Tony Blair’s decision to back George W. Bush in his attack on Iraq will go down as a defining moment for Blair, and for Britain. As Ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock was centre stage in the dramatic months leading up to the Iraq war. After the war he was Special Envoy for Iraq, the UK’s highest authority on the ground, and he worked side by side with Paul Bremer, the US administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, in Baghdad and saw first-hand the impact of the divisive turf wars back in Washington.
He kept a diary of what he witnessed in Iraq as the security situation deteriorated and has spoken remarkably candidly about the US-led administration. This extraordinary book is a record of everything he saw.
Greenstock writes openly about US–UK relations and takes his readers behind closed doors in the tumultuous days leading up to the Iraq war. Through his eyes we see the actions and interactions of key players in New York, Washington, London, Paris and the Middle East. To what extent was the Bush administration determined to attack Iraq come what may? What promise did Blair extract in exchange for backing Bush? How important was Israel to American calculations? Was the war legal? What effect is it continuing to have on Britain’s long-term relations with America and Europe? No one is better positioned to set the story of Britain’s decision to go to war in its international context.
Held back from publication when originally written in 2005, and now revised with a new foreword and epilogue following the publication of the Chilcot Report, Iraq: The Cost of War is a dramatic and groundbreaking blow-by-blow account of one of the most pivotal and controversial conflicts in recent world history.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock joined the Diplomatic Service in 1969. In the early 70s, he studied Arabic in Lebanon and was posted to Dubai and Washington. He later served in Saudi Arabia and Paris, worked on Bosnia and the Balkans in the 1990s, and returned for a second stint in Washington before becoming the Foreign Office’s Political Director in London. Greenstock was UK Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York from 1998 to 2003, and then went to Baghdad in September 2003 as UK Special Envoy for Iraq. He returned from Baghdad in March 2004 and retired from the Foreign Office. He subsequently worked as Director of the Ditchley Foundation and then Chairman of the UN Association in the UK, and is currently Chairman of Gatehouse Advisory Partners Ltd and of Lambert Energy Advisory Ltd.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473539532
Version 1.0
Published by William Heinemann 2016
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Jeremy Greenstock 2016
Jeremy Greenstock has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2016 by William Heinemann
‘Sonnets from China XV (‘Embassy’)’, copyright © 1939, 1945 by W. H. Auden, renewed 1973 by The Estate of W. H. Auden; from W. H. Auden Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, and Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
William Heinemann
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
www.penguin.co.uk
William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781785151255
For Anne,
who suspected long before I did that Saddam had no WMD
In 2005 I wrote and submitted for publication a book about my involvement, as UK Ambassador to the United Nations and later as UK Special Envoy for Iraq, in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion of March 2003 and in the aftermath on the ground in Baghdad.
In July of that year, Jack Straw, then Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, asked me to delay publication until the Ministers involved had left office. He also expressed unhappiness with the concept of Government servants publishing comment on their official work. I therefore withdrew the text from the publishers and cancelled my contract with them. When the Chilcot Inquiry was set up in 2009, I decided to wait until the Inquiry reported before reconsidering publication. Now that the Report is in the public domain, I feel it is a more appropriate moment to re-present my account. While the Iraq story will never be anything but controversial, I hope the passage of time makes my decision to publish less problematic. I offer my apologies to those who disagree.
My main objective in writing this first-hand account had originally been to contribute to the history of the most significant foreign policy issue of the early years of the new millennium, and to attempt some wider lessons for policy-makers in the field of crisis-intervention. The subsequent inquiries in the United States and the United Kingdom, together with a number of books about the Iraq invasion and its aftermath, have largely performed this second function. But the British perspective of what happened behind the scenes at the UN in the lead-up to the invasion and in Baghdad during the Coalition period has not been presented in narrative form. I believe there is still room for a story to be told that sets in a live context the decisions taken and the mistakes committed, and perhaps makes more intelligible the swirl of conflicting considerations that weighed on political leaders at the time.
