The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (94 page)

There were worries re Sunni/Shia divisions, worries re minefields, worries re oil platforms, though he said the Brits had done a brilliant job securing the offshore platforms. Bush sounded very bullish, said that where there had been combat, the force had been overwhelming. TB said it was important that we underclaimed and overdelivered. Bush said ‘Yes, we only have forty per cent of the country.’ It had gone up five per cent in two minutes. TB felt most Iraqis would not be waiting for Saddam to topple, that they did not need to flee. Bush said the Brits had been great. He said Clare Short had been given a briefing and was apparently surprised that the Americans only had one horn coming out of their heads. TB filled him in on the summit, and said how strong the accession countries were generally. TB felt
the French were trying to come back to us a little bit. At the War Cabinet, C said there were some suggestions – alluded to by Bush earlier – that Saddam had been hit. He may be injured, and there were definitely signs of the inner circle turning on each other.

In for the War Cabinet. Another helicopter crash, and also Terry Lloyd of ITN [correspondent in Iraq] was missing. News-wise, things had moved to the region and the overall sense was of things going pretty well. TB set off for Chequers, saying he felt we were in much stronger shape than we might have been. I went home, set off for a run but had a bad asthma attack and walked back after a mile or so. Whether it was the air, stress or both, I don’t know.

I got up early, flicked through the papers, but as often when there was a real and moving international story, the impact of the papers was lessened as events drove the agenda. TB called and he wanted to change the planned broadcast to the forces into an interview, so Emily Hands [press officer] and I worked on that. There was a spate of stories of troops being captured, tortured, etc. In the end, we established there were ten US soldiers captured [in an ambush at Nasiriyah] and later they were paraded. The big battle seemed to be taking place around Umm Qasr [port in southern Iraq], and there were pockets of resistance elsewhere. ITN, not surprisingly, were going crazy re Terry Lloyd. Stewart Purvis [editor-in-chief] called to say that the MoD were being hopeless but it seemed that Terry had gone too far behind enemy lines [near Basra] and was shot by US special forces dealing with Iraqi troops at the time. Purvis called again later and said they now had pictures of the body and would be putting out a statement shortly. I said I would organise a TB tribute. I knew Terry reasonably well and liked him.

In then for a War Cabinet meeting. CDS on the military update and the latest on casualties. GH explaining what they had tried to do re Terry Lloyd. C still not clear on Saddam’s whereabouts or well-being. CDS said things were pretty much on track but there had been a number of accidents and the going was hard. As we wound up, the Iraqis were parading the [captured] American servicemen on TV. Dan called to say Bush was intending to go on TV and say this was a flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention. We agreed TB would echo that in his forces interview with BFBS [British Forces Broadcasting Service]. He said to me as we came away from the interview ‘How
do you really think it’s going?’ I said from everything we could gather, fine, but it is going to be really tough. There were too many signals that the US did not really want the UN to lead on the humanitarian effort. TB said his next meeting with Bush was going to be vital in terms of all the big strategic questions, and how we planned for the future. He was clearly worried.

At the end of the War Cabinet he had taken Boyce aside for ten minutes or so, just to try to get a real fix on his analysis and how he thought the Americans were doing. Boyce did not hide the difficulties ahead. There had been a bit of street fighting going on. Then we heard that a Red Crescent [medical aid] hospital may have been hit by an RAF bomb, with possibly as many as seventy dead and fifty injured. In briefing, I was simply saying things were on track despite the accidents but there was inevitably a lot of focus on the accidents and less on the ‘on track’. The truth was the strategy was on course, but they were meeting greater resistance than anticipated.

