5

The Crisis of 2002–03

The ‘Fall of the Wall’ – the destruction by popular action of the barrier separating West from East Berlin in November 1989 – not only led to the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and eventually to the collapse of the whole communist system in the Soviet Union and its empire. It also inaugurated, in the stated belief of President George Bush Senior, ‘a new world order’.

President Bush’s vision foresaw the replacement of a world system, defined by the military antagonism between free-enterprise America and Marxist Russia, by a benevolent commonality of interest between the old power blocs, henceforth dedicated to sustaining the peace of the world through concerted action against aggressors and to eliminating the causes of conflict by fostering democracy and prosperity across the world. His hope of how the new order would work was exemplified by his construction of the coalition of sixty nations, including many former enemies, that punished President Saddam Hussein for his invasion and annexation of independent Kuwait in 1990, by defeating his army of occupation and restoring Kuwait’s sovereignty.

Belief in a new world order held tenuous sway throughout the uneasy 1990s. Some signs were positive, others not. Domestic aggression in former Yugoslavia, centre point of the most flagrant violations of respect for human life and political liberty, was eventually checked by international action; on the other hand, organization of the action was too long delayed to avert atrocities that called the effectiveness of the new order into question. Still, grounds for optimism persisted. The setbacks in the Balkans might be seen as growing pains, not disabling weaknesses.

Then, on 11 September 2001, two months short of the twelfth anniversary of the event in Berlin which brought freedom to hundreds of millions, another event in New York made mockery of the whole idea of a world order. Three hijacked airliners, seized by Islamic extremists belonging to the al-Qaeda organization, were flown into the Pentagon building in Washington and the two towers of the New York World Trade Center, causing damage to the one and the collapse of the other, with the loss of nearly three thousand lives. Many died in the most heartrending circumstances, throwing themselves to their deaths in the streets below the buildings to avoid incineration in the inferno inside. A fourth hijacked airliner crashed, killing all on board, after action by brave unarmed passengers against the terrorists.

The events of 11 September – or 9/11 as the day soon became universally known – caused shock throughout the world. In the United States it provoked a revolution, changing national sentiment and redirecting national policy. Before 9/11 the American people, if largely uncomprehending of the outside world, viewed it through benevolent eyes; after 9/11 they saw enemies everywhere. Before 9/11 American governments had, for fifty years, sought to keep the peace by leading a Western alliance of the like-minded; after 9/11 Washington committed itself to the defence of America first and foremost. Thinking Americans, in and out of government, knew that their country still had foreign friends; but henceforth friendship would not be taken on trust. It would have to be demonstrated.

At the turn of the millennium, from twentieth to twenty-first centuries, a new world order was indeed born. It took, however, a form entirely different from that envisaged by the father of the new American President, George W. Bush. Bush senior had foreseen a world continuing to be dominated by the traditional blocs, a First World of rich states, led by America, and a Second World of former Communist states, moving to join the Western system; the evolution of the Third World of poorer states would depend on the success of the first two in disseminating their wealth and ideas to that bloc’s peoples. Suddenly such stability had disappeared. The central power of the First World was under attack and would have to put its own security first. The source of the attack lay in the Third World and took forms against which traditional defence, nuclear deterrence and conventional forces organized in international alliances, offered little protection. The attitude of the Second World, for decades the main concern of Western foreign-policy makers, seemed suddenly irrelevant. Armies of experts who had made lifelong careers in the analysis of Marxist politics found themselves at a loose end. The urgent need was for an understanding of militant Islam.

Government officials in the United States were particularly ill-equipped to address the problem, its academic community little better. America has only a tiny Muslim community; Arabic is a language very few Americans, outside a handful of university departments, speak. Historically, moreover, America has little knowledge of the Arab world. A few oil company executives apart, Americans do not live or work in the Arabic-speaking lands or elsewhere in the Muslim world. In that respect, the United States is less well placed to understand Islam than Britain or France, both of which have ruled Arab and other Muslim countries within living memory, and have accepted Muslim immigrants from their ex-colonies in large numbers. British experts, however, struggle to follow the tortuous paths taken by modern Islamic thought. In France, a country with 5 million Muslim inhabitants and a tradition of intellectual involvement with Islam, specialist scholars have led the way in interpreting movements of Islamic thought to other Westerners; yet even the French find difficulty in penetrating the veil. The modern Muslim mind is alien both to Christian and Enlightenment ways of thinking.

What baffles Westerners is why Muslim militants hate Western civilization as bitterly as they do. There is, perhaps, no logical explanation; most modern Westerners would fail to supply a persuasive explanation of the hatred felt between their Protestant and Catholic ancestors in the century of the Reformation. The hatred felt by Muslim extremists is, however, real and it has historic roots. In the years after the Muslim triumph of the seventh and eighth centuries, when Muslim armies conquered the old Christian provinces of the Middle East and North Africa, seized Spain and established a foothold in the Balkans, culminating in the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the ancestors of modern Muslims became, in a sense, the Americans of their age. The system of government they established under the universal Caliphate was an enlightened one which guaranteed freedom of belief to all who acknowledged the Caliph’s supremacy, and his scholars were in the forefront of contemporary learning. They rescued Western classical thought from obscurity, they advanced the study of modern mathematics and the practice of medicine and they instituted the systematic study of political sociology.

Until the fourteenth century Islam was the most progressive intellectual force in the world west of China. Then, in a regrettable step, the religious leaders of orthodox – Sunni – Islam decided that its interpretative development, taking account of discoveries in non-theological thought, should come to an end. This ‘closing of the gates’ spelled an end to Muslim openness. Thereafter, right down to our own day, mainstream Islam found itself confined within intellectual boundaries set by scholars several hundred years dead. Not only was the practice of religious life to be defined by their decisions; so too was public, political and legal life. The law of Sharia – ‘the path to the waterhole’ – thenceforth dictated how pious Muslims should relate to each other, to their business associates, to non-Muslims and to the state. Not that, in orthodox Muslim thought, the state had any existence independent of the religious world that defined it. Until the extinction of the universal Caliphate in 1925 at the behest of the secularist Mustapha Kemal of Turkey, where it had had its seat since the sixteenth century, orthodox Islam made no distinction between worldly and religious authority. One was the other and vice versa.

The interpenetration of the spiritual and the material was, in practical terms, a disaster for Islam. It prevented the separation of theological and pragmatic paths of thought which the Christian West had achieved, if not without a struggle, even before the Protestant Reformation. While, from the Renaissance onwards, Italy, France, Germany, Holland and Britain soared off into the heady altitudes of intellectual freedom that would usher in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, Islam remained stuck on the path to the waterhole. Its intellectual life decayed, its political institutions, the universal Caliphate foremost, fossilized. In its heyday, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the Caliphate had conquered wherever it turned its steps. By the nineteenth century Turkey, meaning the Caliphate, which still ruled North Africa in name, the Arab lands and the Balkans as colonies, was the Sick Man of Europe. France and Britain fought Russia to prop Turkey up on its deathbed, for fear of the consequences of its final collapse.

Its collapse, when it came at the end of the First World War, gave France and Britain control of what remained of its empire, the Arab lands of which they had not already taken possession. The Arabs proved, however, turbulent subjects, even though promised eventual independence under the terms of the League of Nations mandate which authorized Britain and France to exercise authority over them. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and in particular Palestine, whose future Britain complicated by offering it as the location of a National Home for the Jews, chafed at the mandate terms. Their populations wanted immediate, not delayed independence.

Independence came. In the meantime, however, developments had occurred that made formal political arrangements a secondary issue. The onetime outposts of the Caliphate’s power that had been made French colonies, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, achieved independence by secession or armed struggle. Their British equivalents, Egypt and Libya, went the same way, as Iraq and Jordan had already done. Part of Palestine became a Jewish state. Syria and Lebanon achieved separation from France. Inside the Arab world which was comprehended by these states, however, there raged an intellectual ferment which threatened to transcend the idea of mere independence from European rule. In one direction it took the form of an Arab political renaissance, imitating but stressing its separation from European political models; its instrument was the Ba’ath party in Syria and Iraq. In another and later development it reverted to the earliest message of Islam: that the preaching of the Prophet has universal force, that it is his destiny to triumph and that those who oppose the extension of his power over the world are excluded from the promise of compassion that lies at the heart of the Islamic religion.

