Back to the future: the USA, the UK and Iraq
The US threatens to attack Iraq and is backed by the UK. There are objections in the UN Security Council from Russia and France. A large task force is assembled. Guess what happens next? Not a lot. There is a diplomatic crisis temporarily resolved after the intervention of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and no invasion takes place because this is 1998 not 2003.
In all the ferment about the second Gulf war there was hardly any reference to the near miss five years earlier. Only the veteran journalist Alastair Cooke gave the 1998 crisis any serious discussion in two editions of his ‘Letter from America’, broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 15 June and 11 August this year.
The story is instructive on two levels. First because it suggests that it may be wrong to claim that if Clinton or Gore had been in the White House there would have been no war and secondly for what it tells us about British foreign policy in the Blair era.
Let’s look at the details. The autumn of 1997 saw deteriorating relations between the USA and Iraq. The issue was Iraq’s unwillingness to open to UN inspectors all sites where there was suspected research and development of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Clinton complained that Saddam Hussein was not co-operating with the UN and argued that he would have to be punished unless he changed both his ideas and his behaviour. Blair’s government was fully behind the US position and in November both Washington and London began work on a resolution which they hoped would sail through the UN Security Council, thereby legitimising action against Saddam. Meanwhile military preparations were made on both sides of the Atlantic. By February 1998 there was a powerful US task force stationed in the region, comprising two aircraft carriers (the Nimitz and the George Washington, each with 50 warplanes), ‘at least a half-dozen Navy vessels equipped with precision-guided Tomahawk cruise missiles’, 24,500 ground troops, and 174 Air Force warplanes including Stealth bombers and B1s. The Americans were supported by a sizeable British presence which included the aircraft carrier the Invincible, 50 Tornado ground-attack planes and special forces.(1)
The robust Anglo-American position was not shared by others: there was to be no reemergence of the 1991 anti-Iraq coalition. Within the middle east Egypt dissented and Saudi Arabia made it clear that it would not provide a base for US troops in action against Iraq. The Russians, the French and the Chinese called for diplomatic measures and opposed military action against Saddam. They were encouraged by offers made in Baghdad to open some sites to the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM: mainly weapon inspectors), arguing that Iraq could be peacefully persuaded to open all its doors in time. These Iraqi concessions were not good enough for Clinton and Blair and the British Prime Minister embarked on some personal diplomacy designed to try to win over Security Council members to the US-UK position. In Washington in February he invoked the special relationship, (2) expanded on the Iraqi threat and committed the UK to the use of force unless Iraq provided unconditional access to UNSCOM.
Despite the best efforts of Blair, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and the US Secretary of State Albright there was no reconciliation between the Anglo-Americans on one side and the other Security Council members on the other. Alastair Cooke reported during the second weekend in February 1998 that rather than tolerate a ‘hopeless stalemate’, Clinton ‘was ready to give up on the United Nations and go into Iraq with Britain’. Clinton and Blair both explained that they would prefer a diplomatic resolution of the crisis but failing this, said Clinton on 4 February, ‘one way or another, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line.'(3) If the UN would not play ball it would have to be sidelined. But just as the war plan was about to swing into action the Lewinsky affair hit the headlines and the US President was left grappling with an extraordinary domestic crisis which went all the way to impeachment. This shattered the domestic political consensus needed for action against Iraq and the UN was able to step in, win concessions from Baghdad and defuse the crisis. Some months later John Bolton, a conservative who was to become head of Arms Control and International Security in George W. Bush’s State Department, pointed to ‘a very deliberate effort to avoid a confrontation with Iraq’ and argued that ‘a desire not to have a foreign policy crisis in the middle of the President’s Lewinsky testimony’ may have been responsible for the change in policy’. (4) And there was no grand assault, just some bombing of suspicious sites by American and British planes at the end of the year.
