How America kept Blair out of the loop
AS THE full story of Prime Minister Tony Blair's isolation over the Iraq invasion even in his own inner circle starts to emerge thanks to numerous revelatory memoirs by former senior diplomats and civil servants, a new TV documentary has heaped further humiliation on him by claiming that his American allies withheld from him details about when exactly they planned to attack Iraq.
It shows Mr. Blair was surprised when an aide called him on March 20, 2003, to tell him the invasion had already started and he could watch it live on television. "What channel?" a visibly shocked Mr Blair is shown asking the caller and as images of American bombardment flash on the screen he sinks into the sofa while the lights in the room dim and then slowly go out.
In fact, the documentary suggests that Mr. Blair might have been misled by Americans about the timing of their first military attack.
"I thought it was tomorrow," Mr. Blair says apparently taken aback by the news that the invasion was already in full swing.
/Why We Went to War/, shown on More4, a sister channel of Channel Four, claims that "every scene" in it is based on a combination of first-hand sources, official documents, and off-the-record briefings with participants at the "highest level."
The 90-minute documentary is, perhaps, by far the most detailed reconstruction of behind-the-scenes developments starting from the September 11 attacks and right up to the time when the first American bombs landed in Baghdad.
For the first time, the degree of Mr. Blair's isolation unfolds before our eyes as his closest advisers and friends warn him against plunging the country into a war they regard as illegal. Significantly even Alastair Campbell, who was then his powerful communications chief and widely portrayed as an apologist for the war, is shown pleading with him to pull back from the brink. That Mr. Campbell too opposed the war and in such strong terms comes as a revelation as until now he had been perceived as one of the architects of Mr. Blair's disastrous Iraq policy.
Mr. Campbell and Sally Morgan, who was Mr. Blair's political adviser, warn him that he may have to resign if sufficient number of his own party MPs do not vote for the war in Parliament.
The film notes: "Even when it seemed that everyone was against him, and there were tens of thousands of New Labour supporters out on the streets protesting against his policy, Tony Blair stood his ground telling his private office staff that `I cannot know what I know about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction and do nothing. It's just not possible.'"
Having promised support to U.S. President George W. Bush, Mr. Blair was so transfixed by the idea of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Washington that even when the former offered him an escape route he declined.
In one scene, President Bush is shown telling Mr. Blair that if, because of domestic pressures, he is not in a position to commit British troops America would be happy to go it alone and Britain could join later in peace-keeping efforts. But Mr. Blair insists "I am with you." Mr. Campbell and Ms. Morgan, standing behind him, throw up their hands in despair.
Not that Mr. Blair was not conscious of the scale of the opposition to his policy. Watching the television footage of a million angry Britons march through the streets of London in February 2003 waving placards and chanting "war not in our name," he gloomily notes that among them were many of "our people."
Mr. Campbell calls the Prime Minister's position "bloody dangerous." Any doubts that Mr. Blair may have had about the public mood were dispelled when, days before the invasion, he was pilloried by a TV audience with one angry old woman accusing him and President Bush of planning to do exactly the same thing that the perpetrators of 9/11 had been guilty of— killing hundreds of innocent people.
A shaken Mr. Blair emerges from the TV studio and walks away in a huff telling Mr. Campbell who had apparently advised him to appear on the show: "That was a lot of fun ... Thank you!"
Most damagingly, the film depicts the attorney-general Lord Goldsmith bluntly refusing to declare a war without UN authorisation as legal. "We can't base it on regime change," he tells Mr. Blair. And with support for the Prime Minister round the Cabinet table starting to dwindle Mr. Campbell again warns him that he is committing political /hara-kiri/. "There's hardly anyone left who believes you are doing the right thing. You are not winning any of the arguments in the right places," he says. Words that were to prove prophetic. For, in the end, Mr. Blair did not exactly win the war either.