The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (7 page)

TB saw Guthrie to brief him on his mission to see Musharraf. I suggested he tell him that his visit was the first step towards Britain moving to Pakistan-style rule. TB did the World Service, trying to push the line that the coalition was strengthening. David Blunkett was round for dinner. He was a bit down about the whole asylum mess and was vicious about the inability of the Home Office to do what we asked them to. He was convinced reception centres and ID cards were the answer. He said he hoped TB would stay for a long time but also asked
when I thought JP [John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister] would go. I asked if he ever thought he could be leader of the Labour Party. He said no, he could be deputy. Deputy leader or deputy PM with a department? He laughed. It was basically the latter, and I imagine he wanted it fed back. He believed we had lost our way a bit and were slightly losing the plot on public services but he was very pro TB at the moment. He said [Alan] Milburn [Health Secretary] was probably the best current bet as a non-GB [leadership] candidate. The anti-Bush feeling in the press was getting way over the top. The liberal press was revolting, the
Mirror
moronic, the
Mail
poisonous.

I went to see TB who was with Jack Straw discussing MEPP and saying farewell to [John] Sawers.
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John was telling him he was going to the Middle East and he didn’t want Michael Levy [Lord Levy, Labour fund-raiser, Blair’s personal envoy to the Middle East], anywhere near him. I was winding up Jack [a supporter of Burnley’s local rivals, Blackburn Rovers] about Burnley’s latest win – eight out of nine – when Geoff Hoon and CDS came in, looking grave. CDS said that on a very unofficial net he had got hold of what the Pentagon were proposing – Tomahawks followed by 1,000 missiles raining down on various targets. He was very sceptical, said it sounded basically political and it would mean hitting a lot of sand. TB was keen for their take on what we should advise them militarily. He said he was clear what needed to be advised diplomatically but we needed to give them a military plan too. CDS felt what was needed was surgical strikes and special forces.

Then to a broader meeting with C, Lander, Scarlett, GH, JS, CDS, RW and our lot. Depressing. Lander felt that if there was a big attack we just could not predict the response. He said there was a definite rise in Islamophobia since the attacks. Nobody had a clue where OBL was and nobody was hopeful about finding out. They were also checking whether the Pennsylvania plane [United Airlines Flight 93] had been designated to hit a nuclear power plant.
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There were quite
a few OBL people in the UK and Europe and they understood they were currently planning attacks. We were also worried that Bush’s ‘dead or alive, head on platter’ type of rhetoric would not be helping in Pakistan, which had the potential to be a tinderbox.

We could only get at Mullah [Mohammed] Omar [Taliban leader] and OBL with Taliban and Pakistan co-operation and even that was doubtful unless we gave them Kashmir. As the discussion wore on, CDS finally articulated what I had been thinking – namely that we had to start to prepare people for a very long-term operation, possibly taking years and years. OBL was travelling most of the time. There was no sign of a shift in the Taliban’s position and any plan to divide them would take an age. I asked whether there was a public enemy number three, four, five so that the focus and the judgement wasn’t solely on whether we got OBL.

Afterwards, I had a meeting with another expert just back from Islamabad, who said that the only thing OBL feared was the opprobrium of clerics. He could not care less about Western opinion because he hated the West. He said OBL had a tough, nasty, dedicated group of people around him which was virtually impossible to penetrate. They were ultra careful, especially in their travel and communications. He could probably slip to Pakistan but it was unlikely. He agreed with the guy on CNN yesterday who said the only way to get to OBL was through saying, and getting clerics to say, that he was not Islamic, that what he was doing was contrary to Islam.

TB saw some of the delivery ministers and had a meeting on Railtrack before we set off for RAF Northolt.
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I told him what Blunkett had said about being deputy leader. He said JP had said that if it helped with Gordon he would stay on. JP was pretty down on GB at the moment, said he had told him he would support him if he sorted himself out but not if he carried on the way he was. TB admitted there was a part of him that felt it would be irresponsible to back GB for the succession. On Bush, TB said he’s basically bright but he’s just not good with words.

