Section 1.2 of the Chilcot Report discussed the difficulties the United Kingdom ran into trying to maintain its containment policy on Iraq. First, the international community and Arab states were losing interesting in Iraq, so it was more difficult to maintain sanctions against it. Second, elements in the new Bush administration were talking about removing Saddam as soon as they entered office. Despite that, London mistakenly believed that it could continue with its Iraq strategy.
At the start of the 2000s England saw Iraq as an outlaw
state. London believed that Iraq still had WMD and a nuclear program despite
United Nations weapons inspectors and in violation of U.N. resolutions. UK
intelligence reports on Iraq became even more alarmist about Iraq’s intent on
maintaining its weapons programs. As a result, the Blair government believed
that Saddam Hussein was still a threat to the Middle East. In fact, Iraq had
destroyed all its stockpiles and ended hopes of restarting its programs because
it thought that U.N. sanctions would never end. Because it had done this in
secret however and stopped cooperating with inspectors in 1998, the British
thought that Iraq was still trouble. This miscalculation was shared by
Washington and would lead to the 2003 invasion.
England still thought that the United Nations was the way to
deal with Iraq, but the situation had dramatically changed. France, Russia, and
China permanent members of the Security Council no longer believed in
containment of Iraq and wanted to end sanctions. There were other members of
the Council that were concerned about the humanitarian effects of the sanctions
on Iraq and didn’t see the country as a threat. Finally, there was little
support in the Middle East for sanctions either. International opinion had
partly changed due to an intense propaganda campaign by Baghdad that emphasized
dying and malnourished children. The fact that Iraq’s Arab neighbors wanted to
end sanctions and didn’t have problems with Iraq contradicted a basic tenet of
UK and US policy that Saddam was a regional threat.
Despite opposition in the United Nations, the Blair
government was still committed to containment. A May 1999 review for example
argued that bottling up Saddam was the only viable policy to follow. The next
year another paper said that containment was failing, and support for sanctions
was dropping as well. Saddam was manipulating the Oil for Food program to bring
in money, there were no more weapons inspections, and Iraqi propaganda about
the sufferings of the Iraqi people was working in the west. The only option
London could think of was smart sanctions that would only focus upon military
related materials. A separate document called for England to offer an end to
restrictions on Iraq’s trade if it allowed inspectors back and they were able
to confirm that Baghdad had gotten rid of its weapons programs. The problem was
Saddam was feeling no pressure to cooperate with the west. England was
realizing that the world was changing. Its original Iraq policy was forged
almost a decade ago after the Gulf War, and now many countries had different
opinions. PM Blair’s response was to push ahead with his strategy despite
little chance of success.
The new Bush administration threw another monkey wrench into
the UK’s plans. From 2000-2001 a number of British officials met with the new
White House including a Bush-Blair summit in the United States. Initially,
Washington said that Iraq was a low priority and it was in the process of
reviewing its stance. As early as December 2000 however, British diplomats were
reporting that there was talk of regime change in Iraq. When Foreign Secretary
Robin Cook went to the U.S. in February 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz said that they wanted Saddam gone, and no longer
believed in inspections or sanctions. Secretary of State Colin Powell however,
said he would work with London on a new sanctions regime in the United Nations.
When PM Blair visited the U.S. he came away believing that he and Bush were on
the same page. London was receiving different messages from different American
officials because the administration had no Iraq policy at the time. As former
Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neil told journalist Ron Suskind in The Price of Loyalty the White House
was going through all kinds of options for Iraq from smart sanctions to
military options to supporting Iraqi exiles to regime change. Before 9/11 Bush
simply told each agency to come up with its own policies while things were
under review. That process was not finished before the terrorist attacks.
Again, London responded by deciding that it had to convince the administration
of its policy of new sanctions and returning weapons inspectors even though it
knew that was opposed by powerful members of the White House.
The Blair administration entered the 2000s with its Iraq
policy adrift. It wanted to maintain the same strategy of containment and getting
the U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq it had in the 1990s. The problem was
the international community had turned against England’s stance. There was a
new government in the White House as well, and it had not figured out what it
wanted to do about Iraq. London believed that Washington was still with it even
though that wasn’t true of all the administration officials. Things would
change even more after 9/11 and PM Blair would continue to believe that he
could maintain his Iraq policy.
SOURCES
The
Iraq Inquiry, “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry,” 7/6/16
Suskind, Ron, The
Price of Loyalty, Free Press: New York, London, Sydney, 2004
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