On three occasions, the Prime Minister has been confronted in interviews with the fact that his Foreign Policy adviser, Sir David Manning, told the US administration in March 2002 that he “would not budge in” his “support for regime change”:
(1) On the Jonathan
Dimbleby Programme on ITV1, on 13 March 2005
(2) On the
pre-election programme, ASK THE LEADER on ITV1, presented by Jonathan
Dimbleby, on 2 May 2005, and
(3) On Today,
BBC Radio 4, 4 May 2005, when he was interviewed by John Humphries.
Extracts from each of these
interviews are reproduced below.
(1)
Jonathan Dimbleby Programme, ITV1, 13 March 2005
The Prime
Minister’s strategy in this interview was to deny that his stated refusal to
budge referred to regime change.
Instead, he pretended that it referred to the enforcement of Security
Council resolutions on disarmament.
JD: I think that some of those who are sceptical
and believe that you were going to go along with this [military action] in any
case will think back to what your man in Washington [David Manning] … told Bush
in March 2002 that "you would not budge from support for regime change but
you had a press, a parliament and a public" who were a bit of problem for
you. And now you keep moving the goal posts to legitimise the invasion that you
were determined to take in any case. That's what I suspect is in people's
minds...?
TB: Yes, but actually subsequent
to that, actually he didn't say that as a matter of fact, but anyway we'll
leave it to one side...
JD: .. it's in the minutes..
TB: .. it's not actually if you go and look at the minute you will see
it...
JD: What did he say?
TB: What he said was this: we have to be absolutely clear that the
development of WMD in breach of the United Nations resolutions will no longer
be tolerated. That was not really what he was saying to me incidentally, it
[was] what I was...
JD: ... he was wrong if he said it? He either didn't say that you would
not budge in support for regime change, he either didn't say that or he
misreported you.
TB: No, it's that we would not
budge in insisting that the United Nations resolutions that were outstanding,
that had been outstanding for many years, were actually enforced and that was
the crucial thing ...
This is a lie: Manning wrote to
Blair
“I said
[to Condoleeza Rice] that you would not budge in your support for regime
change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion
that was very different than anything in the States [my emphasis].”
Blair’s unwillingness to budge
referred specifically to regime change.
Furthermore, there is no mention whatsoever in the memo of outstanding
United Nations disarmament resolutions, let alone that he would not budge from
their implementation. In fact, there is
no mention of disarmament in the memo at all, apart from a suggestion that a
refusal by Saddam Hussein to accept unfettered inspections would be a powerful
argument for military action.
(2) ASK THE LEADER, ITV1, 2 May 2005
On this programme, the Prime Minister deployed a different defence to the charge that he backed regime change in March 2002, when it was put to him by Jonathan Dimbleby, a few days before the General Election.
He always backed regime change, he said, if it wasn’t possible to get compliance with UN resolutions by any other means. If he’d made up his mind for regime change in March 2002, he asked, what was the purpose of going back to the United Nations in the autumn of 2002 and giving Saddam Hussein one more chance to disarm in resolution 1441?
This is a very plausible defence, which Jonathan Dimbleby failed to breach.
The key fact that undermines this defence is that the Prime Minister didn’t want arms inspectors back in Iraq ever again. He hoped that Saddam Hussein would keep them out. He told his meeting on 23 July 2002 that “… it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors”.
It is not obvious how a desire to see Saddam Hussein refuse entry to arms inspectors can be reconciled with wanting Iraq disarmed by peaceful means – which couldn’t be done without arms inspectors being on the ground in Iraq. But it can be reconciled with wanting a pretext to take military action against Iraq with the aim of overthrowing the regime.
The purpose of “going back to the United Nations” in the autumn of 2002 was to acquire such a pretext. The aim was to persuade the Security Council to prescribe an inspection regime that was so unpalatable to Saddam Hussein that he would refuse to allow inspectors in, and to authorise military action in this event.
This plan failed to get off the drawing board because other members of the Security Council, led by France, watered down the conditions of the US/UK draft of resolution 1441 to such an extent that it was acceptable to Iraq. UN inspectors, acting under the terms of 1441, were allowed into Iraq and were allowed to go anywhere they liked.
The ploy of “going back to the United Nations” was in danger of achieving the wrong result, namely, a declaration by UN inspectors that Iraq was disarmed in accordance with Security Council resolutions. But, the US/UK averted the danger by deciding unilaterally (a) that Iraq wasn’t complying with 1441, and (b) that the Iraqi regime should be overthrown militarily because it wasn’t complying (they said).
The US/UK’s settled purpose from March 2002, if not earlier, was to change the regime in Iraq. Realistically, this could only be done by military means. For domestic purposes, the UK was anxious, if at all possible, to get the Security Council to authorise military action ostensibly to enforce disarmament resolutions, but which would inevitably lead to regime change.