Four days in and our ridiculous media were all on ‘setbacks’. As I said to TB, if we had had 24-hour news during World War Two, we would all be German by now. The main news overnight was two UK soldiers missing, big stuff on PoWs paraded, so all quite tricky. I got the cab in, and up to see TB and Jonathan. He was generally worried. Jonathan and I were both pointing out that this was the fog of war, and it would take time for a rhythm to be established and we had to hold our nerve. The media were pushing hard at the limits of what they should know and then deliver instant comment on everything. At the pre-meeting CDS said things were still going pretty much according to plan though there were Fedayeen [Saddam paramilitary] fighters in Basra causing a fair bit of trouble. C said there were some reports, as yet unclear, of an enormous civilian disaster in Basra, with dozens possibly killed. In general, the bombing campaign was more low-key than people had expected, and very targeted, but the fighting was going to be tough, especially when our forces reached the Medina troops on the road to Baghdad.

Then through to the broader meeting, where John Scarlett ran through things and there was a run round the block on the issues already discussed in TB’s office. These meetings were not great. John and CDS obviously felt they were being asked to repeat themselves; those not at the earlier meeting assumed there was something else going on they didn’t know about. David Blunkett was in a pretty bad mood and went off on one, saying he needed to know whether Basra
was going to become like a medieval siege. TB just said ‘No.’ David was so down on his own civil servants most of the time that he had slightly got himself into a habit of messenger-shooting, and these guys didn’t particularly like it. John R asked whether we shouldn’t be moving to messages and tone that suggests longer not shorter term. He felt we had been caught a bit behind the curve and needed to get ahead again. I picked him up on it at the party meeting later, said ‘Aah, the man losing his nerve.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘just keen to ask questions because we have to make sure we can sell this policy to party and public.’

I said we had to communicate that there was a plan, it was unfolding, there would be mishaps and accidents but the basic plan would be seen through, and this was not a time to communicate nervousness to generals, which I fear is what they took away from the meeting this morning. He and David B both denied panic but it seemed close to it to me. Later another meeting with C and CDS who assured TB things were generally on track, but there was going to be heavy resistance and a lot of fighting. He and C both said that the 24-hour news was making it much harder in the field. We discussed with CDS and GH the idea of the main Baghdad switchboard being bombed, as it was central to the working of the regime. We also discussed a new missile that could wipe out the power to broadcast on Iraqi state TV, but GH was worried about it.

Then working on TB’s statement to the House. He was very focused, but also worried and wanted to walk round the garden to go over it. He was starting to think ahead to the meeting with Bush. He felt Russia had behaved really badly, and though there was an explanation he felt it showed they could not really be trusted to be strategic partners. It was sad, he said, but there we are. We were also picking up all kinds of signals that Cheney and Rumsfeld in particular were not that keen on us being too involved in the UN/aftermath issues. TB felt there was some sense to the really hard US approach. Why should the French and the Russians come in at the end and clean up? Condi was giving the French a very hard time. We were in for a very foggy few days and we were going to need a lot of nerve around the place. I had a long chat with Dan B re the visit and how we intended to handle the public side of things.

I still felt we did not have a big picture out there, and the problem with the embedded media was that they were just putting over little snapshots from where they were, all competing to get on, but with
no sense of an overall strategy. I also felt the military were going a bit native with the media, giving them too much access, letting them get in too close. GB asked to see me, and we met next door. He said the War Cabinet meetings were hopeless. You had Clare just blathering away, DB and JR behaving like armchair generals and giving out weakness vibes to the real generals. He felt we needed to structure things much more like a campaign. We needed to be clear what it was we were pushing every day, e.g. today would be push on Baghdad with a line out on humanitarian and reconstruction. The problem was there were currently too many places and people capable of setting an agenda from somewhere. I asked if he thought the party was OK on this. He said the party is fine on Iraq. ‘It’s other things they are worried about.’ He said there were real worries about the direction of domestic policy and I needed to rein him in a bit.

I got back to the pre-meeting at Number 10. There were more friendly fire incidents today, including UK on UK. The Saddam broadcast on Iraqi TV had the effect of pushing the message he was still in power, which might set us back on the internal opposition to him, which had been growing in confidence a bit.
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TB and I agreed that we had to reimpose a big-picture message, and he would have to be the one to do it. I had done a script overnight that set out the overall mission and purpose, update on the military front, humanitarian. The War Cabinet was possibly the worst yet. John S and CDS went through the motions of telling us what they had already told a smaller group of us in the pre-meeting and then we meandered around for a bit, with Clare, JR and DB asking a few questions. I scribbled a note to John S ‘How many of these would you take into the jungle with you?’