This perversion of the Prophet’s teaching, and that it is a perversion is admitted by the majority of Muslim teachers, was launched on the Islamic world by an Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, during the period of Nasser’s Presidency. Imprisoned by Nasser for membership of the Muslim self-help organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, he moved by stages to an extremist interpretation of Muslim theology. Nasser’s essentially secularist version of Islam – though he was an overtly devout believer, his policies emphasized material at the expense of spiritual development in a Muslim society – led Qutb to denounce the Egyptian President as jahili, spiritually ignorant. His refusal to moderate his views led to his execution, after a long period of imprisonment, in 1966. Before his death, Qutb had elaborated his new interpretation of Islam to argue – convincingly to many young, frustrated Muslims – that, while the Prophet had undoubtedly preached compassion towards nonbelievers, he had also stressed the primacy of submission to his teachings, which were those of God, and that, until such submission was widely achieved, Muslims were absolved from the duty of showing compassion to those who rejected the preaching of the Prophet’s word.

In short, violence against nonbelievers was not sinful. Indeed, and here Qutb harked back to the teaching of Abul Ala Mawdudi, struggle – jihad – against the encroachment of the West on the Islamic world was an obligation. Mawdudi, Pakistani by nationality, had called for a universal jihad to fight the jahiliyyah (ignorance) of the West, just as the Prophet had fought against jahiliyyah in pre-Islamic Arabia. He argued that the call to jihad was the central doctrine of Islam, exceeding in importance the duty to pray and to give alms. Qutb went farther still. He called on Muslims to model themselves upon Muhammad in their personal lives, then to separate themselves from society and then to wage jihad in a violent fashion; an important distinction, since jihad can, and indeed should, take the form of a struggle against self. Only when the jihad against ignorance – which Qutb identified as the secular modern world – had been won should Muslims revert to the practice of compassion, within what would be a new universal Caliphate.

Qutb’s elaboration of Mawdudi’s teachings proved enormously influential. It inflamed, rather than inspired, a new generation of Muslims, particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to train for war, to learn the methods of terrorism and to reintroduce into public life the ancient Islamic punishments of stoning and mutilation. It underlay the rise of the Taleban (‘students’), products of religious schools where his teaching was passed on. It motivated the assassination of secularist Muslim leaders, notably President Sadat of Egypt. It justified, if it did not directly motivate, the doctrines of al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11, whose methods are those of universal jihad and whose ambitions, the conversion of all to Islam and the establishment of a universal Caliphate, mirror those of Qutb.

The emergence of a new world order according to Qutb was the least expected outcome of the fall of the Berlin Wall; it is most improbable that it could have been foreseen. True, the dissolving of the superpower blocs, what foreign policy experts called the ‘bipolar’ world, would be likely to result in a measure of instability. Terrifying though the bipolar world had been, with its opposed ranks of nuclear weapons, its nature assured that most states had to belong to one bloc or the other – the ‘unaligned’ states had no strategic significance – and that the bloc leaders kept their followers in order. Inevitably the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that some of its client states would cease to toe the line determined by the Kremlin, but the presumption was that, at worst, they would resume old quarrels with neighbours. So at first it proved; the Balkan disorders had origins that long predated the Cold War and Saddam’s annexation of Kuwait was motivated by a dispute over frontiers that went back to a British disagreement with the Ottoman empire. The international system seemed adapted to coping with such problems. Then 9/11 demonstrated that there were malcontents in the post–Cold War world for whose wrongdoing the international system made no provision at all. The system, whether its roots are traced to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 or to the creation of the League of Nations after the First World War, is political in substance. It assumes the existence of states and that they will relate to one another in terms of self-interest. The Salafists who launched 9/11 – Salafism is an Islamic umbrella doctrine embracing all Muslims who reject the concept of the state and seek only a universal kingdom of believers – deny the right of mortals to make policy or frame laws, insisting that all they need to know of public life can be found in the Koran.

This Salafist new world order – little known in the West and even less understood – nevertheless indirectly provoked a Western response. In the aftermath of the First Gulf War, which left Saddam in power, a group of Washington foreign-policy makers began to argue that acquiescing in his survival spelled danger to the West. Unaware that there were more dangerous figures active in the Muslim world, they advocated what would become known as the doctrine of pre-emption – striking first to avert a later danger. They included Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Secretary of Defense to Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, also a Pentagon official at the time, and Richard Perle, a defence intellectual omnipresent in post–Cold War Washington. They and many of their associates had begun their political lives on the left of politics. As they moved towards the right,‘rightness’ being associated with strategic realism, they acquired the description of ‘neo-conservatives’. In 1992, as the first Bush Presidency drew to its close, Wolfowitz wrote a defence policy paper which outlined his view of how a strategy of pre-emption should work. He argued that, in the face of calls for a ‘peace dividend’ following the end of Cold War hostilities, the United States should spend to maintain its military dominance in Europe and Asia, preserve its strike forces and be ready to launch pre-emptive attacks against states which, on escaping the constriction of the superpower system, were setting up as possessors of weapons of mass destruction – nuclear foremost but also biological and chemical. Those he suspected were either historically unaligned or pro-Soviet – Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya and, of course, Iraq. His paper, though diluted by bureaucratic process, was eventually published under then Secretary Cheney’s imprimatur as an official document, Defense Strategy for the 1990s.

The succession of President Clinton deprived the neo-conservatives of direct influence on government. Clinton, though prepared to intervene abroad, as he eventually did in the Balkans, preferred to do so in concert with other states and through international organizations, and to proceed with caution. He did not share the neo-conservatives’ beliefs in the necessity of pre-emption nor in the desirability of régime change in countries overtly hostile to the United States and able to harm its interests or citizens. Although out of government, the neo-conservatives remained able to propagate their views, through such publications as the Weekly Standard and Commentary, a major organ of Jewish thought. Many of the neo-conservatives were Jewish; almost all were Zionist and pro-Israeli. That was to prove unfortunate for it entangled their policies for the Middle East, which were generally rational and enlightened if not always realistic, with their ambitions for the future of the Jewish state, which were contentious and nationalistic. The neo-conservatives believed, in a highly traditional American cast of mind, that the solution to the world’s problems lay in transforming absolutist, monarchical and autocratic régimes into free-enterprise democracies. They believed democracy to be transportable and to have a transforming effect; through its implementation, in societies previously tribal or theocratic or otherwise afflicted by divisive and unrepresentative systems, they believed populations could be led to become politically enlightened and economically prosperous. They also believed in a ‘domino’ effect: that the transformation of one society in a region would lead to the same effect in others. They were particularly insistent that ‘régime change’ in Iraq, the focus of their antipathies, would foster change for the better in its neighbours, including Syria and Iran. Paradoxically, however, several of the neo-conservatives supported extremist politicians in Israel, who rejected compromise with the Palestinians; they wanted a larger and stronger Israeli state, empowered to deal with the Palestinians only on the basis of recognition of its right to exist and to command defensible frontiers. The confusion of policy, for confusion it was and remains – democracy for Middle Eastern Muslims but a particular version of state rights for Israel – weakened and continues to weaken the neo-conservatives’ message. To European liberals and leftists in particular, the neo-conservatives appear hypocritical. They interpret the contradictions of neo-conservative policy as an attempt to establish native versions of American democracy in the unreformed Arab states while supporting a selfishly Zionist regime in Israel. Needless to say, that view is widely shared in the Arab world and bedevils American efforts to win friends in the region.