But this tactic failed: in March 2003, the Security Council refused to pass a “second” resolution stating that Iraq wasn’t complying with its disarmament obligations, let alone authorise military action to effect compliance. So, committed as they were to regime change, the US/UK had no option but to go ahead without authorisation from the Security Council.
Transcript
JD: … A year before the invasion, just a year
before the invasion, your foreign affairs advisor Sir David Manning e-mailed
you from America saying that he had reassured the White House, I quote, “You
would not budge in support for regime change”, more than a year before the
war. That seems pretty clear that you
were on for regime change.
TB: But it is absolutely clear from the
statements I was making at the time publicly, never mind privately. We then
decided to go back to the United Nations and give it one last chance to work
the UN route.
JD: But you said you would not budge, Mr Blair,
from regime change. To any normal
person I suggest that means that you were absolutely on for regime change,
which was their [the US] policy to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
TB: If you couldn’t enforce the UN resolutions
by any other route, then you’d have to go down the route of regime change. You know there was this leak in the papers
the other day –
JD: With respect, you are turning around the
order of events as they were described by .. when Sir David Manning says you
would not budge in your support for regime change he went on to say you had to
“manage a press, a parliament and a public opinion”, which you knew was very
hostile to that prospect.
TB: Yes, but this was all in the context of
ensuring that you had regime change if you couldn’t get any other way of
complying with UN resolutions. And
actually that thing that was leaked the other day from July 2002 made it absolutely
clear that, if you couldn’t get compliance with UN resolutions by any other
means than regime change, it would have to be regime change, but, after those
leaks, after those memos rather, we went back to the United Nations in
November. Now if it had been, as you
say, and, as parts of the media have suggested, I’d made up my mind for regime
change, come what may, what was the purpose of going back to the United
Nations?
JD: I’m just saying…I’ve got the whole memo here
it says nothing about UN resolutions.
TB: Where is that memo from?
JD: It is from March 2002.
TB: Exactly.
Six months .. more than six months actually, eight months before the
United Nations resolutions.
JD: Precisely the point, Prime Minister.
TB: What point?
JD: You said six months before, the point that
I’m putting to you on behalf of some of the people in the audience here, you
would not budge in your support for regime change before it went to the United
Nations.
TB: Because you’re taking that, as the leak did
the other day completely out of context, because we’d made it clear that if -
I’d said this publicly incidentally in April 2002 - if you couldn’t get
compliance with UN resolutions by any other way than regime change, there
should be regime change. There was no
point in going back to the United Nations in November 2002 unless it was clear
that, if he complied with the UN resolutions, then of course you couldn’t have
had the conflict.
JD: Four days after Sir David Manning’s e-mail
to you saying you would not budge in your support for regime change, he said
that to Condi Rice after a long meeting, four days after that, Christopher
Meyer, your man in Washington, British ambassador, also e-mailed number 10
saying he had also told the Pentagon “we backed regime change” and he added in
his memo that the “plan” had to be very “clever”. What did that mean?
TB: What it means is that if you go back and try
to get international support - as was made clear incidentally all the way
through the year - if you go back and try to get international support for
regime change, without having exhausted the UN route, you weren’t going to get
support for it. That is precisely why
we went back to the United Nations in November, I mean all of this stuff that
you are putting to me has been in the public domain for ages. We went back to the United Nations in
November. We got a resolution that said
Saddam Hussein now had to let the inspectors back into Iraq; he has to comply
immediately fully and unconditionally with them. He didn’t do so and that is the reason why we went to war.
[It is
important to remember that it didn’t need a Security Council resolution in
November 2002 to get the inspectors back in.
On 16 September 2002, Iraq gave permission for the inspectors to return
to Iraq, but the US/UK prevented them going back in.
Remember also
that the impartial authorities chosen by TB and GB to be the judges of whether
Saddam Hussein had complied with resolution 1441 were TB and GB, so surprise,
surprise, they got the answer they wanted.
They then chose themselves to decide what should be done in the light of
the non-compliance perceived by themselves, and chose to take military action,
overriding the view of the Security Council, which had laid down the
obligations in the first place. DM]
JD: The point, Tony Blair, that I’m putting to
you, proposing to you, is that it is open I would have thought to a reasonable
interpretation that you had already committed yourself to a regime change by
saying to the White House in March that you would not budge from regime change
and then in order to deliver regime change because you had to manage the press
and the public opinion to quote…
TB: Let’s just take your conspiracy theory for a
moment and ask what is the point…
JD: It’s not a conspiracy theory … it’s lining
up the evidence to make sense.