For this reason I have kept the original text of the 2005 book almost entirely unchanged. Some references to events and personalities have been clarified, to assist memories with the passing of time, and a few passages have been abbreviated where the detail has become unnecessary. But I have resisted the temptation to make any alterations with the benefit of hindsight.
The only new element is the Epilogue, written in the summer of 2016, which tries to summarise the impact of the Iraq saga on the countries involved in it, on the conduct of foreign policy since that time, and on the perception of military intervention as a foreign policy instrument. The second decade of the twenty-first century has brought us a world of much greater openness, equality and complexity, where the attempts of the more powerful nations to exercise their influence have begun to meet strong resistance both from lesser nations and from international public opinion. The use of hard power without an accompanying position of international legitimacy or persuasive justification has become much more difficult, even when a dictator’s defiance of the UN security Council’s ressolutions presents an argument for action.
The Iraq intervention probably accelerated this trend. It shows the limits of a superpower’s freedom of action without severe cost if it fails to gather broad international support. It also underlines the unwisdom of ignoring the force of the precepts set out in the Charter of the United Nations. At the time it seemed that the UN had been gravely damaged by its failure to deal either with Saddam Hussein’s contraventions of its resolutions or with the insistence of the United States, backed by the UK, on the unilateral use of force. But the UN’s organs and representatives turned out to have called the situation more accurately than those nations that prioritised their own sovereign prerogative. This truth has not prevented a continuing slide in international affairs towards increasingly subjective and nationalistic decision-making by nation states; and the leading role of the UN in establishing international justice and legitimacy still requires greater promotion and protection. But the strength of the Iraq story as a cautionary tale will continue to stand out as the history of the new millennium evolves.
This book is not an academic treatment of the Iraq story, nor does it qualify as historical research of the subject. I have written my account of things as I saw them, without consulting others who worked much closer to the decision-making centre. It is offered as one individual’s view of events for historians to make use of as they see fit, and for readers to gain a more intimate, and I hope understandable, picture of the workings of the UN, of the intricacies of foreign policy decision-making and of the operations of the extraordinary entity set up to govern Iraq after the invasion.
It is also offered with an element of apology to the people of Iraq. The US and the UK helped them to escape the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s rule, but failed to ensure that what followed shaped a better life for them and their country. We underestimated the resources required to create a new political structure for Iraq and we miscalculated the steps to a secure and coherent condition for the country. Iraqis too have made mistakes, as any nation will in developing a new system for itself. But the Coalition could have provided them with a better starting-point than the one they inherited on 30 June 2004. I shall follow their future progress with interest and affection, and trust that the next generation will manage to evolve a society of far higher quality than the one that Saddam had produced for them by March 2003.
London, September 2016
The story of Iraq is the story of the application of American power. For reach and for superiority above all imaginable adversaries there has never been a power like it. It can deliver destruction anywhere on earth within hours and no combination of other nations or alliances can defeat it. Year by year the military and technological gap between the United States and the rest of the world is growing.
Yet all human power is finite. What happens when power fails to deliver? Iraq is an unfinished story, but its travails have already become a symptom of the limits of power, conventionally defined. The way in which Iraq was chosen as the focus of war and change, and the manner in which it was administered after the 2003 conflict, point to some fundamental realities about the world and its workings which will affect us all if they are not understood in the handling of future problems. That does not just mean that the United States made some significant mistakes. It also means that others have to understand and respect the responsibility they have ceded to the United States to keep the world safe.
The United States likes to have friends, but it also likes to have independent control. Washington has an experience of directing massive power which others can only imagine, and US administrations require decisions on the use of that power to be taken only by Americans. They have an acute sense of duty in serving no one but the American people, whose collective attachment to freedom and individual rights tolerates no interference. Europeans can understand that even if they are frustrated by it.