The neo-conservatives farther alienated liberal and leftist opinion in Europe by their devotion to the idea of American ‘particularism’ – an idea, almost as old as the United States itself, that the country stands for certain superior principles of public and inter-state behaviour – justifying in their view, again a long-established American position, its right to act unilaterally in foreign affairs. From the earliest days of the republic American ideologues have sought to define America as not only detached from but better than the Old World of religious prejudice and political egotism. To the idea of American particularism – Ronald Reagan’s vision of ‘the city on the hill’ – the neo-conservatives conjoined that of ‘the American moment’. With the collapse of the Communist system, the neo-conservatives argued, the United States inherited an opportunity, unlikely to be long-lived or to recur, to change by forthright action the world for the better. There had been such a moment once before, in 1918, when the idealistic President Woodrow Wilson had imposed on an exhausted world his plan for a League of Nations that would rid mankind of war. The chance to capitalize on his vision had been missed when his physical collapse allowed less enlightened politicians, some American, to dilute his plans.

With the return of an American moment, the neo-conservatives glimpsed a new opportunity and determined to profit by it. It would not be taken through the medium of the United Nations. An improvement on the Wilsonian conception though it was, with its powers to authorize the use of military force against transgressors of international order, the UN still lacked the capacity for peremptory action. Too many interests had to be placated; too many nationalities were allowed a voice. The neo-conservatives wanted the power to strike, without consultation and without warning. They believed in particular that enemies like Saddam could be disposed of only by unilateral action, with the assistance of such allies as would not quibble and could match American standards of military efficiency. That meant in effect Britain and any British associates, like Australia, that deployed equivalent forces.

Capturing a fleeting American moment required the return to power of a conservative American President. George W. Bush, elected in 2001, was such a figure. At his inauguration he did not seem a neo-conservative choice, though he appointed to office several highly conservative politicians, including Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Dick Cheney, his Vice-President, was also a neo-conservative favourite. The horror of 9/11 set the new President, however, on a neo-conservative path. He was quickly persuaded that the ‘war on terror’ which he immediately proclaimed was best prosecuted at the outset by attacking al-Qaeda, the perpetrator of 9/11, in its terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Having acquired American bases for the campaign in the ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, he launched the counter-terrorist attack. By a combination of the commitment of special forces (American, British and Australian), the enlistment of the anti-Taleban forces of the Northern Alliance and the deployment of heavy American airpower, the al-Qaeda units in Afghanistan and their Taleban supporters were quickly overcome. At the culmination of the campaign it was believed that Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind, had been cornered and killed. Later evidence, supplied by video and broadcast tape, dashed such hopes. Nevertheless, he thereafter became a fugitive figure, having scarcely substantial existence, while the material success of the campaign in Afghanistan was undoubted. The country was given a new, plausibly representative administration and the Islamicist régime of the Taleban was dissolved.

With the defeat of the Taleban, which destroyed al-Qaeda’s principal platform of support, the Bush Presidency could turn to engage the other main targets of the war on terrorism. Al-Qaeda was reported by American intelligence to have centres of support in as many as fifty countries but the main danger was identified as emanating from Iraq. Saddam, Iraq’s President, was indubitably a threat to peace in the Middle East and beyond. During his thirty years in power he had attempted to acquire the capacity to build nuclear weapons – a threat checked only by the Israelis’ destruction of the French-supplied Osirak reactor in 1981 – and used chemical weapons both in his war against Iran in 1980–88 and against his own Kurdish citizens. Saddam had also authorized an assassination attempt against the new American President’s father, George Bush Senior, who had organized the coalition war against him in 1990–91. Saddam was a wicked man, an aggressor, an oppressor of the Iraqi people and a menace to order in his own régime and the wider world. Whether he was a sponsor of al-Qaeda was more problematic. He had undoubtedly given succour to Abu Nidal, an earlier father of anti-Western terror, and he was generally well-disposed to anti-Western terrorists. His association with al-Qaeda escaped proof. Osama bin Laden was a Salafist, a believer in a Muslim world without political institutions. Saddam was an Arab secularist, a type particularly repugnant to Islamic fundamentalists. Had Osama bin Laden attempted to propagate his beliefs in Saddam’s Iraq, he would undoubtedly have met the fate of all Saddam’s enemies.

Unfortunately for Saddam, official America after 9/11 was uninterested in distinctions between one sort of Arab extremist and another. Osama was violently anti-American. So was Saddam. The decision was taken to eliminate his régime. The steps to that decision were given in two public warnings, President Bush’s State of the Union address to Congress in January 2002 and his speech to the graduating class at the US Military Academy in June. In both he denounced Saddam’s régime – to Congress as part of an ‘axis of evil’ – and he threatened pre-emptive action. The decisive moment came, however, on 11 January 2003 when Secretary Rumsfeld ordered the deployment of 60,000 troops, together with military aircraft and warships, to the Gulf; on 20 January Geoffrey Hoon, the British Secretary of State for Defence, commanded the despatch of 26,000 British troops and 100 aircraft; with those already in the area, a quarter of the British army and a third of the Royal Air Force would be present in the zone of operations. Rumsfeld’s and Hoon’s announcements clarified a puzzling obscurity. Strategic analysts had pondered for months on the territorial difficulties of mounting an operation against Iraq, one of the most inaccessible countries in the northern hemisphere. Its tiny coastline at the head of the Gulf offered scarcely any space for a bridgehead. Saudi Arabia was proving uncooperative. Iran was almost as hostile to the West as Iraq itself. Turkey had suddenly turned contrary. Syria would not breach the Arab front. Jordan seemed too weak to violate Muslim opinion. There seemed no way in. At the last moment, though the Americans had known so for some time, Kuwait was revealed to be willing to offer basing and transit rights. It was a courageous decision, since it isolated the country in the Arab world and carried the risk of terrible retaliation if the coalition operation did not work.

Solving the difficulty of the military preliminaries did not, however, dissolve the political obstacles. The United States could count on the support of Britain and of Australia, which supplied ships, aircraft and special forces (which may have included a New Zealand element). Otherwise it was bereft of allies. Worse; early in the crisis that developed in 2002 and persisted into 2003, right up to the unleashing of hostilities, its traditional European supporters began to object to and even oppose the taking of military action against Saddam. Spain, an unlikely militant, supported President Bush, so enthusiastically that he chose to stage a summit meeting in the Azores on 16 March, the very eve of the war. France, however, made strong and increasingly loud protests; so did Germany. Objections by France were to be expected, for many reasons. Historically pro-Arab and pro-Muslim since the seventeenth century, when it had been the Ottoman Emperor’s only friend among the Christian powers, and led by the braggart President Chirac, who both gloried in trumpeting his differences with Washington and was deeply implicated in commercial dealings with Saddam’s government (dating back to the sale of the Osirak reactor to Iraq at the end of the 1970s), France was an odd man out in the Western world. Germany, by contrast, had always been an American insider. In the days when twenty Soviet divisions occupied the old East Germany, it had been America’s most devoted friend on the continent. Liberated, however, from the Soviet threat, thanks to the triumph of President Reagan’s policy of bankrupting the Soviet Union by competition in military expenditure, German public and much political opinion yielded to the temptation of seeking the softer way. The defeat of 1945 had altered the German psyche, transforming the most militarist nation in Europe into one genuinely devoted to the principles of peace and the resolution of international disputes by conciliation. The threat of Soviet aggression had forced the German people to embrace NATO and do the military duty membership of the alliance required. The elimination of the Soviet threat allowed German anti-militarism to surface and to predominate. The new German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, a Social Democrat, though lacking Chirac’s pro-Arab credentials, shared his anti-Americanism and by 2003 was on equally as bad, if not worse terms with Washington. The Americans were not shocked by Chirac’s chauvinism since they had been taught French egoism by the master of the medium, Charles de Gaulle. German ingratitude both surprised the Americans and genuinely hurt; it exemplified de Rochefoucauld’s judgement that past favours are never forgiven.