TB: But the sense is this. As was being made clear publicly, never mind
privately that, if you couldn’t get compliance with international obligations
by any other route than regime change, regime change it would be. But the reason we went back to the United
Nations in November was precisely to say he had to have one last chance .. did
he take it and the answer is: no he didn’t.
[Again,
remember that it was TB and GB, not the Security Council, who decided that Iraq
was not complying, and decided that Iraq should be invaded militarily because
of the non-compliance they perceived. DM]
JD: So when you said I won’t budge from regime
change in March before your meeting in Crawford with the President, when you
said .. effectively I reassured the president I won’t budge that didn’t mean I
won’t budge what it meant was .. we may have to use regime change.
TB: What you’re doing as ever is taking these
things out of the context of which they are, when the discussion, as I’ve
openly said, was of course about regime change. All of it was in the context of if we exhausted the UN route and
he’d failed to comply.
[Remember that it was TB and GB
who decided that the UN route was exhausted in March 2003, just before the
Iraqi weather made military action difficult – which may have influenced their
decision that the UN route was exhausted in March 2003. DM]
(3) Today, BBC Radio 4, 4 May 2005
When interviewed by John Humphries on Today, the Prime Minister deployed the same defence as he had done two days earlier with Jonathan Dimbleby: he always backed regime change, he said, but only if disarmament could not be effected by other means.
Transcript
JH: … half the country believes this scenario: that
you talked to George Bush at Easter 2002, you agreed then, effectively agreed,
to go to war, you came back to this country and every subsequent action you
took was designed to win our support for a decision that you had already taken,
but were not prepared to admit you had taken.
You misled us, surely?
TB: That is what people say, and it’s simply not
right, because if I’d had the ability to get a second United Nations resolution
which I tried very hard to do. We went
back to the UN in the first place in order to try and resolve this
peacefully. What I was determined to do
–
JH: That isn’t the point though, with
respect. The question of United Nations
resolutions is not what I’m asking about.
It’s that you decided with George Bush at his ranch in the spring of
2002 that you were going to war, come what way effectively – the decision had
already been taken. And that is
supported by all sorts of things that we have learned since then, memos from
people like Sir David Manning, who talked about meetings and who briefed you
and said: “I said you would not budge in your support for regime change”. So, by March of 2002, it was perfectly
clear, according to your own Foreign Policy adviser, Sir David Manning, that
you had agreed with George Bush on regime change.
TB: But that’s simply not right. What I’d agreed –
JH: That was what was said in the memo.
TB: What happens with these things is that
they’re just lifted out of context. I
can tell you exactly what I said to President Bush.
JH: I can tell you what he said, what Sir David
Manning said in the memo: “I said you would not budge in your support for
regime change”. So, how would your own
Foreign Policy adviser believe that you supported regime change, unless you had
made it clear that you did?
TB: I did support regime change, provided that
it was impossible to get what we wanted through the United Nations route.
JH: But you told us that you were not going to
go to war to support regime change, in order to change the regime, very
specifically. You were very clear about
it.
TB: What I said was this, and I actually said it
publicly, and this is why these so-called shock horror leaks aren’t shock
horror at all. In April 2002, I
actually said at the press conference I did that I would support regime change
if it was the only way to bring back Iraq into compliance with UN resolutions,
but the reason why I raised the UN resolutions is that going down the UN route
and giving Saddam a final chance to comply is completely inconsistent with the
notion that we decided to go to war in any event, because had Saddam complied
fully, unconditionally, immediately with the UN resolution that was passed in
November 2002, after all these meetings took place, then of course there
wouldn’t have been a conflict.
So, the issue in the end is how
did we, because this all arises, I think we discussed this before, this all
arises for me out of my belief, and I may be wrong in this incidentally, but I
happen to believe it genuinely, and sincerely.
I believe that after September 2001, after the attack on America, that
it was vital that we took a completely different attitude to the whole notion
of proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, because of my
fear that if terrorism managed to get its hands on these types of weapons, then
terrorists that had killed three thousand people would kill three hundred
thousand people. And so, the reason why
we then discussed the issue of Iraq, as a live issue if you like, for the first
time after September 2001, was because that had changed the paradigm within
which I thought, we thought these things through. So, my thought then was, look, Iraq is the place to start on
WMD. It’s not that you don’t have Iran
and North Korea and Libya and the network of AQ Khan and others, who were a big
WMD problem. But the place to start was
Iraq, because of the history of UN resolutions. That’s to say, I may be wrong in this, but I thought you had to send
such a clear signal across the world that regimes from then on would know that
they had to comply with international obligations, and terrorists would have a
reduced chance of getting their hands on such weapons.
