A Journey (78 page)

The south of Iraq is now largely under British control. The west is secure, and in the major town of Al Qaim fighting is diminishing. In the north, Kurdish forces have retired from Kirkuk and Mosul, leaving US forces in control. US forces are in and around Tikrit. They are meeting some resistance. But in essence, all over Iraq, Saddam’s forces have collapsed. Much of the remaining fighting, particularly in Baghdad, is being carried out by foreign irregular forces. In Baghdad itself, the Americans are in control of most of the city but not yet all of it.

As is obvious, the problem now is the disorder following the regime’s collapse. Some disorder, frankly, is inevitable. It will happen in any situation where a brutal police state that for thirty years has terrorised a population is suddenly destroyed. Some looting, too, is directed at specific regime targets, including hospitals that were dedicated for the use of the regime. But it is a serious situation and we need to work urgently to bring it under control.

Basra shows that initial problems can be overcome. I am particularly proud of the role that British forces, ably led by Major General Robin Brims, have played in Basra.

Iraqi technicians and managers are now making themselves known to British forces. Together we are restoring many key services. Most public health clinics are operational. UK forces have supplied oxygen to Al Basra general hospital and are providing other medical support where they can. About two hundred policemen have reported for work. Joint patrols started on 13 April. In surrounding towns, looting has either ceased or is declining, local patrols are being re-established and cooperation with city councils is going well.

The casualties on the British side for such a military operation were mercifully slight – fewer than thirty deaths, each one a personal tragedy, but an extraordinary low count on such a major undertaking.

As the army moved through the south, taking out Iraqi resistance, mopping up any renegade elements, they were, through the excellence of the engineering unit, also repairing bridges, electricity, water and power infrastructure. Detailed plans were developed for rehabilitation and repair work. Though it is true that Clare’s attitude did hamper the civilian efforts, the army commitment more than made up for it, and in any event, frankly, any failings of Clare could have been easily remedied, had the security situation remained benign.

The US effort, through the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), was a mess. On the other hand, the truth is that until American forces got into Baghdad and obtained a real sense of what the real-life situation was, there was a limit to what could be done. I will come to how that effort progressed. But right at the outset, let’s be very clear: it would be so easy to say that the reason for the subsequent difficulty lay in planning failures, in terms of the civilian capacity to rebuild Iraq. It isn’t true. The plain fact is that with the money and effort committed, any defects would have been overcome, had the problem been administrative or bureaucratic. What went wrong was on the security side. Some of the civilian decisions may not have helped and I will come to those also. But the notion that they were the root of the problem is just false, a delusion I’m afraid, and one that matters, because in future conflicts we have to be aware of the limitations of this approach. Reconstruction is essential. It can’t happen in a violent environment. I saw that in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve also seen it since in Gaza and the West Bank.

The only issue is whether with better preparation, the security situation itself would have been better. If that preparation had yielded in and around Baghdad different or more troops, it is possible it would have. Down south, where the British were and where soon enough we were joined by 20,000 troops from other nations, it is less clear. For much of 2003 the south was relatively calm.

But I doubt any change would have prevented the al-Qaeda and Iran factors emerging; and it was those that from 2005 to 2007 almost tipped the country into the abyss.

In those initial weeks, all seemed according to plan. The regime had no support among the people at large. Many towns declared themselves open to coalition forces. Pockets of fighting continued but, without a local base of support, they were quickly eliminated and the south – Shia and heavily anti-Saddam – was swiftly subdued. Indeed, by 12 April, local police patrols resumed in Basra.

Baath Party officials were being captured or were surrendering to US forces. When the notorious Abu Ghraib prison complex was taken – notorious then and to become even more notorious later – it was found empty. Saddam had released all the prisoners, at least the criminal elements. It should have warned us – along with the intelligence that Saddam had allowed al-Qaeda to establish a base inside Iraq in early 2003 – that his tactics were not to fight our superior force but to let the country be overrun and then attempt to plunge it into chaos. But at this point, the reception accorded to the forces, if not that of garlands of flowers, was certainly more like that extended to a liberating force than to an occupying one. Towards the end of April, a million Shia pilgrims attended the main Shia festival in Karbala, something Saddam had forbidden to them.

On 27–28 April, things were sufficiently quiet even in Baghdad for General Garner, head of ORHA, to be able to host a political and reconstruction meeting with over two hundred Iraqi delegates and representatives of the coalition force nations. At the end of June, the first new Basra political council was established.

Before then, I had myself visited Basra on 29 May. The British troops had been brilliant. I saw the forces at the Presidential Palace and then at the port of Umm Qasr. The port was being de-mined and they were preparing to reopen it. The potential of it was enormous, all of it lost during the Saddam years. But it could have been – and in the heyday of ancient Iraq it was – one of the great ports in the world. When, just before leaving office in 2007, I made a speech in the Emirates and said that Basra in time could become like Dubai or Abu Dhabi, I was much mocked. But the truth is it could, and today is expected to double its capacity in the next three years, having already increased it dramatically since the days of Saddam.

I visited a school newly refurbished by the British troops. Basra was quiet and relatively peaceful. Up in Baghdad, the statue of Saddam was wrenched from its pedestal and broken into pieces to cheers. It was a great moment. Stupidly I gave an interview to the
Sun
and allowed myself to be drawn into a vainglorious remark about how I had almost lost my job over the war. (Rather less important than the soldiers losing or risking their lives, you might think.) But all in all, at that point the campaign had been hard and bloody but successful and short. By the end of May, roughly five hundred coalition troops had been lost, over four hundred of those American, and according to the Iraq Body Count around 8,000 Iraqis had died, obviously significant numbers of them combatants.