Yet the attitude of France and Germany, shared by some of the smaller Western European countries, was not fully to be explained by personal or contingent factors. Something much larger was at work. Superficially it is easy to say that France and Germany had, during the second half of the twentieth century, become ‘European’. The rise of the European Union and the consolidation of its authority had undoubtedly encouraged first France and then Germany to look forward to a rebalancing of international power in the Atlantic world, in a fashion that would equalize the influence of its two halves, American and European. Economically that seemed attainable, for the combined population of the European Union countries exceeded that of the United States and, on the admission of new members, promised to be much larger. It was not impossible either that, with effort and by accepting economic sacrifice, an expanded Europe might eventually match the military capability of the United States. The attainment of economic and military equality, perhaps eventual superiority, depended, however, upon political evolution. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, France and Germany were pressing for the adoption by the states of the Union of a comprehensive constitution, regulating not only economic activity but also defining political institutions and their powers, including the Commission, its executive authority, the council of ministers, the parliament and the European court; the constitution also made provision for a Union president, foreign minister and military authority.

Yet the Europe envisaged by the framers of its constitution – a constitution not in the event adopted, because of the refusal of some of the constituent states to accept it – would not have imitated the United States of America of the Founding Fathers. It would initially have been less but eventually more; initially less because it left to the constituent governments more power than the American constitution left to the states, eventually more because, by accretion, the powers exercised by the Union over its constituent members would have greatly exceeded those of the American federal government. The fathers of the European ‘idea’, the Frenchman Jean Monnet and the Englishman Arthur Salter, had conceived their vision of Europe’s future as officials of the League of Nations, after the First World War. They were inspired by the hope of creating a pan-European system that would render impossible war between its member states. The only way to assure that outcome, they persuaded themselves, was to create a central authority so strong that subordinate governments would lack the means to take independent decisions. Their ‘Europe’ was therefore to be not ‘intergovernmental’ in character but ‘supranational’.

It was towards that form that ‘Europe’ gradually evolved in the years after the Second World War. Beginning with a Coal and Steel Community, to which were added an Atomic Energy Community and an Economic Community, with a European court and central bank as adjuncts, and eventually a European currency as a medium of exchange, the European Union was, on the eve of the Iraq War, when the framing of a constitution was at an advanced stage of drafting, almost the supranational body Monnet and Salter had wished to make it. Its executive, the Commission, monopolized the drafting of legislation to regularize its economic life; its parliament had rights only to approve, scarcely to alter, such laws; and the European court had authority to condemn governments in breach of Union legislation. In almost every respect it amounted to a supranational authority, to which the historic governments of Europe were subordinate.

In only one aspect was its authority deficient. It had no power to impose its will, either internally or externally. This was a crippling deficiency, its effect completely unforeseen by the European founding fathers, Monnet and Salter. They, products of an earlier and higher-minded age, were mechanistic in outlook and, believing in the power of economic sanction and collective legal condemnation to regulate misbehaviour, had apparently imagined that treaty and international law would be sufficient to enforce the supranational will. It may be that, in their appreciation of the Union’s domestic behaviour, they were correct; the fundamental authority of the Union’s institutions has not hitherto been called into question, though the failure of France and Germany to abide by the Union’s financial stability pact gives warning of trouble ahead. It is in the Union’s external relations, those both of it as a collectivity and of its individual member states, that the weakness is apparent, and never more so than over the crisis with Saddam’s Iraq. The crisis of 2002–03 revealed a fundamental breach in foreign policy attitude between ‘Europe’, both the Union itself and most of the states that compose it, and America. The crisis made it obvious that the United States (originator of the League of Nations idea of collective action that inspired ‘Europe’, to be enforced at harshest by economic sanction) had been hardened by fifty years of Cold War confrontation to settle for nothing less than bringing transgressors of international order to compliance by military action. The neo-conservatives were merely expressing a national attitude. The Europeans, once so militarist, had by contrast espoused a philosophy of international action that actually rejected action and took refuge in the belief that all conflicts of interest were to be settled by consultation, conciliation and the intervention of international agencies. The conflict of approach between ‘hard cop’ America and ‘soft cop’ Europe became manifest in the months that preceded the outbreak of the war.

Iraq’s relations with the outside world were governed, following its unsuccessful annexation of Kuwait, by a series of resolutions adopted by the United Nations, eventually to number fifteen altogether. Before the adoption of Resolution 1441 on 9 November 2002, which the United States and Britain were to use as their legal justification for instituting military action against Iraq, the most important of the relevant UN resolutions was 687, adopted immediately after the First Gulf War. Framed to legalize military action if Iraq persisted in the acquisition or development of weapons of mass destruction or their means of delivery – it should be remembered that the results of the First Gulf War had not given the victorious coalition forces the opportunity to inspect weapon sites in Iraq – it demanded unconditionally ‘the destruction, removal, rendering harmless of all chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities related thereto; and all ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres [approximately 93 miles], and related major parts and repair and production facilities’. Resolution 687 was accepted by international lawyers as reinforcing Resolution 678, that which had authorized the inception of the First Gulf War but which also legitimized all ‘subsequent relevant resolutions needed to restore international peace and security’ to the region.

Resolution 678 had underpinned the actions of the United States, Britain and other allied nations in enforcing restraint on Saddam in the years after 1991, in particular the ‘no fly’ principle in northern and southern Iraq. The heightening of Western hostility towards Saddam, following the election of President George W. Bush and 9/11, was at first largely justified by invoking 678, which remained in force. Then, as the new American administration became increasingly concerned by the threat of Iraq’s continuing with its development of weapons of mass destruction, 678 came to seem insufficient. In 1999, as the Clinton administration drew towards its close, a new resolution, 1284, had been passed in the United Nations, intended to reinforce the régime imposing inspection measures against weapons of mass destruction imposed by 687. That measure had created an inspection system known as UNSCOM, which had proved extremely effective, far more effective than recognized at the time or afterwards. UNSCOM worked inside Iraq for over seven years, discovering and destroying much of Saddam’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). As its agents could use the leverage of denying oil sales in the face of Iraqi non co-operation, its demands for access to WMD sites had usually to be obeyed, to Saddam’s disgust. UNSCOM’s operational success led eventually to his refusing its inspectors any farther facilities in 1998 and their withdrawal from the country. UNSCOM was replaced by UNMOVIC, an altogether less rigorous régime, under Resolution 1284; even 1284 was opposed by several members of the Security Council, including Russia and France, which were profiting commercially by provisions that allowed Saddam to export oil in return for humanitarian aid (the ‘oil-for-food’ programme); Saddam, like a Roman emperor of old, had instituted a rationing system to provide dutiful subjects with essentials. In any case, Saddam declined to respect 1284 and refused UN inspectors access.

Saddam’s defiance of 1284 inaugurated his downfall. It led the United States and Britain to seek a new UN resolution that would bring him to heel. Washington was less concerned by the need to restrain Saddam under legal authority. The UN Charter, though outlawing military action by one state against another unless authorized by the Security Council, provided, under Article 51, wide latitude for measures of self-defence. The United States had acted under Article 51 to attack the Taleban in Afghanistan in 2002. Britain, however, more influenced by the prevailing European distaste for military action of any sort, unless legally buttressed, was anxious to observe the proprieties. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, remained committed, however, to supporting President Bush in the war against terrorism, in which Saddam Hussein was identified by Western intelligence as a frontrunner. America was anxious to secure British support in any move against Saddam. During September and October 2002, therefore, American legal officers co-operated with their British counterparts to draft a new resolution for submission to the UN, which would authorize joint military action. Its wording was finally agreed in early November and submitted to the Security Council as Resolution 1441. It stated that Iraq was still in ‘material breach’ of Resolution 678 of 1990 and all subsequent resolutions affecting its régime. It required the Iraqi government to prove that it no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction and to co-operate with the inspectors of UNMOVIC. It allowed it a ‘final opportunity’ for co-operation; it warned that, failing such cooperation, ‘serious consequences’ would follow.

Much has been made subsequently by legalists of the Security Council’s failure to adopt its usual form of words, ‘all necessary means’, to warn of the threat of military action. That seems specious. Resolution 1441 clearly menaced Saddam with severe penalties at the hands of the responsible powers unless he opened Iraq to unrestricted inspection of its military facilities. Should he fail to do so, a repetition of 1991 would follow. Then his forces had been deployed on the territory of Kuwait, proclaimed by him, illegally, to be Iraq’s nineteenth province. What he now risked, if he persisted in intransigence, was a direct Western attack on the territory of Iraq proper.