We flew out to Berlin and TB and [Gerhard] Schroeder spent most of the meeting one-on-one with an interpreter. They did a brief doorstep together, and Schroeder was very strong, considering how difficult this was for him with less than one in three Germans supporting military response, but he said he was keen to lead them towards it.
He gave a very good description of his own situation and felt they had to be part of the response. But for sixteen years, he said, the SPD [Social Democratic Party of Germany] was basically a peace party. Ditto the Greens. The churches were against war and culturally it was very difficult for them to go for conflict but he felt they had to. He said his situation was very different to Britain. ‘You have polls where seventy-five per cent condemn the attacks and seventy-five per cent say yes to action. We have seventy-five per cent condemn the attacks but thirty per cent saying yes to action.’ He was pretty relaxed and philosophical about it. We had dinner up at the top of the new swanky building that housed his new office [the Bundeskanzleramt, eight times larger than the White House], much nicer than Bonn, with great views. He talked about his own political situation. He could always go for a grand coalition but he preferred what he had and said he owed a lot to [Joschka] Fischer [Green politician, Vice Chancellor and minister for foreign affairs in Schroeder’s coalition government] because he took the Greens with him. They had a bizarre love-hate relationship but they basically knew they could rely on Fischer. He said that whilst TB was building a coalition of nations, he had quite enough to do in building a coalition inside Germany.

He was much more likeable when he was open and expansive, as he was on Europe as well as Afghanistan. He had nice friendly eyes, a warm smile and easy manner, and seemed to understand and appreciate the scale of what TB was trying to do. His lovely interpreter was with him who told me not to lose any more weight. I was definitely becoming addicted to running. We got back on board the 146 to a message that Cherie had spoken to Laura Bush [George Bush’s wife] who was keen for her to go to Washington. Flew to Paris.

Paris. Up for a run in the embassy gym. Over breakfast, TB set out the approach he intended to take with Chirac, the need to separate the short-term response from the long-term agenda to deal with the deeper problems. Chirac had coincidentally been to the States and Catherine Colonna [his spokeswoman] suggested it had been helpful in that he had got a real sense of how deep it went for the Americans. For a while, he would probably curb his basic anti-American feelings. It was clear he wanted to be involved but it was also likely the Americans had remained suspicious. They did a brief doorstep together and there was a flurry of excitement because TB said at one point ‘within the next few days’ and we had a major job to smooth it over, make clear he was talking diplomatic not military.

We headed for the plane to meet up with Cherie, the rest of the staff and the press corps coming with us to New York. I had just about finished the note I was doing for Karen [Hughes] setting out the need for really tight co-ordination structures between all the key players, and the need for a really thought-through strategy for reaching moderate, mainstream Muslim opinion. Before dinner, TB had a long session with C and the military planners. They were looking at specific targets based on information they had obviously garnered from their various discussions with opposite numbers. What was very clear was that the US were well advanced. These were detailed plans. After an hour or so with them, TB said at least he got the sense that these guys knew what they were doing. I had a good chat with C, who said that in some ways the brave thing would be to do nothing, hold tight until we were absolutely sure of where OBL was. I was worried that the focus was so much on OBL that success or failure would be judged solely according to that.

TB did a briefing on the plane, cranking up the sense we were heading towards action and playing up solidarity with the US. TB worked on a new note for Bush with two aims – first, bringing OBL and al-Qaeda to justice, and second, going after international terrorism in all its forms. The ultimatum, and help for the Northern Alliance, remained central. He felt we should use air strikes to demolish the camps, support the NA, gather intelligence to designate high-value targets, hit the drugs trail, go for OBL, strong forward base in Uzbekistan and the Afghan border, a deal for Pakistan, help Musharraf, help Afghan people, new relations with Iran, support from Russia and Arabs. He set out too a number of things in the practical fight against terrorism – the disruption of groups from their travel. Extradition laws. He said we needed: 1. an integrated and streamlined military planning operation, binding in other allies too; 2. detailed work on the long-term agenda; 3. a well-staffed US–UK-led propaganda team, and 4. the political, military and media operations linked between us.