With globalisation, however, the wheel has turned. The New World is invading the Old as American interests become pervasively global. An overpopulated, under-nourished and culturally divided world, living under a fragile sky, will not always respond to the force of arms or dollars. Iraq may be seen by future generations as a turning-point in US interaction with the rest of the world, because a policy which promised security and justice failed to deliver either. It is as if the two great attributes of the single superpower – protector of freedom and projector of power – are running at cross purposes. Whether this turns out to be an aberration or a trend, we need to know what happened and to see if lessons can be learnt.
As the UK’s Ambassador at the United Nations and then Special Envoy in Baghdad, I observed parts of the Iraq saga from close up. I sympathised with the reasons for confronting Saddam Hussein and was as deceived as almost everyone else at the time by his apparent capability in weapons of mass destruction. But I was unconvinced that force had to be used on the March 2003 timing, and disappointed and frustrated by the handling of the post-conflict administration.
These feelings came to a head on the day I left Iraq after seven months of direct involvement with the US-led Coalition’s administration of the country. The journey to Baghdad airport is short but scary. Once you have left the artificial safety of the American protected zone on the Tigris’s north bank, weaving through the chicane of concrete barriers at the exit point, you rumble over narrow bridges and down a highway where the undergrowth presses in and offers plenty of scope for an ambush. I used to count the minutes to the entrance to the airport security perimeter. My sense of relief that day as the RAF HS 125 spiralled up off the runway and soared out over the Western Desert was very marked. But with it came an equally strong regret at leaving behind a job half done, colleagues in the thick of it and an experience with the people of Iraq as intensive as any in my diplomatic career.
Much has been written, authoritatively and well, about the origins of the decision to use force against Saddam Hussein. But so far no Briton closely involved has offered a version of events. This account does not seek to collate or reinterpret the experiences and perspectives of others. And it cannot draw on the minutes of restricted political and diplomatic exchanges, because they belong to the State. It is a personal attempt to present relevant detail of some significant events and to make sense of some of the more perplexing twists and turns of the story.
What I saw and heard suggests that Iraq took pride of place after 9/11 more because a long-standing desire to remove Saddam became achievable than because security logic made action essential; that the UN negotiations never rose above the level of awkward diversion for the US administration; that the rationales presented for the use of force were exaggerated and inconsistent; that the invasion was a military triumph but failed to achieve international legitimacy; and that the opportunity inherent in the post-conflict administration of Iraq to make the whole initiative broadly acceptable to the watching world was missed through poor policy analysis and inflexible execution.
Iraq dominated the politics of the UN Security Council during my time as the UK’s Permanent Representative in New York from July 1998 to July 2003. A huge amount of other work passed across our desks in that period, on Africa in particular, on the Middle East Peace Process most uncomfortably, on the Balkans and East Timor, the International Criminal Court and human rights. But in a committee of high international politics of that kind the most divisive business sets the tone and Iraq was the issue that split the Permanent Members down the middle.
Decisions at the UN in 2002 and 2003 had their roots in the aftermath of the first Gulf War and the confrontation with Saddam in late 1998, but the main political antagonisms lay along a broader fault line than just Iraq. They stemmed from the differing perspectives of the United States and continental Europe on global security and the application of power, with most non-Western countries much more hostile to the US view than to the European one. As Robert Kagan has succinctly described in his essay ‘Of Paradise and Power’, the United States is inclined to use military and economic power because it has it; whereas the Europeans, who do not, want the use of power to be constrained within inviolable international norms. Each camp advocates a different set of rules accordingly. In practice, when the issue is large enough, the single-minded strength of the former wins over the disparate and half-formed philosophy of the latter – to the extent, that is, that physical power is applicable. Iraq is interesting because it offers clues to the limits of traditional power and illustrates the difficulty of fusing power and legitimacy when the highest stakes are being played for.