Following the passage of Resolution 1441, there ensued a curious passage of diplomatic dissent by the larger European powers and domestic protest by their populations. The reaction to Resolution 1441 was highly ‘European’. The Union’s inner circle, France, Germany and Luxembourg, though not Italy, the latter taking unexpectedly a stoutly Atlanticist position, struggled by every means to distance themselves from the decisions of the United States, to put legal obstacles against military measures in its way and to mobilize opposition to its policy in the United Nations. Newer members of the European Union, Spain in particular, gave America wholehearted support, as did recent and aspirant member states in Eastern Europe. Popularly, a European fault line appeared. East of the old Iron Curtain, the European population came out for President Bush. Correctly recognizing Saddam as essentially Stalinist, they supported America’s determination to discipline the sort of tyrant who had created the system under which they had suffered for so many of the postwar years. Their governments took a similar position. Poland, which most valued its new status as an American ally through its membership of NATO, actually agreed to send a small military contingent to join the coalition forces. Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania granted vital staging rights to American forces. The Czech Republic and Latvia disassociated themselves from expressions of anti-American opinion. West of the old Iron Curtain, by contrast, popular antiwar majorities appeared. They were large in France and overwhelming in Germany. Even in Britain, whose government proved America’s staunchest ally throughout the diplomatic crisis of 2003 and the war that followed, many newspapers declared an anti-American position and demonstrations staged by crowds estimated to include over one million people took to the streets.

It was the active opposition of governments formally allied to the United States that most troubled Washington and caused the greatest diplomatic damage. Germany, throughout the Cold War years America’s most compliant ally on the European continent, revealed a face to Washington never previously shown. Gerhard Schroeder, its Chancellor, actually campaigned for re-election on an anti-American platform, apparently seeking to compensate for his personal unpopularity by espousing the popular mood of the moment. President Chirac of France went much farther. Chirac had a long personal involvement with Saddam’s régime. As Prime Minister in the 1970s he had received Saddam in France, escorted him on a tour of French nuclear facilities and negotiated an agreement by which France sold Iraq the reactors, one containing enough enriched nuclear fuel to construct at least three nuclear warheads. He also agreed to train 600 Iraqi scientists and technicians in nuclear technology. Under farther military agreements France supplied Iraq with $1.5 billion’s worth of military equipment, including fighters, surface-to-air missiles and air defence equipment. Much of this material was destroyed during the First Gulf War. Iraq paid in oil but also entered into trading arrangements with France which, under the oil-for-food programme, resulted in France selling Iraq $1 billion’s worth of exports as late as 2002.

Yet neither his long association with Iraq nor the pressure of a major Muslim minority in his country wholly explain Chirac’s bitter anti-Americanism in the months preceding the war. What he felt, and it was felt too by many politicians and millions of electors in France, Germany, Britain and elsewhere, was something different and new: a distaste for and hostility towards the use of military action for state purposes. The mood was not one of pacifism but of a changed outlook on the world which might be defined, in a term chosen by Professor Kenneth Minogue, as ‘Olympianism’. Olympianism is by definition supranational – the European Union is in essence supranational, not intergovernmental – and seeks to influence and eventually control the behaviour of states not by the traditional means of resorting to force as a last resort but by supplanting force by rational procedures, exercised through supranational bureaucracy and supranational legal systems and institutions. One of the most striking developments in the world since 1945 has been the rise and proliferation of such bodies. The United Nations, deficient as its powers are, is the most obvious; the Hague Tribunal, set up to try war criminals, including those who commit crimes against their own people, and the European Court of Human Rights are others. The most notable, however, is the European Union, a truly Olympian body, since it seeks to supersede the governments of its constituent member states but to do so while lacking any ultimate means to enforce its decisions. Treaties, laws and regulations – millions of regulations – are the media of its power.

To many Europeans the Union provides an example and a vision of how the whole of the world might one day be governed. They are able to believe what they do because, thus far in its existence and development, none of its major decisions have ever been rejected by a member state. The workings of the Union do seem to lend credence to the idea in which Olympians most want to trust: that laws will be obeyed by their mere promulgation and that treaties can be self-enforcing.

The idea is, of course, illusory. ‘Covenants without swords are but words’judged the supreme realist Thomas Hobbes and nothing that has happened since the seventeenth century gives reason to expect otherwise. Olympians, and particularly those who live within and are committed to the supranationalism of the European Union, have persuaded themselves differently. As long as ‘Europe’ continues to make apparent progress towards ‘ever closer union’ they can persist in the belief that civil servants will eventuallydisplace soldiers and that judges can be supreme commanders.

It was not surprising therefore that the growing prospect of a resumption of war against Saddam should, in the spring of 2003, have brought the crisis that it did in the Western world. All European governments, those recently liberated from Communist oppression excepted, were run by men affected to some degree by Olympianism. The American government, by contrast, was run by men who were emphatically not so influenced. The neo-conservatives, who included in practice the President himself, were old-fashioned believers in the irreplaceable importance of the nation state and in the ultimate primacy of arms as a means of enforcing the national will. Hence the nature of the quarrel that ensued: on one side of the Atlantic the insistence that Saddam should allow unfettered access to Iraq’s territory by inspectors authorized to go wherever they choose and see what and whomsoever they desired, under threat of unilateral military action in the event of noncompliance; on the other, an equally powerful insistence that such inspection should not be constrained by a time limit and that, if military action were to be undertaken, a farther UN resolution, beyond Resolution 1441 of 9 November 2002 which threatened ‘serious consequences’ – the ‘second resolution’ as it became known – should be adopted. In the event, as the dispute hardened, President Chirac appeared to oppose the taking of any military action at all and to be ready to use the French veto in the Security Council to oppose it.

A time limit had indeed been attached to Resolution 1441. Iraq had to declare its acceptance of the resolution within a week of its adoption. It then had thirty days to provide the UN with evidence of what weapons of mass destruction it retained, if any, or of how and when such weapons had been destroyed if that was the case. Besides providing the evidence, Iraq also had to permit the readmission of UNMOVIC, successor to the earlier UNSCOM, which, frustrated by Iraqi non co-operation, had withdrawn from the country in 1999. Not, however, before submitting a final report; UNSCOM had stated that its inspectors, who had had access to Iraqi governmental documentation, had been unable to account for 6,000 chemical aircraft bombs, seven Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles and two Russian-supplied Scuds. They had farther failed to account for much chemical and biological weapon material, including that capable of producing 26,000 litres of anthrax and 1.5 tons of VX gas. To exemplify the threat posed by such stocks, UNSCOM noted that 140 litres of VX could kill a million people.

UNMOVIC’s inspection teams arrived in Iraq on 25 November 2002. They were led by Hans Blix, a former Swedish foreign minister, not the American or British first choice. The Americans would have preferred the man who had led UNSCOM, Rolf Ekeus, another Swede who had impressed observers by his rigorous methods and his dissatisfaction at Iraqi evasions. Security Council members indulgent of Saddam’s pretensions to be a conventional head of state, including France and Russia, had opposed the re-appointment of Ekeus; the United States had opposed the choice of Blix, whom it regarded as ‘soft’, but without success. The UNMOVIC teams were accompanied by others from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), led by Mahomed ElBaradei, who would appear with Blix before the Security Council in the weeks to come. UNMOVIC’s teams, numbering almost 100 inspectors out of a strength of 270 available, began at once to visit suspect sites in Iraq and to interview Iraqi scientists identified as having knowledge which UNMOVIC needed. Resolution 1441 authorized their transferral to places outside Iraq where they could be debriefed beyond governmental supervision. There was a multiple mismatch between what the Americans and British wanted from the inspection, how Iraq was willing to co-operate with UNMOVIC’s methods and what UNMOVIC was trying to do. UNMOVIC sought to survey a country the size of France to declare it clean of WMD; the Iraqi government was concerned to provide paper evidence that it had nothing to hide; America and Britain wanted material verification that all Iraqi WMD had been destroyed. The latter, short of a physical occupation of the country, was impossible to provide; UNMOVIC had set itself an unfeasible task; Iraq, however much documentation it published, was unlikely to be believed.