We landed in New York and though we had an escort, the combination of bad weather, dreadful traffic and continuing post-September 11 chaos meant that sadly we had to cancel the visit to a fire station. I was able to rescue it a bit when Clinton agreed to go instead of TB and take Cherie with him. TB was getting frantic because we were so late but we finally reached St Thomas’ Church and then a mild panic because there were suggestions that the reading, which had been suggested to me by Paddy Feeny [Tessa Jowell’s press officer], was not appropriate because it was about bereavement and some of
the people there did not believe they had yet lost their loved ones. It suggested they were all emotionally shot to pieces. TB was in the front row with CB, Kofi Annan [United Nations Secretary General], Bill and Chelsea [Clinton]. TB’s reading
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went fine as did the message read out by [UK ambassador Sir Christopher] Meyer from the Queen, including the brilliant line ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ Bill C asked me if I wrote it. I said I’d love to take credit, but no. He said find the guy who did, and hire him.

After the national anthems we had a brief meeting with Bill and Kofi who both warned of real dangers from Pakistan if we weren’t careful. Then we were taken up to the room where all the relatives were gathered. The contrast, the moment you entered the room, was palpable. We had been engaged in the normal diplomatic chat that goes on even in these circumstances, humour included, and now into this dreadful, dreadful atmosphere, haunted eyes, faces drained of blood, lips quivering. Most said it was all made worse by the fact they had no bodies to take home. Most carried pictures which they showed to TB and Bill as they moved through the room. Bill was absolutely terrific when he stood in for TB at the fire station. By now we were running really late and I felt terrible constantly reminding TB, but it was impossible to leave without him going round to speak to everyone. And they all just wanted to pour out their stories. These were in the main just ordinary people caught up in one of the most extraordinary things ever to hit anyone.

We finally got out to the airport and discovered that all the press luggage was being thoroughly searched so we were delayed even further. Meyer was next to useless at trying to cut through it. David Manning was on the phone trying to organise helicopters and warning them how late we might be. TB said he wanted a real inquiry into how we had managed to get into a situation where we spent half an hour sitting on a fucking plane while the president was in Washington waiting for us. Meanwhile Jonathan sent Meyer off the deep end when he had told him that the White House had said the meeting was one plus three, and TB wanted Jonathan, David Manning and me. Meyer threw an absolute tantrum, said he would be a laughing stock in Washington, threatened to resign on the spot. Jonathan did his usual
unflappable bit, just let him let off steam and eventually it was resolved by David M asking Condi if she could slip in an extra place. It was all a bit silly and as TB said, leaders couldn’t give two tosses which officials from the other side were there, but it made sense to him to have the three people he would be working most closely with not just here but everywhere.

When we landed, we headed straight to the White House to be met by GWB, Powell, Condi and Dan Fried [senior director for European and Eurasian affairs, National Security Council]. We were taken upstairs to one of the bigger rooms and TB went over to the corner with Bush and they clearly embarked straight away on a very tough conversation. He said later it had started fine, GWB saying how dreadful the events had been but now something good had to come out of it. The focus was OBL and the Taliban and tonight when he spoke to Congress he was going to deliver the ultimatum. But he also talked about how they could go after Saddam’s [Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq] oilfields. TB emphasised the need for a measured response. Jonathan said later it was funny how [Margaret] Thatcher had gone to see Bush Senior to say ‘This is no time to wobble’ while TB was visiting Bush Junior – ‘This IS a time to wobble.’

We went through for the dinner, scallops, veal, salad, Bush and TB doing most of the talking. Powell, Condi, Fried, Jonathan, DM and me, with Meyer stuck on the end desperately taking notes. I couldn’t work out if he was embarrassed or not by his tantrum. Bush was pretty much directing the conversation, said he was grateful for our support, said Britain was a true friend and we were going to win. He said anyone could join the coalition provided they understood the doctrine – that we were going after terrorists and all who harbour them. Obviously the wider the coalition the better, but they were going to do this anyway. When the scallops arrived, there was a thin ring of pastry on top which he picked up and said ‘God dang, what on earth is that?’ The waiter said it was a scallop. He said to him it looks like a halo and you are the angel. I think he meant the waiter. It was a bit alarming how loudly they all laughed, including Powell, at his jokes, like when he said he wouldn’t do questions at the doorstep because he had his speech later and he was never allowed to say more than one thing a day. I sensed sometimes he was taking the Mickey out of himself, other times out of his team.