Other ingredients became added to this mix: international terrorism, Israel’s security, the denial of justice to the Palestinian people, the security of an oil-producing region, the inevitability of the abuse one day of a weapon of mass destruction, and a whole collection of cultural and political rivalries in the world. They produced a cauldron of the most explosive issues. The United States had every right to look to its own capabilities if there was no effective alternative, but not to ignore the legitimate interests of others. While its disdain for the United Nations was overdone, it was also understandable, because from its beginnings the UN has never been able to cope with the most uncivilised or the most determined forms of international disorder. If we are to have an ordered world, US power has to be part of the solution. So does UN collectivism, if US power is to be accepted within a universal framework. One without the other is bound to be insufficient.
I tested that proposition to its limits in the weeks leading up to the decision to attack Iraq on 19 March 2003. The impatience of the United States to deal once and for all with Saddam Hussein was rising, but no one else at the UN, including the United Kingdom, wanted the UN mechanisms for containing Iraq, which had been largely successful over the previous twelve years, to be abandoned at that precise moment. Iraq had defied the United Nations for more than a decade and nobody, least of all his neighbours, had a good word to say for Saddam Hussein. Yet a clear majority of UN members saw little immediate threat to international peace and security and were opposed to the use there and then of brute force to deal with him. The UN Security Council had already lived through the drama of collapsed diplomacy and the bombing of Iraq in late 1998 and failed to see what direct force had achieved. They were just as sceptical in 2003, and even more suspicious of American motives.
This increased suspicion was partly associated with the world’s experience up to that point of the administration of President George W. Bush. The early months of 2001 had seen some nervous questions raised in UN corridors: about the handling of the Palestine issue; about the willingness of Washington to contribute to multilateral initiatives, for instance on climate change and the International Criminal Court; about the effect on disarmament if the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty were abrogated; about the best way to respond to international terrorism; about the commitment to finance and support the UN itself, when the vexed question of US funding of the UN had only just been resolved by the Clinton administration.
The destruction of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001 put an immediate halt to all that apprehensive muttering. The pall of dust that hung over a traumatised Manhattan in the following days seemed to alter global sentiment completely. A wave of understanding manifested itself in unanimous support for resolutions condemning the perpetrators and empowering the US and its allies to take forceful action to deal with them. The belief quickly took hold that this was more than just one of those times when differences had to be set aside to express decent human sympathy. It looked like a fresh opportunity to construct a global coalition, with the US on board, against both the forces of violence and the underlying reasons for their emergence.
Our American partners at the United Nations sensed this change of mood and realised its potential. John Negroponte, who had been kept waiting in the wings by the Senate’s confirmation processes, was immediately approved for dispatch to New York as US Ambassador, where he capitalised instantly on the responsive momentum he found there. Uninitiated as he was in the curious ways of the United Nations, he soon recognised an atmosphere that seemed to contradict all those warnings in his Washington briefings about the infertility of UN soil for US initiatives. I worked closely with this shrewd and open-minded American diplomat in the months that followed to broaden the scope of international support for British and American policy in the wake of 9/11. We both failed over Iraq.
Well before the election of the new President in November 2000, dealing with Iraq had emerged as a major Republican objective. Amongst the small but capable group of foreign policy planners and thinkers around the Bush campaign, Saddam Hussein was seen as an unresolved challenge to the superpower’s interests, a threat to Israel, a supporter of Palestinian terrorism and a possible source of a direct attack on American interests. 9/11 catapulted change in Iraq from wishful thinking into the realm of the achievable. Writers with sources inside the Bush administration have shown, with some credibility, how quickly after the attacks Iraq surfaced as a leading potential target rather than al Qaida or Afghanistan. That was because it was already there, under the surface but set on a loaded spring.
By March 2002, when the realisation began to filter through to New York that an attack on Iraq was a genuine possibility and not just axis-of-evil rhetoric, military planning was well advanced in the Pentagon. Unknown to me at that point, there had already been high-level US–UK discussions about policy options. These exchanges, as they progressed through the summer of 2002, helped to persuade the US President that the UN route was necessary for the construction of an alliance. This was due not so much to the persuasive arguments of Tony Blair and his team – good arguments powerfully expressed by foreign allies are normally not enough to turn an American administration from its preferred course – as to the reality that the UK held the key to wider international support and would not come on board without a basis in international law. Once Colin Powell had won the internal argument, with which I believe the President was instinctively sympathetic, that US unilateralism was bad policy in practice, the multilateral route was given a try.
