depth was allied to a burning moral conviction. It was a fatal combination, the consequences of which were played out on the battlefields of Iraq.