What do these events tell us? First, that there was never any link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The US conflict with radical Islam goes back not to 2001 but to 1979, when the Shah of Iran was toppled. His fall was a huge setback for Washington’s ability to project its own influence and power throughout Near and Middle East. But Iran’s replacement as a strategic ally by Iraq would reverse this defeat and provide Washington with the kind of regional influence it lost with the fall of the Shah. This would guarantee access to plentiful supplies of oil in a pro-western political environment, increase leverage over the Arab states in the hope that they would respond by backing the moderate Palestinians, and through the construction of a pro-western Iraq provide a counterweight to the more radical Islamic regimes of Iran and (then) Afghanistan.
American protection?
As Henry Kissinger said in December 1998:
‘Saddam is symbolic of the inability of the United States to dominate the situation in the Gulf and the longer he stays the surer it is that the other countries in the region will lose confidence in the American ability to protect them.’ (5)
In other words the longer decisive action against Iraq was delayed the weaker would be the US position in the region. The vulnerability and ‘weapons of mass destruction’ capacity of the Saddam Hussein regime was a pretext for the reestablishment of American influence: up to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 Washington had hoped the Ba’athist regime in Baghdad might do this job, but it had proved an unreliable ally and one with some dangerous toys into the bargain.
Secondly, this project was not the monopoly of the ‘neo-conservative” but in fact consensual in the Beltway, the arguments being about the manner of its execution. However these arguments were significant. In 1998 there was no talk of ‘regime change’ by the White House. The idea was to disarm Saddam Hussein completely and use UNSCOM and sanctions to police the country, at the same time covertly encouraging groups which would be in a position to stage a military coup. This was not enough for some: on 26 January 1998 Clinton received a letter calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein because he is a ‘hazard a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil’. The President was urged to ‘seize the opportunity and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the US and our friends and allies around the world’. The foundation of this strategy was to be ‘the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime’. The signatories of this letter were all to hold positions in the George W. Bush administration they included familiar names such as Donald Rumsfeld (Defense Secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), Richard Perle, Richard Armitage (number two at the State Department, and John Bolton (see above). These were the neo-conservatives, openly writing on behalf of their right-wing think tank, the Project for the New American Century, and they wanted an invasion whereas Clinton thought that strategic bombing and internal subversion would be adequate.(6)
Thirdly, US plans were known to its allies and to the leading middle eastern powers who opposed this bid for hegemony and sought to mobilise the UN against it.
Fourthly, the Twin Towers atrocity and the subsequent ‘war against terror’ declared by the George W. Bush administration gave it the chance to pursue the neo-conservative solution to the question of Iraq. The issue was not connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq, a faintly preposterous scenario which stubbornly refused to come to life despite Washington’s rather desperate efforts to convince the world. It was about the longer-term objective of projecting American power into the Near and Middle East and, as Kissinger had pointed out in 1998, Saddam Hussein, weak though he was, had become an obstacle to this process given that his continued survival fed perceptions of US weakness in the area.(7) Here is the connection to the ‘war against terror’: it was to do not with WMD but with the reinforcement of US credibility and strategy. Achievement of the first would dismay enemies and encourage allies; success with the second would (so it was hoped) enhance Washington’s ability to strike at al-Qaeda by increasing its bargaining position in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia, where al-Qaeda was believed to have supporters, materials, and influence, albeit in widely differing degrees.
Why did Blair back the US?