JH: But there are out there, and we return to
the subject over and over again as you know, because more information keeps
coming out in the form of leaked documents, memos and e-mails, whatever it
happens to be. Sir Christopher Meyer,
who was your ambassador, Britain’s ambassador, to America, he told Sir David
Manning in March of 2002 about a meeting that Paul Wolfowitz had had, that he
had with Paul Wolfowitz. “I opened by
sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice”. That’s what he said to you [to Manning, in
fact, not to TB]. “We backed regime
change”. So again you see all the
evidence is that you had made this decision to get rid of Saddam Hussein. And it wasn’t unless this or that or the
other happened, it was the decision that you had taken with George Bush. You had promised George Bush you go to war
with him back in February or March of 2002.
TB: That’s simply wrong, because all these –
JH: Well, how do you explain –
TB: Because they’re taken out of context, and
the context in which all the discussions were taking place –
JH: How can you take a sentence like that out of
context? “I opened by sticking very
closely to the script you used with Condi Rice. We backed regime change”.
That’s a verbatim quote.
TB: But the script that we used throughout was
the same script, John, which was, and it was announced publicly, never mind privately,
was that if we could not secure compliance with international obligations by
any other way than regime change then it would be regime change. But I can assure throughout the entirety of
all those meetings the same thing was being said. And, indeed, I had the occasion when this leak came out to go
back over some of the other documents describing positions and meetings that
took place. It was made absolutely
clear that we had to exhaust the UN route.
JH: That isn’t what you told .. You see, you had
a meeting in July 2002, just a few months after that, a meeting with Bush. “When the Prime Minister – this is the
minute of the meeting – when the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President
Bush at Crawford he said that the UK would support military action to bring
about regime change.” You didn’t tell
us that, you didn’t tell the people of this country that that was your
decision.
[To be precise, JH’s quote is
from the Foreign Office briefing paper for the July meeting, not the minute of
the meeting itself.]
TB: Look, as I keep saying to you, that was not
the case. We would support regime
change if –
JH: So the minute was wrong?
TB: Well, the minute is just taken out of
context, because there were all sorts –
JH: Everything appears to have been taken out of
context.
TB: These particular things are because people
want to make a case, which as I say is completely inconsistent with going down
the UN route, that I agreed with President Bush at the meeting back in March or
April 2002 that we would go to war in any event. That is simply not true.
The reason we went back to the United Nations in November 2002 was
precisely because we made it clear that there had to be an exhausting of the UN
route, because you couldn’t make the case for regime change unless it was very,
very clear that was the only way to secure compliance with international law.
JH: You told Jeremy Paxman we had 250,000 UK and
US troops there in March 2003. I
had a decision to make as to whether to leave Saddam there or remove him. I decided to remove him. The reason we had all those troops there was
that they had been sent there knowing the war was going to be inevitable. And you didn’t have to decide yourself to
remove him, did you? The United States
could have done it without us, couldn’t it?
TB: Well, there are two points there. The first thing is: when we went back to the
United Nations in November 2002.
Remember, the history of this that Saddam was in breach of UN
resolutions, and had refused to let the weapons inspectors back into Iraq. But that’s true, the only reason he actually
let them back into Iraq was because we had the troops down there. Now, the troops were there in case he didn’t
comply. He was supposed to comply
fully, immediately and unconditionally and didn’t do so. Now, in respect of the second point, I don’t
know whether it’s the case that the Americans would have done this on their own
or not.
JH: The greatest military power the world has
ever seen against a tin pot dictator.
They could have done it … I
decided to remove him. That has such a
hubristic ring to it.
TB: It’s not hubristic, it’s simply trying to
explain a decision. Now, it’s true we
could have withdrawn. We could have
backed away as a country. I didn’t
think that was right. I thought that
would have been a wrong decision, a cowardly decision.
JH: But we were in that position, because of a
decision you’d already taken.
TB: That simply isn’t the case, otherwise there
would be no purpose in having gone down the UN route. I made it clear, I think I’ve said this before, but I’ve done so
many interviews running over this ground so many times. I think I’ve said this before. But back in November 2002, when we had the
UN resolution, I made it absolutely clear that if Saddam complies with UN
resolution 1441 there’s nothing can be done, even though the regime is an
abhorrent regime and it would be in one sense it would be a good thing to get
rid of it in any event, given the death and destruction he caused to his own
people and to the region. But he
didn’t. The reason I explained the
decision in this way, I’m sorry I don’t mean to, to, to, I didn’t mean it to be
explained in a hubristic way, I’m simply trying to explain to people that when
you then go to March 2003, and it was impossible to get a fresh resolution with
an ultimatum, in order to enforce compliance, then I had the decision, I mean
either we backed away or we removed him.
[There was another alternative,
which was to continue inspection indefinitely.
But it was impossible to bring about regime change by inspection. DM]