The humanitarian disaster had not happened. The oilfields had been protected. The resistance of Saddam elements had crumbled. The warnings of doom had been wrong.

We thought we were at the end of the main military campaign. Actually, we were at the beginning of what then became a quite different phase of operations; but this one hard, bloody, protracted, and at times during those years, the result was most definitely in doubt; even today it is fragile.

In this phase, the absence of international unity in the original decision, and the vested interests of many to prove that it was a mistake, counted heavily against us. I got a taste of this during a visit to Russia at the end of April. Vladimir Putin launched into a vitriolic attack at the press conference, really using the British as surrogates for the US, and then afterwards at dinner we had a tense, and at times heated, discussion. He was convinced the US was set on a unilateralist course, not for a good practical purpose but as a matter of principle. Time and again, he would say, ‘Suppose we act against Georgia, which is a base for terrorism against Russia – what would you say if we took Georgia out? Yet the Americans think they can do whatever they like to whomever they like.’ Chechnya was another example, though as I pointed out I had actually supported suppression of terrorism there.

I realised then how deep was his feeling that Russia had just been ignored by the US and his determination that they should see it eventually as a mistake. The difficulty was that I half agreed with him about the unilateralism. There was an arrogance to it that was not so much wrong as counterproductive to our cause. But it didn’t mean that the action per se shouldn’t have been taken or that the analogies he was drawing were accurate. The truth is that the India–Pakistan dispute over Kashmir did erupt into sporadic violence and there was terrorism coming out of Pakistan. But, though elements of state organisations might be involved, that was a long way from saying the Pakistan government was a terrorist government, or Pakistan was a rogue state. China’s issue with Taiwan was of internal Chinese unity. It was not really an external threat to anyone. Chechnya did indeed exhibit some of the same characteristics, but frankly if the US or Britain had gone into Iraq as hard as Russia had in Chechnya, there would have been bedlam.

I respected Vladimir for being as direct as he was. Though we disagreed, we kept lines open. But the chance to forge a really strong US/Russian partnership had been lost. If I were the US I wouldn’t allow the same thing to happen with China. Bind them in and treat them as an equal, not in form alone but in substance.

There was also another more pressing and more embarrassing issue for us. We were actively searching for the WMD. We were sure we would find them. This was the moment I was waiting for. It would draw a line under one major issue.

As our troops went further into Iraq, so we would get daily reports. Sometimes we would try to inspect plants or sites and get thwarted. Other times we would think we had made a find and be disappointed. As the weeks wore on, I became more and more agitated. By the time of my visit to Basra at the end of May, Donald Rumsfeld had somewhat unhelpfully suggested that we may never find WMD, a prediction that turned out to be true but needed to be handled with some care. It was, after all, the
casus
belli
.

When in Basra, I met Jerry Bremer, who had just taken over the running of ORHA, soon to be the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). I told him that he should not hesitate in asking for anything he needed from us, and advised him to use the same tactic with his own administration. ‘Don’t hold back,’ I said. ‘If you need it, demand it. I will back you up and I’m sure your president will too.’ Unsurprisingly, he seemed a trifle overwhelmed, but very capable and committed.

Following that conversation, however, I redoubled our efforts on helping, not just in respect of our field of operations down in Basra, but in what we could do to support the US in the rest of the country. It was set to be my principal preoccupation over the coming months.

The visit was a real wake-up call. Though I could see that much was being done, I could also see we were in danger of having won the war, then losing the peace. The expectations of the people were enormous. The complexities of tribal and religious life manifest. This was a huge challenge and there was no cause whatever for complacency.

On my return I called the key ministers together and gave a series of instructions to get our help to the US on a better footing. We had thought they would handle the centre of the country and we the south. I realised after that visit that unless they succeeded, we would fail. I had sent John Sawers, my former key foreign policy adviser, to Baghdad. He came to the same conclusion: the American operation needed a drastic boost. I also sent a strong note to George and we then spoke by phone.

Fortunately, on 22 May, the UN had passed unanimously UN Resolution 1483 which gave the UN a key role in all aspects of Iraq’s development. It put us back on a multilateral path. I argued strongly for the appointment of a really top UN operative to go into Baghdad. After some deliberation, Kofi agreed. At my urging he chose Sergio Vieira de Mello, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and a man with a first-rate record and experience.

However, my attention soon got diverted elsewhere. On 29 May, the BBC’s
Today
programme contained as its top story revelations from its defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan. In it, he focused on the forty-five-minutes claim in the September 2002 dossier. As I’ve said, this claim was in the dossier, it was highlighted by some papers the next day in a form we should, in retrospect, have corrected. But it then disappeared off the radar.

The claim turned out to be wrong. Also, unknown to me, or to the Secretary of State, or indeed to the JIC, there had been internal Ministry of Defence debate about it. One of those taking part in the debate, though not directly responsible for the dossier, was a Dr David Kelly, a Ministry of Defence intelligence expert of about twenty years’ experience.

The BBC broadcast did not claim, simply, that the intelligence was wrong on the forty-five minutes. What Gilligan said was:

What we’ve been told by one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that dossier was that actually the government probably knew that that forty-five-minute figure was wrong even before it decided to put it in . . . Downing Street, our source says, a week before publication ordered it to be sexed up to be made more exciting and ordered more facts to be discovered.