The British government was as solidly behind Clinton as it was to be behind Bush. Why did Blair back the USA both times, going against Britain’s allies in the EU on both occasions and in 2003 defying the overwhelming majority of public opinion into the bargain? In view of his later support for Bush, Blair’s backing for Clinton in 1998 cannot be explained simply by the closer relationship he is supposed to have had with the former President and the joint enthusiasm for the ‘third way’ of the two men. In part the answer goes to the heart of Blair’s ‘new Labour’ administration. This has never made any secret of its Atlanticism, many of its key advisers and ministers having spent years as members of the ‘British-American Project for the Successor Generation’, established in the mid-1980s to strengthen the special relationship and develop a common US-UK position on key questions of international economics and strategy.(8) The showdown with Iraq was an opportunity for the Blair administration to demonstrate this Anglo-American solidarity, revealing a conviction that it was central to the defence of Britain’s national interest. More than this, Blair’s stance was a sign that Atlanticism in the UK was now bipartisan. After 1979 the two major political parties had gone separate ways on the special relationship: under Thatcher the Tories had drawn closer to the USA than they had been under Heath; while Labour under Foot and Kinnock had adopted a stance critical of the USA and its role in the world (though the process of rapprochement started under Kinnock after the 1987 election defeat). In the Iraq crises of 1998 and 2003 there was no difference between Labour and the Conservatives; foreign policy had been taken out of party politics. This protected the government from unpopularity: whatever the electorate thought about the invasion of Iraq there was no major political outlet for those who dissented, unlike in 1956 when Labour had come out against Anthony Eden’s disastrous Suez venture. Under Blair pragmatism and principle went together.
Yet there was more to Blair’s position on Iraq than commitment to the special relationship. In 1998 his backing for Clinton was relatively uncontroversial. In 2003 his support for Bush was deeply unpopular not just in the country but in the Labour Party and even among those who were supporters of the special relationship. Robin Cook, a former Foreign Secretary, resigned from the Cabinet. Jack Straw, the incumbent in 2003, advised Blair against providing anything more than moral support for the US invasion. (9) There was no enthusiasm in the Foreign Office and the defence, intelligence and security establishments were divided.(10) Reasons for the depth of opposition included distrust of the ambitions of the George W. Bush administration, anxiety about isolation from allies in the EU, fear of terrorist reprisals at home, and a well-founded disbelief that Iraq was anywhere near as threatening as Blair claimed. Yet the Prime Minister stood by the President. The infamous 10 Downing Street Dossier on Iraq of September 2002 misleadingly argued that Saddam’s WMD capacity was such that ‘inaction is no longer an option’. But the real point of the document was its place in a government strategy of preparing the public for war: work on the Dossier started in the autumn of 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11. (11) Was it then that the George W. Bush administration decided to go to war with Iraq, once the Taliban had been routed? And did Blair agree to crank up the Downing Street publicity machine at that stage so that whatever the fate of his efforts to multilateralise the Iraq war the USA and the UK would stick together?
The extra ingredient
The extra ingredient which Blair possesses and which made him firm about going to war is his moralistic approach to international affairs. The Labour conference of October 2001 saw a glimpse of this. (12) A more comprehensive statement of the Prime Minister’s world view appeared in an Observer article the following year, written by ‘a senior diplomat’ called Robert Cooper. Until after the 2001 election, at which point he went back into the Foreign Office, Cooper was ‘one of Tony Blair’s close personal foreign policy advisers’.(13)
Cooper’s argument rested on the proposition that the world was divided between ‘post-modern’ and the ‘modern’ states. The former no longer wished to fight or conquer, aspired to security via ‘transparency’, accepted voluntary codes to govern behaviour, and collaborated across national boundaries. The latter were still operating ‘by the principles of empire and the supremacy of the national interest’. Stability in regions where ‘modern’ states predominated would only be achieved as a result of a balance of power but there were few parts of the world where the conditions for this existed. Meanwhile the was a ‘sharp risk’ that in some regions where states were in competition ‘there may soon be a nuclear element in the equation’. How to deal with this? Cooper’s answer was clear:
‘…when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the post-modern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era force, preemptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle…’ (emphases added).
