In the months immediately before the March 2003 invasion of the Iraq the number one priority of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government was getting a second United Nations resolution to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein. This was despite the fact that the weapons inspectors had found nothing, and France, Russia and others on the U.N. Security Council opposed going to war. Despite that Blair was convinced that he could win the day. He would be proved wrong again and again.
In January 2003 PM Blair met with President George Bush and
was promised a second U.N. resolution even though the White House staff was
telling him otherwise. The two leaders met on January 31 when it was already
becoming clear that the war would start in March no matter what. Bush agreed to
push for a second resolution because Blair needed one to gain political support
back in England. This was despite the fact that Bush, Vice President Dick
Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice were opposed to the idea, and Secretary of State Colin Powell
said a new one probably couldn’t get passed anyway. Blair’s only victory in the
entire Iraq conflict was convincing Bush to go to the United Nations. Bush appreciated
Blair’s friendship and support and was willing to go this route despite his own
reservations to help the prime minister. Blair on the other hand believed that
he could win over the U.N. to his side despite all the evidence he would fail.
One of the reasons why Blair thought a second resolution was
still possible was that he didn’t believe Iraq was cooperating with weapons
inspections. At the start of February he told parliament that if Iraq continued
to not meet its obligations to the inspectors it would be in material breach
and that would justify a new resolution. This was largely based upon the
reports he was receiving like one from the Foreign Office that said Iraq’s
weapons declaration didn’t reveal anything new and that it wasn’t working with
the inspectors on certain issues. Blair was so convinced that he could win the
day that he told Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar that their two
countries should draft a new resolution. The problems with Blair’s thinking
were two fold. First, despite the inspectors saying Iraq had not come clean on
everything their overall reporting was that they found no WMD or active
programs. Second, there was little support amongst the other members of the
U.N. Security Council for going to war.
Members of the Security Council were open about their
support for continued inspections and opposition to any use of force against
Iraq. On February 5 Secretary of State Powell gave his presentation to the U.N.
on Iraq’s WMD and ties to terrorism. Russia’s Foreign Minister replied that
there was no time limit on the inspections so there was no reason to end them.
He said they should take as long as they needed. France believed that the inspections
were working and should continue. On February 10 the Foreign Office told
Downing Street that there were only four countries supporting a second
resolution, the U.S. England, Bulgaria and Spain and that getting a new
resolution therefore was impossible. This had been true for quite some time.
France and Russia had been the greatest skeptics of Washington and London’s
call for confronting Iraq, and several others on the Security Council were
unconvinced as well. Blair still thought he could change their minds despite
the evidence to the contrary.
Blair’s position was also undermined by reports by the
inspectors. On February 14 the head inspectors gave their latest report to the
Security Council. Hans Blix told the body that no WMD had been found but there
were some unaccounted anthrax and VX stocks that Iraq claimed it unilaterally
destroyed. Mohammed El Baradei from the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) told the Council no evidence of a nuclear weapons program had been
found, but there were still some unresolved issues. The next month, Blix
reported that Iraq was doing more, but it still was still not fully
cooperating. El Baradei said that IAEA could soon finish its work because it
was finding nothing including evidence of aluminum tubes for centrifuges,
magnets for a nuclear bomb program, or the purchase of uranium from Niger. These
briefings were no different from the ones before and afterward. Iraq was
working with the U.N., but not on everything. The unaccounted for WMD stocks
would always remain an issue, but Iraq was telling the truth it had destroyed
all of its weapons stocks. The problem was it did it secretly and didn’t
document it so this would always be an issue. On the nuclear front there was no
such ambiguity. The IAEA just wanted to know what Baghdad had done in the past
with its program, but repeatedly said no active weapons work was going on. Both
London and Washington picked on the negatives and presented them as the only
thing of importance coming from the inspectors despite the larger picture that
nothing was being found. That’s because the two countries believed Iraq would
always hide what it was doing like it did in the 1990s. They didn’t expect the
U.N. to disarm Iraq just to provide some type of justification for removing
Saddam. The non-cooperation therefore, was all they cared about.
The last important bit of information from this section is
an intelligence report from February on Iraq, WMD ad Al Qaeda. On February 10
the Joint International Council issued a paper saying that any war would
increase the threat of terrorism in the world, and that if Saddam believed that
his regime would fall he might give his WMD to terrorists. Iraq might also
resort to terrorism in the case of war, but it had limited assets. At the same
time, the JIC found no intelligence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection. It said
that Al Qaeda members were in Iraq, but didn’t know of any relationship to the
government. This mostly had to do with Ansar al-Islam in Kurdistan which
received Al Qaeda members from Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion. Both U.S.
and British intelligence were sure that Iraq had WMD. The CIA and MI6 also
thought as war approached Saddam would be more inclined to share his weapons
with terrorists in a last gasp of desperation. Also like the CIA, The British
didn’t believe there was any operational cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
While the Bush administration ignored that and claimed the two worked together,
the Blair government never made that assertion.
SOURCES
The Iraq Inquiry, “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry,” 7/6/16
Other stores on the Chilcot Report
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