So proved to be the case. On 7 December Iraq delivered to the UN office in Baghdad an enormous cache of documents, having previously displayed it to the world media. The forty-three bound volumes, written in English, six folders and twelve CDgROMs were claimed by General Hassam Muhammad Amin, the Iraqi government’s nominated liaison officer with UNMOVIC, to demonstrate that Iraq had already complied with Resolution 1441. ‘We are a country’, he said, ‘devoid of weapons of mass destruction. This fact is known to all countries including the United States of America and Britain and all those concerned.’ The delivery of the Iraqi documents to the UN caused a short-lived sensation. The BBC, with an unctuousness that would characterize much of its reporting on the politics of the crisis, declared Iraq to be ‘bullish’ in the aftermath of the documentary presentation and gave the impression that the prospect of war had receded.

When the documents were delivered for perusal to the competent authorities – UNMOVIC had an office in New York, the IAEA in Vienna – both Blix and ElBaradei announced that it would take weeks to analyse the contents, then months to verify the information in Iraq. President Bush was therefore confronted with the prospect of more delay before bringing Saddam to face the threat of military action if he did not physically demonstrate that he had disarmed. He was frustrated at the prospect and even more frustrated when Blix stated that the Iraqi disclosures would be distributed to all fifteen members of the UN Security Council. The President suspected that some would seek to protract the inspection process farther and that others – France foremost – would attempt to use the material to block resort to military action altogether. As the US had possession of the Iraqi documentation, however, Blix and potential procrastinators could be outflanked. Only the four other permanent members of the Security Council – France, Britain, Russia and China – were given a full set of the papers. The non-permanent members were provided with edited extracts.

Yet the Iraqi presentation, because of its inadequacy, provided the United States with the opportunity it now sought: to demonstrate that Saddam was defying the authority of the UN. The Iraqi papers were a tired collection of old material, disclosing nothing not already known. Hans Blix privately admitted as much. He told some of his UNMOVIC associates, ‘Saddam might not like foreigners crawling around his country but if he wants to get out of this mess, he has to engage with us’. Saddam’s difficulty, like Blix’s, was that the UN’s success in securing the readmission of UNMOVIC to Iraq solved nothing. It was posited on the notion, which became an endlessly repeated media catch phrase that somewhere in Iraq there was waiting ‘a smoking gun’ to be discovered by the inspectors. The ‘smoking gun’, a particularly vacuous media notion, would have been a cache of chemical weapons, a WMD production facility, a stock of weapons-grade nuclear material or an armoury of missiles capable of delivering warheads to ranges greater than 150 kilometres. Given the size of Iraq relative to that of the inspection teams, and the very small compass of any hiding place in which forbidden weapons could be concealed, Blix’s inspectors could have beaten the coverts for years without statistically material hope of finding anything relevant to their investigation. UNMOVIC had been sent on a wild goose chase, as Blix knew and partially admitted in the months following the Iraqi disclosure of 7 December by his begging for time. Saddam knew the same. UNMOVIC had been set the impossible task of proving a negative, that Saddam no longer had forbidden weapons. It was unlikely that, over any foreseeable period, Blix or ElBaradei could prove anything, one way or the other. Saddam was in a comparable fix. He had turned himself into a victim of his own fictions and evasions. Because of his systematic mendacity, he had lost the capacity to persuade anyone that he was telling the truth. Even had he, in the last weeks of free action he enjoyed as President of a sovereign country, had the UN inspectors escorted to the places he knew to be WMD sites, he would not have convinced the powers gathering against him that he had made a full disclosure. The tangled web of deception he had contrived in his last ten years of power was the cause of his own downfall.

President Bush was not prepared to follow Blix or anyone else through the tortuous process of an inspection fated not to produce results. On 19 December 2002, he declared Iraq to be in ‘material breach’ of Resolution 1441. Colin Powell, his Secretary of State and a known moderate, stated that ‘Iraq’s non-compliance and defiance of the international community has brought it closer to the day when he has to face the consequences. This declaration [the presentation of December 7] fails totally to move us in the direction of a peaceful solution.’

The policy of direct confrontation with Saddam met with acceptance in the United States. The administration’s equation of his defiance of the UN over WMD with its war on terrorism evoked popular support. In Europe the situation proved different. The American government was already aware that in Western Europe it could count only on Italy, Spain and Britain to support its war policy. During the first months of 2003 the British government’s difficulty in sustaining commonality of purpose with America became apparent. The beginnings of popular dissent, which were to culminate in large scale anti-war demonstrations, emerged. Much of the British media, including the BBC, revealed its hostility. Most troublingly for the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the Labour Party in Parliament, which he had controlled sinuously throughout his first years in power and at the beginning of his second term of government, began to show signs of serious dissent. Labour is a broad church, accommodating many doctrines. Two which have to be placated at all times, however, are anti-Americanism and anti-militarism, particularly if the use of military force is threatened in what might be represented as a neo-colonialist cause. Saddam was an unlikely favourite of Labour’s anti-colonialist wing. He was patently a tyrant and oppressor of his own people. He ought also to have been disfavoured by the Labour anti-war party, being one of the most flagrant regional warlords of modern times. Nevertheless, he had credentials which resonated with some Labour ideologues. He was undeniably anti-American; he was also anti-Israeli, a new enthusiasm with some Labour backbenchers; and he made himself appear a military underdog, threatened with the overwhelming force of Western military power.

Many on the Labour backbenches did not like the manifestation of military power in any form; they were, in most cases unwittingly, adherents of the Olympian outlook that believed treaty, legal agreement and diplomatic negotiation sufficient to settle international differences. When, after President Bush’s declaration of 19 December 2002 that Iraq was in ‘material breach’ of Resolution 1441, which threatened ‘serious consequences’ to Iraq for its failure fully to disclose its WMD state, a declaration falling short of the UN’s usual warning that ‘all necessary measures’ would follow, the dissenters began to demand what became known as the ‘second resolution’. They wanted, in effect, the case for military action against Iraq to be taken back to the Security Council and authorized by an additional vote.

There was no such demand in the American Congress, whose members were satisfied that fifteen UN resolutions, including 1441 but originating in 687 of March 1991, which required Iraq to accept under international supervision the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, sufficed to justify military action in the face of Saddam’s noncompliance. The British Parliament, and a sizeable portion of the British electorate, was soon to show that it dissented. By early February 2003, the antiwar movement in Europe was in full flood. On Saturday 15 February some 100 million protesters in 600 cities took to the streets; perhaps as many as 2 million demonstrated in London. They were not a rent-a-crowd of ageing anti-nuclear protestors or anti-everything dissidents. Many were members of the sober middle class, who had been touched by the Olympian ethic of opposition to any form of international action lying outside the now commonly approved limits of legal disapproval and treaty condemnation. Tony Blair, the ‘pretty straight sort of guy’, had been hoist with his own petard of decency. Many of the marchers who thronged London’s streets were exactly the people whose votes he solicited: Christian, highminded, internationalist, pro-European.

Worse was to come. The anti-war feeling in the parliamentary Labour Party was strengthening and when on 21 February the chief whip issued an instruction demanding support for a pro-war vote five days later, the dissidents began to organize. An anti-war amendment to the motion was tabled within the hour, getting sixty names underneath the statement that ‘the case for military action is not yet proven’. The Labour whips kept calm, believing that, as usually happened, much of the support would fall away on the day. The Prime Minister, his party’s chief electoral asset, lobbied hard, inviting the leading anti-war protesters to meet him to discuss their concerns. He had confidence in his own very great powers of persuasion; he also doubted his backbenchers’ willingness to weaken his standing. Many of them, however, were in an unreasonable mood. The temptation to indulge deep-seated ideological emotions – anti-Americanism, anti-militarism – was too strong to resist. The Prime Minister told the visiting German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, himself a leading opponent of any war, that he was confident of keeping the number of votes against the motion below 100, perhaps even below fifty. In the event, the tone of the debate was against the government and when the house divided on the evening of 26 February, 121 Labour members voted for the anti-war amendment. It was a deliberate slight to the Prime Minister and a serious setback for his policy.