The effort was less than wholehearted. The US handling of the UN route came across to many observers as an artificial test, not a genuine attempt to find a better way. Powerful voices within the administration pushed for military preparation and derided the capability of the UN. Secretary Powell won time through his skilful negotiation of Security Council Resolution 1441 in November 2002 and the UN inspectors returned to Iraq with President Bush’s challenge goading them on to find the missing evidence of weapons of mass destruction. They laboured under repeated accusations, partly true, that Saddam was outwitting them with his techniques of prevarication and concealment. The British Prime Minister pleaded for more time to allow the peaceful route to show its full potential, but Washington saw things differently: the evidence indicated that Iraq possessed WMD; Saddam’s uncooperativeness had already been condemned by the UN; to ignore the possibility of an Iraqi link with terrorism after 9/11 might open the door to an even more lethal attack; Saddam was defying the inspectors and the UN system as a whole; US public opinion was likely to support a tough approach. Conclusion: the inspectors would not solve the WMD problem, Saddam remained a danger, war was justified both legally and politically, and it would be a catastrophic error to remain inactive and discover later that the clock could not be turned back.
The UK made one last attempt to avoid war. The only way to do that, as we saw it, was to unite the international community in exerting enough pressure on Saddam to compel him quickly to concede everything the UN had demanded of him. After President Bush had come to the UN in September 2002, there had been no doubt in my mind that a new resolution was necessary to set a last test for Saddam. The 1991 resolutions had validity in strictly legal terms, but something fresh and clear was needed to convince people that hard action was justified. Suspicion of US motives was rife and the atmosphere in New York had become increasingly tense. I warned London in October that if a new resolution was impossible to secure and the UK wanted to go ahead with military force nonetheless, I would not find it possible to stay in my job in New York. Once Resolution 1441 of November 2002 had been unanimously adopted, the legal situation looked more secure.
I was partly responsible for the idea of a second resolution. It was interpreted by most international observers as an attempt to capitalise on the more threatening articles of 1441 and get the Security Council to authorise the use of force against Saddam Hussein, but the intention was not that crude. The United Kingdom, though committed to fight alongside the United States if military force was to be used, tried to find an instrument for dealing with Saddam and his WMD that would avoid full-scale military action. I was personally convinced that the Iraqi regime was a threat to international order. I believed the thrust of the intelligence about WMD and regularly spoke up in public to warn people of it. But I was deeply uneasy about the start of a conflict which, in the unanimous view of my New York colleagues, was bound to be messy. The second resolution was designed to offer the Security Council an alternative way forward, to deliver clarity and to keep the initiative in US–UK hands.
The negotiations involved a convoluted combination of pressing for support, playing for time and looking for escape routes. Until quite late in the day, I believed that they had a chance of producing an effective alternative: mounting such pressure on Saddam that he would give up without a fight. But, between American apprehension about loss of momentum and French reluctance to be caught rubber-stamping the use of force, the necessary pressure was never generated and diplomacy came to a grinding halt. On 17 March 2003 I walked in front of the microphone outside the UN Security Council in New York and, on instructions from London, announced to a massed and overheated crowd of journalists that the attempt to address the Iraq problem through diplomacy had been terminated and that the United Kingdom reserved the right to consider another way forward. Ambassador John Negroponte, following close behind me, left no doubt as to what that meant for the United States.