A new kind of imperialism
What is needed then is a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values. We can already discern its outline: an imperialism which, like all imperialism, aims to bring order and organisation but which rests today on the voluntary principle. (14)
In the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Cooper’s thinking was regarded as ‘most adventurous’ (15) (code for ‘unsound’) but Blair has always been open to arguments of this kind. In February 1998 he had called Saddam ‘an evil dictator’ who posed ‘a fundamental challenge to world peace’ and who would have to give up his weapons of mass destruction through diplomacy or be relieved of them by force. It is clear that the Prime Minister has a deep sense of Mission, a belief that it is the duty of the advanced powers to intervene in any part of the world which he or his advisers identify as unstable. This duty cannot always be fulfilled. Indeed for Blair the only times when it can be executed are when the US and the UK march in step, as they did over Kosovo and in Iraq, thanks to Clinton and Bush. Pro-Americanism and liberal imperialism made Blair determined to act in the interests of his own concept of a ‘new world order’, using ‘force, pre-emptive attack and deception’.(16) For the Prime Minister, standing aside from the US assault on Iraq would not only represent a missed opportunity in terms of future regional and global security, it would also damage the Anglo-American partnership essential to a more stable and prosperous future for all the peoples on this planet. This is why Britain was ready to go to war with Iraq early in 1998 and did so in 2003.
The Gulf crisis of 1997-98 reveals the objectives of American and British policy in the middle east. Two different types of western imperialism marched together: the Pax Americana and Blair’s liberal imperialism the methods of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coming to the rescue of the world in the twenty-first. The crises were not mainly about WMD and al-Qaeda had very little to do with it. The US went to war so that it could invade Iraq and establish hegemony over the Middle East. The UK joined in because Tony Blair believed that the creation by force of a new, ‘post-modern’ order in the Middle East would simultaneously benefit the West, the inhabitants of the area, and the cause of global stability. Never before has such a fortunate reconciliation been achieved; but history was never a strong point of ‘new’ Labour.
Notes
1 ‘Further US Buildup in Gulf is Anticipated’, New York Times, 1 February 1998
2 ‘We have stood together before in the face of tyranny. Today in the face of the threat from Saddam Hussein we must stand together once more,’ he said. ‘Clinton and Blair unite at the White House’, BBC News, 5 February 1998. At the meeting Blair also branded Saddam ‘a completely ruthless dictator who must be stopped’ exactly the same kind of rhetoric used in 2002-2003.
3 New York Times, 7 February 1998
4 Interview of Bolton by Elizabeth Farnsworth on ‘The Newshour with Jim Lehrer’, 14 August 1998.
5 Transcript of ‘OnLine Newshour’ with Jim Lehrer, 21 December 1998.
6 Neil Mackay, ‘Rumsfeld urged Clinton to attack Iraq’, Sunday Herald (Glasgow), 16 March 2003.
7 Saddam Hussein appears to have been convinced that the USA would invade sooner or later and that conventional military opposition would fail. In the aftermath of the 1998 showdown with Clinton and Blair he therefore began to lay the foundations of a resistance network capable of sabotaging and disrupting an occupation. See Nick Fielding, ‘Saddam set up his resistance five years ago’, Sunday Times, 21 September 2003.
8 The work of Tom Easton in Lobster 33 (1997) and Lobster 45 (2003) is especially useful here.
9 New Statesman journalist John Kampfner on BBC’s ‘Frost on Sunday’, 14 September 2003.
10 Private information; it also became clear with the testimonies of witnesses before the Hutton enquiry.
11 Sunday Herald, 22 September 2002.
12 See Scott Newton, ‘Blair and Gladstone’, Lobster 42 (2001/2), pp. 27-8.
13 Hugo Young, ‘A new imperialism cooked up on a Texan barbecue’, The Guardian, 2 April 2002.
14 Robert Cooper, ‘The new liberal imperialism’, Observer, 7 April 2002.
15 Hugo Young, ‘A new imperialism cooked up on a Texan barbecue’, The Guardian, 4 April 2002. Young for years had excellent Foreign Office contacts.
16 Deception of his own electorate, apparently, as well as of the wider world.