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Blair's litany of failures on Iraq - ambassador's damning verdict
Meyer says PM failed to exert any leverage on Bush and was seduced
by US power
By
Julian Glover and Ewen MacAskill
11/07/05 "The
Guardian" -- -- Tony Blair repeatedly passed up
opportunities to put a brake on the rush to war in Iraq, a failure
that may have contributed to the country's present anarchy,
according to Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain's ambassador to
Washington at the time, in his book DC Confidential, serialised in
the Guardian from today.
Sir Christopher, highly critical of Mr Blair's performance in the
run-up to the war, argues the prime minister and his team were
"seduced" by the proximity and glamour of US power and reluctant to
negotiate conditions with George Bush for Britain's support for the
war.
He says Mr Blair failed to exploit his enormous leverage with Mr
Bush not only to secure a precious delay but to plan for postwar
Iraq. "We may have been the junior partner in the enterprise but the
ace up our sleeve was that America did not want to go it alone. Had
Britain so insisted, Iraq after Saddam might have avoided the
violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise."
But Mr Blair did not have any appetite for bargaining with Mr Bush,
according to Sir Christopher: "Tony Blair chose to take his stand
against Saddam and alongside President Bush from the highest of high
moral ground. It is the definitive riposte to Blair the Poodle,
seduced though he and his team always appeared to be by the
proximity and glamour of American power.
"But the high moral ground, and the pure white flame of
unconditional support to an ally in service of an idea, have their
disadvantages. They place your destiny in the hands of an ally. They
fly above the tangled history of Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Turkomen and
Assyrian. They discourage descent into the dull detail of tough and
necessary bargaining: meat and drink to Margaret Thatcher but, so it
seemed, uncongenial to Tony Blair."
The former diplomat accuses Mr Blair of weakness in failing to
engage Mr Bush in the "plain-speaking conversation" that needed to
take place. "Had Blair told Bush in clear and explicit terms that he
would be unable to support a war unless British wishes were met? I
doubted it."
The Washington embassy repeatedly advised Downing Street to use its
leverage, but was ignored.
Delaying the invasion from March to the autumn would have allowed
the United Nations weapons inspectors extra months to establish
whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, enabled the
US and Britain to reach an understanding with France and Russia, two
of the biggest sceptics about war, and increased international
support, instead of going to war "in the company of a motley ad hoc
coalition of allies".
The former diplomat, who enjoyed unparalleled access to all the key
members of Mr Bush's administration and supported the war, provides
the most detailed account yet of the thinking inside the White House
and Downing Street in the 18 months running up to the invasion in
March 2003. He says of the war now: "History's verdict looks likely
to be that it was terminally flawed both in conception and
execution."
Publication comes at a time when Mr Blair is vulnerable
domestically, and the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the chief
of staff of Vice-President Dick Cheney, has reopened the debate in
the US about why the country went to war.
Sir Christopher records a conversation with Mr Libby who told him
"we were the only ally that mattered. That was a powerful lever".
But the former ambassador says London "was not fertile ground for
the notion of leverage or the tough negotiating position that must
sometimes be taken even with the closest allies - as Churchill did
with Roosevelt and Thatcher did with Reagan".
He regrets that at precisely the moment that Mr Blair should have
been bargaining, in the early autumn of 2002, "political energy in
London had become consumed by a titanic struggle to keep public
opinion, parliament and the Labour party onside for war. There was
little energy left in No 10 to think about the aftermath. Since
Downing Street drove Iraq policy, efforts made by the Foreign Office
to engage with the Americans on the subject came to nothing."
He questions whether No 10 relied too heavily on British military
and intelligence advisers fatalistic about the inevitability of war
and "as a consequence underestimated its political leverage and
ability to affect the course of events".
He takes a swipe at John Scarlett, chairman of the joint
intelligence committee, which was responsible for assessing
intelligence, and one of the main authors of the controversial
British dossier making a case against Saddam. Sir Christopher, who
at one time was lined up to be head of the JIC, said he understood
why Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair's press secretary, wanted as
categorical a public depiction of Saddam's threat as possible.
"Equally, I would have expected the JIC to be rigorous in telling me
how far I could go."
One of Sir Christopher's main charges is that Mr Blair failed to
puncture the US administration's belief that it would be "sweetness
and light in Iraq" after the war, and the descent of Iraq into chaos
today is, in part, a result of this.
Sir Christopher recounts how Mr Bush told the inner circle at a
US-British summit at Camp David in 2002 that the prime minister had
"cojones" (balls). The former ambassador says Britain should have
taken advantage of such praise, making its participation in the war
dependent on a fully worked-out plan for postwar Iraq, which he
describes as "defective" and "rudimentary".
"This would have been the appropriate quid pro quo for Blair's
display of cojones at this Camp David meeting with Bush." He is
adamant Mr Bush was amenable to pressure almost to the end. "Indeed,
if it all went wrong at the UN, and the US was faced with going to
war alone, it seemed to me that Bush might blink. Or, to put it
another way: what Britain decided to do could be the decisive factor
in the White House."
The former ambassador says a delay from March to autumn 2003 could
have made a significant difference: "Even if the most optimistic
predictions are finally realised for Iraq, the question will still
be asked: why did the Americans and British make it so hard for
themselves and even harder for Iraqis? The US and the UK would have
stood a better chance of going to war in good order, and of doing
the aftermath right, had they planned on an autumn, not a spring,
campaign."
He reveals that Karl Rove, the political adviser to the president,
told him there would have been no problem for Mr Bush in waiting
until the end of 2003 or even early 2004 and this would not have
risked entanglement in the US presidential campaign.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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