Yet, strained as he was by the intensity of the crisis and harassed by the disaffection of many he had counted as personal as well as political friends, he retained his resilience and his belief in himself. Tony Blair is that unusual being, a politician sustained by a sense of morality. He believed New Labour, a party he had invented almost single-handedly, was a necessary force for good in his country’s domestic life. He also believed that its foreign policy was a necessary force for good in a wicked world. Soon after the vote of 26 February, on a flight to see his European ally, the Spanish Prime Minister, he made to attendant journalists a declaration of faith. Its tone was the opposite of Olympian. It had historical echoes, but not those favoured by his party opponents. He did not hark back, as so many of them did, to the idealist illusions of the appeasers of the 1930s or to the deflated expectations of the supporters of the League of Nations. He took, instead, a Churchillian tone. ‘A majority of decent and well-meaning people’, he told his little audience in the aircraft, ‘said that there was no need to confront Hitler and that those who did were warmongers.’ Then, referring to his earlier support for ‘progressive war’ in the Balkans and elsewhere, ‘progressive war’ being another of his moralistic inventions, he went on, ‘I’m proud of what we’ve done in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and, in a different way, by supporting the régime in Sierra Leone . . . if you go back now, for all the problems they have got, and you ask if we did the right thing, I believe we did. Those who benefited most from military action had been the people of those countries . . . I believe we have to do this in Iraq, the people of Iraq will be the main beneficiaries.’ In a final affirmation of his moral position as the apostle of progressive war, he replied to a questioner who asked why he was so committed to the American President’s war policy: ‘I believe in it. I am truly committed to dealing with this, irrespective of the position of America. If the Americans were not doing this, I would be pressing for them to be doing so’.

Events in the military sphere were now moving to bring about the outcome he insisted was morally justifiable, as well as politically necessary. By early March most of the forces committed to Operation Iraqi Freedom (Operation Telic in mundane British phraseology) were in place in Kuwait; 170,000 troops were on the ground, dozens of ships on station, hundreds of aircraft deployed for action, some close to the scene of coming combat, some preparing to fly from bases thousands of miles distant. The obstacles to the inception of the operation were few, and all political. Saddam persisted in his refusal to placate his enemies; perhaps after his long years of successful defiance he did not know how. In Britain the Labour Party’s dissidents were demanding yet another vote on the transition to war and drawing on popular resistance – ‘Not in My Name’ was a favourite slogan – to justify parliamentary revolt. At the United Nations, Britain and America – Britain more insistently than America, which scarcely attempted to disguise its loss of faith in the Security Council’s commitment to maintaining international order – were pressing for what had become known in Britain as the ‘second resolution’ for war, to succeed 1441. The working out of these processes would occupy the early weeks of March 2003.

On 7 March Hans Blix made a presentation – his third – of his findings in Iraq. He testified, to American displeasure and British disquiet, that the Iraqis were co-operating more fully with UNMOVIC than they had done in the past, though not to the point of full disclosure. He announced that he had investigated American claims of the existence of mobile biological warfare laboratories and underground facilities but had been unable to authenticate either. Turning to Iraqi delivery systems, he described what he had discovered about the al-Samoud missile. A development of the Russian Scud, itself an improved version of the German V-2 of 1944, its range undoubtedly, if slightly, exceeded 150 kilometres, forbidden under Resolution 687 (that range had been chosen because, subtracting the extent of Kurdish territory from Iraq proper, it would prevent Saddam from launching missiles against Israel); thirty-four al-Samoud missiles had been destroyed, about a third of the number he was satisfied existed. Given more time, at least several months, he could conclude his investigations. More time was precisely not what the Americans wanted Saddam to be allowed. Blix’s pedantic manner infuriated the Americans present at this speech; it reinforced their doubts about his suitability as head of UNMOVIC. Their frustration was reinforced when ElBaradei, speaking for the International Atomic Energy Agency, dismissed British intelligence claims that Iraq had obtained supplies of uranium from the African state of Niger. They were based, he said, on a patently forged document. As the British Prime Minister had based many of his arguments for carrying war to Iraq on an intelligence dossier, opened to the public the previous September, Britain even more than America was discountenanced by ElBaradei’s announcement. With other matters, it would return to haunt the Prime Minister when the September dossier became the centre point of a major political crisis, focused on the justification for having taken military action, in the aftermath of the war.

Blix’s presentation of 7 March and ElBaradei’s footnote to it, inaugurated the final passage of political and diplomatic bargaining before the war began. It was not one which involved the Americans, who were now set on war and held firmly to the view that justification for it was provided by the UN resolutions already adopted, beginning with 678 over ten years before and confirmed by 1441. President Bush was concerned by UN politicking only insofar as it would help Tony Blair, his principal foreign ally, to sustain his base of support in his home country. The Prime Minister, by contrast, was desperately anxious for the ‘second resolution’ in the UN, for what threatened to be a demand for a ‘second vote’ in the House of Commons and for his legal experts’ assurance of the lawfulness of taking military action, in the increasingly complex arena of international law. In the early days of March the British government concentrated on securing the second resolution in the Security Council. Even optimists despaired at swinging the vote. There were fifteen votes, the five of the permanent members – the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China – and those of the ten alternating members. A majority of nine was required. The votes of the United States and Britain were assured. China, during the Cold War aligned with Iraq, was now more concerned to maintain its new Western friendships and would either support the United States or abstain. Bulgaria and Spain would back the Anglo-American position. Pakistan would probably abstain. Germany would be opposed. The ‘swing’ voters were reckoned to be Mexico, Cameroon, Angola, Guinea and Chile. The position of France, a permanent member, a political if not military member of NATO, a pillar of the Western world, would depend upon the decision of President Chirac. Not truly an Olympian, since he took a characteristically Gallic and realist view of the primacy of national power and armed force, for all his outward commitment to the legalism of the European movement, Chirac’s voting choice would be determined entirely by French prejudice.

In the first week of March British efforts to secure the nine votes necessary for adoption of the ‘second resolution’ giving UN authority to taking war to Iraq became almost frantic. The British ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, lobbied his fellow representatives on the Security Council constantly, offering changes of wording and calling on old friendships. He was also daily, sometimes hourly, on the telephone to the Foreign Office and 10 Downing Street. All the news he brought was bad. At one stage he reported that there might be only four votes, besides those of Britain and the United States, for their resolution. Finally, on 10 March the effort to win UN approval was brought to a full stop by Jacques Chirac. In a television broadcast to the French people from his presidential offices in the Elysée Palace, he announced that France would vote against, ‘whatever the circumstances’. He seemed to imply that France would use its veto if necessary. Later his officials indicated that he had been misinterpreted: counting voting intentions as they had been declared, he knew that the Americans and British could not win. He was merely aligning himself with the majority.

That was not how his position was viewed by Britain and America. They chose to regard Chirac’s declaration as an act of betrayal. The Americans shrugged off the rebuff; they had always been prepared to act unilaterally and anyhow reposed no confidence in France. The Prime Minister was genuinely outraged. However self-deludingly, he had always believed in his personal ability to straddle the Atlantic divide, sustaining the special relationship with America while remaining on co-operative terms with his fellow Europeans, even in the face of Chirac’s Gallic nationalism. Now the friendship he believed he had forged with Chirac was shown to be hollow.