They reported that the Fedayeen were being organised by Chemical Ali.
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CDS reported continuing difficulties with the Turks re requests for access. He also warned operations may have to be scaled down because of the weather. David B had a go at one of the UK military spokesmen who had been on. ‘I would get him off the airwaves if you can.’ GB said to me afterwards that TB needed to take DB and JR aside, tell them these were supposed to be meetings on military strategy and we should have a separate meeting on political strategy. John’s and David’s questions did tend to be about the politics of where
we were, but the overall impression for the military and intelligence guys was not good. TB went off to the NEC, then back to prepare for the press conference. They were all going to be on the ‘Why is it all getting bogged down?’ theme, which was easy to deal with. The tough questions related to differences with the US on the UN role, where we were not in the same place. We had stated clearly there would be a UN role in the aftermath, but the US signals were not as clear. We just had to go back to the Azores words on this. It would be so much easier if Powell, not Cheney and Rumsfeld, was driving the policy in the States. The press conference seemed to last an age. I watched downstairs. They were running a split screen with TB on one side, and bombs being loaded at [RAF] Fairford on the other. One of the girls in the office said the whole thing was being presented like another form of reality TV show, round-the-clock coverage of anything and everything and the prism was ‘setback’ and ‘bogged down’.

On the conference call, I was pressing for more strategic communication and less focus on one part of the picture. There was next to no context out there for the briefings and pictures. They were like random scenes. The briefings in Qatar, and at the Pentagon, kept taking us to our weak points, e.g. PoWs and casualties. TB did the big picture OK today but there was precious little sign of it anywhere else. Also we had real problems on the diplomatic front, particularly re the UN. We had a good meeting of the Iraq communications group, and we agreed to get a message to all those with access to media in the field about the need to stay plugged in to bigger message and overall strategy. We also agreed to press internally for strikes against Saddam’s TV output, which was integral to his command and control, part of his infrastructure of fear, and a legitimate target.

We had a lot of problems – sense of setback, bogged down; UN role; humanitarian crisis growing; Basra very tricky. It was a good meeting though and I felt if this group was in charge of the whole communications operation, we would be in a better position. We had to step up even further the contacts with the US. I commissioned a message note justifying attacks on their TV station. Then to the Bush call, and lots of comforting noises to each other, TB saying things were going as well as they could be expected to, Bush saying our troops were so much better than theirs and it was going well. TB said there was a chance the whole thing would collapse quickly like a pack of cards, but we shouldn’t bank on it. There would be a lot of fighting, but eventually people would notice change happening, different people in control and if we handled the relations with the
Iraqi people well, change could come quickly. Bush said that if the word went round that Saddam was incapacitated, and also when we ‘kick the crap out of the Republican Guard’, that will have a profound effect around the country. He was in pretty bellicose form. They discussed Putin, and Bush said he was going to be looking for advice on how to deal with him from now on in. TB said [Hosni] Mubarak [Egyptian President] was nervous and what these guys wanted more than anything now was for the job to be done quickly.

We then left for the MoD for a presentation by CDS, [General Sir] Mike Jackson [Chief of the General Staff], [Admiral Sir Alan] West, [Air Chief Marshal Sir Peter] Squire and [General Sir John] Reith from PJHQ [Permanent Joint Headquarters]. Reith was very impressive but it was absolutely clear this was going to be a lot tougher. Reith felt the US had been excessively optimistic about the collapse of the regime. The hard core and the Fedayeen were absolutely up for the fight. They had nothing to lose, and would not just give up. TB asked about Baghdad. They said it would be split into forty sectors, and our forces would try to take them one by one, before sending in regulars. It would take several weeks, and there were a lot of dangers attached. Jackson said it was the only possible plan. Reith was excellent on the overview, but said that at Basra for example, it was not yet clear the best way to proceed.