The setback was not merely personal. It also objectively undercut his position as a national leader. His personal and press staff swiftly shifted their efforts, to represent Chirac as the cause of Britain’s difficulties in winning support for the war. They could not, however, rescue him from his troubles at home. An ungrateful Labour Party, which he had led to two electoral triumphs, was reverting to type, allowing its taste for anti-Americanism and anti-militarism to overcome its political common sense. Unwillingly Blair had promised the party yet another opportunity to debate the justification for going to war and this other ‘second vote’ now monopolized the energies of the Prime Minister’s entourage. Despite Chirac’s disabling declaration, diplomatic activity continued at the United Nations. Security Council members were still seeking means to postpone a military showdown. A delay of up to forty-five days was proposed, to give Saddam a final chance to prove his willingness to disarm. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, for Britain, attached to that timetable a list of ‘benchmarks’ Saddam should be asked to meet, the surrender of all his chemical and biological agents, his mobile WMD production facilities, the destruction of all remaining al-Samoud missiles and the transfer of the thirty most important Iraqi scientists to Cyprus for a UN debriefing. Hans Blix, enthused by the ‘benchmark’ scheme, went farther. He suggested that Saddam be required to broadcast a statement to the Arab peoples admitting his faults, his evasions of the UN resolutions and his firm determination to comply with the UNMOVIC regime. For a moment the benchmark scheme looked hopeful. Then on 14 March Chile, a non-permanent Security Council member, formally proposed that Iraq be given thirty days to meet the benchmarks. The proposal was immediately quashed by the US ambassador to the UN. ‘I was asked several days ago about whether or not the President would be open to extending the deadline from thirty to forty-five days – now you could say that’s twenty-six to forty-one days. If it was a non-starter then, it’s a non-starter now.’ The Prime Minister at once told the President that he accepted the war should begin the following week, that of 17–24 March, but asked that they should have a final meeting to show common cause. The meeting was arranged to take place with the Spanish and Portuguese prime ministers in the Azores, the Portuguese islands off the African coast, on 16 March.

Neither the promise of the Azores meeting nor an American offer to embark on a new attempt to negotiate a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the ‘road map’ scheme, were sufficient to palliate the Prime Minister’s party troubles. On 17 March, immediately after his return from the Azores, where it had been agreed to give Saddam exactly twenty-four hours to comply with all outstanding UN resolutions if military action were not to begin, one of Labour’s most difficult figures, Robin Cook, formerly Foreign Secretary, currently Leader of the House of Commons, appeared at Downing Street to announce his resignation. It was not unexpected and, to his credit as a party loyalist, he indicated his willingness to minimize the difficulty it would cause the government. In his speech to the House later that day, he confined himself to expressing disbelief in the intelligence appreciation used to endorse the need for military action and to explaining his moral reservations. One of the best parliamentary speakers of his era, Cook received a considerate hearing from both sides.

Nevertheless his resignation, together with that of eight other Labour officeholders and of a legal expert at the Foreign Office, did farther damage to the Prime Minister’s stance. His inner circle held firm and continued to provide dedicated support. Unlike President Bush, however, who could count on the wholehearted endorsement of his policies by his own circle, by the cabinet, by Congress and by the overwhelming majority of the American people, still in a fervently patriotic mood created by the outrage of 9/11, Tony Blair was in a precarious and exposed position. It was an odd predicament for a national leader. On the threshold of war, Britain usually rallies around its government, whatever its party label. The country had rallied, famously, in 1939–40, when the threat was Nazi aggression. It had rallied during the Korean crisis, distant though that event was, dramatically during the Falklands and once again during the First Gulf War. Only over what was still called ‘Suez’ in 1956 had the people wavered, and then because the Labour Party in opposition had declared the conflict with Egypt to be neo-colonialist. In 2003 the spectre of Suez reappeared, with a curious difference. The Labour constituency, the industrial working class, had been pro-war in 1956 as it was in 2003; it was Labour’s middle-class constituency which had opposed military action in 1956, while the rest of the middle class had supported the Conservative government. In 2003 wide sections of the middle class, much of it politically Conservative, went the other way. The most unlikely opponents of Labour’s war policy emerged, professional people, the comfortably retired, even ex-officers. Tony Blair, a public schoolboy with distinctively officer-like characteristics, found himself suddenly isolated, dependent for control of Parliament on apparatchiks who, if in opposition, would certainly have voted against the policy he was pursuing. The later-twentieth-century, early-twenty-first-century obsession with rights, legalities and the judgement of international institutions, with Olympianism in all its aspects, had touched the great British middle-class. Once sublimely certain of the correctness of how its government acted, middle-class Britain had fallen into doubt.

It was therefore a great relief to the Prime Minister that, in the final days of the prewar crisis, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, entered an opinion that furnished legal support for his decision to join the United States in going to war against Iraq. There were other opinions: Matrix, the legal chambers of his lawyer wife, Cherie Booth, had already announced its view that a resort to war without a second UN resolution would violate international law. Lord Goldsmith, in the aftermath of Robin Cook’s resignation, argued differently. Basing his judgment on Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes the use of force for the purpose of restoring international order, he reviewed the effect of the resolutions affecting Iraq since 678 of 1990, which authorized the use of force against Iraq in support of ‘all subsequent relevant resolutions needed to restore international peace and security’. He went on to argue that a material breach of Resolution 687, which required the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction and means of delivery, such as missiles, revived authority to use force under 678 and that by Resolution 1441, ‘the UN determined that Iraq has been and remains in material breach of Resolution 687, because it had not fully complied with its obligations to disarm under that resolution’. The judgment might have been written at President Bush’s dictation. As delivered by Britain’s senior law officer, it gave full authorization to the Prime Minister to join with its fellow UN member, the United States, in opening military action against Iraq.

The only impediment to proceeding that remained was the need to win the ‘second vote’ on a motion for war in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister, anomalously, could count upon the votes of the Conservative opposition. The possibility of defeat was threatened only by his own dissidents, almost all on the backbenches. The ‘payroll’ vote, those MPs holding senior or junior government office or unpaid but semiofficial positions as parliamentary private secretaries, could be counted on to support the Prime Minister; there were 264 backbenchers, many of whom were loyalists and some, the ‘waverers’, who might be won over. Hidden in the parliamentary party, however, was a bloc of intransigents who would refuse to be moved. The party managers had been calculating its size on an almost hourly basis, analysing the politics of individuals and targeting those it hoped to win over for person-to-person interviews with senior ministers, sometimes with the Prime Minister himself. In the last resort, however, all turned on the impression Tony Blair would make in the speech he would deliver on the afternoon of 18 March as Prime Minister, leader of his party and spokesman for the nation.

Tony Blair is both a complex character and a complex personality. Upper middle-class in manner and appearance, to the distaste of many in his party, he is populist in sentiment, but ultimately immune to the temptations of popularity. Not an intellectual, though highly intelligent, his centre of gravity is moral; he has deeply held religious beliefs and an unshakeable conviction in the necessity to do what is right. He speaks easily and fluently, too much so at times, succumbing to the seduction of his own voice, and he possesses elements of the actor. An enthusiastic member of his school dramatic society, he was also a highly effective performer in court during his career as a barrister. He has great charm and the priceless political gift of appearing not to be a politician. When, however, the need arrives to speak from the heart, with force and moral conviction, he rises toweringly to the moment. That moment came on 18 March and he was heard by the House with its full attention. A few unworthy attempts at interruption, all from his own side, were ignored or brushed aside. When he moved into his peroration he commanded silence. ‘In this dilemma’, he said, ‘no choice is perfect, no cause ideal. But on this decision [to support war or not] hangs the fate of many things.… This is not the time to falter [a Churchillian echo]. This is the time for this House, not just this Government or this Prime Minister, but for this House to give a lead, to show that we will stand up for what we know to be right, to show that we will confront the tyrannies and dictatorships and terrorists who put our way of life at risk, to show at the moment of decision that we have the courage to do the right thing’.

He said more, justifying his policy of alignment with the United States, assuring the House of his commitment to constructing peace between Israel and the Palestinians, referring again to the danger of weapons of mass destruction and arguing for the correctness of President Bush’s policy of pre-emption, of anticipating attack by carrying attack to the enemy. Pre-emption and the evidence for weapons of mass destruction formed controversial passages in his speech and touched on the deepest Labour sensitivities. Nevertheless, those passages were outweighed by the fervour of his evident moral conviction. At a most difficult time for his premiership, he showed himself to be a master of the British political process and a fine national leader. When the House divided, the amendment moving that the case for war had not been made was defeated by 396 votes to 217. These included 129 Labour votes, besides those of the Liberals and other smaller parties, but the government had won. The war could now begin, with British as much as American endorsement.