It was a bitter moment. After a prolonged, highly charged confrontation over Iraq among members of the Security Council and between world leaders, I was asked to step forward and acknowledge that conflict had beaten diplomacy into second place. Personally, I was not ready to give up the fight. I did not accept that war on this timing was the only option and I dreaded seeing the UK involved in direct responsibility for the state of Iraq, but the American steamroller was engaged in top gear. Saddam Hussein had shown his contempt for the UN and I was fed up with the infighting between the Permanent Members of the Security Council. The acerbity of the differences between the main players was illustrated by the inclusion, on instructions, in my 17 March statement of a sideswipe at the French – ‘one country in particular has blocked the way forward’ – which was partly deserved but ungracious. The Security Council as a whole was left exhausted and bewildered by the refusal of the United States to allow more time for the weapons inspection process. In the end, however, when the single superpower decides to launch itself forwards, the rest have to stand aside and await events. I picked myself up from the turmoil and wrapped up what business I could, on Africa in particular, in my final months before retirement in July 2003.
There then occurred one of those ironies in life which ought to have been predictable for its perverse intrusion, but which came as a shock nevertheless. I was asked to postpone my departure from Government service and go out to Iraq as the UK Representative. It was Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s Communications Adviser, privately visiting New York in early June 2003 but carrying a message from 10 Downing Street, who first posed the question. I said I had other plans and declined. Two weeks later, the Prime Minister came on the line in person and explained why he wanted me to play the particular role he envisaged. There are times when you do not say no. I agreed to go to Iraq, but for a set period until the end of March 2004, a deadline I had promised my family.
The later part of this book tells some of the story of those months in Baghdad, supporting but often wrestling with Ambassador Paul Bremer and his machine, and skirmishing in the dark, usually without effect, with the veiled authorities in Washington who micro-managed policy on the ground. As in the rest of my account, I cannot provide a comprehensive history of the occupation period. Mine is a partial and subjective view, offered in public because I believe that the Iraq saga is an issue of generational significance. The full story must be reconstructed from a number of perspectives, none of them all-seeing.
The period of Coalition administration in Iraq also deserves study, because success in delivering a better Iraq could have washed out all the controversy of the decision to go to war. Most people in the end accept practical results. The early post-conflict period in Iraq was marked by decisions that were often brave, dynamic and well-intentioned, but sometimes fundamentally flawed. Even the single superpower has to reckon up the expense of less than rigorous analysis and planning. America’s righteous indignation collected a massive show of support from the international community in the weeks following 9/11. But, as this account describes, there was a steady progression from sympathy to rejection in the world’s reaction to US decision-making. This matters more to long-term US interests than many Americans like to think. The logical disconnect in putting Iraq at the top of the list has carried a cost which Washington has been reluctant to acknowledge. The mistakes made in the implementation of policy resulted in part from the strength of American anger, justified in its origin but misconceived in its application. The costs of war have to include its aftermath, because acceptance of the need for war is linked to a judgement that war has eventually brought about a better state of affairs. In the case of Iraq in 2003, the post-war costs were never planned for or calculated with the same rigour as the war itself.
The team working under Paul Bremer in Baghdad never developed the strength and capacity to deal with the circumstances that evolved. He himself led from the front, learnt some of the lessons of the early American failures and struggled with his own administration to assert the prime importance of judging action by its effect on the ground. He was not always listened to in Washington and was sometimes unjustly loaded with the blame for others’ misjudgements. But he could be narrow and over-authoritative and he never made full use of the wisdom he had at his fingertips in the Republican Palace. The capability of the players in the team who possessed Arab world experience and Arabic language skills was rarely exploited, while excessive reliance was placed on young Americans with the right political credentials and excellent academic training, but no experience or understanding of the nature of Iraq.
Bremer and I grew close to a number of senior Iraqis who offered themselves as representatives of their people for this awkward period, but we were a world’s distance from many others who had an equal stake in the future of the country but who could not or would not organise themselves to forge a relationship with the powers of temporary occupation. We tried, with considerable success at odd moments, to analyse, forestall and cut down the forces of violence arrayed against us. And we set in place a structure for the political transition of Iraq to a new and freer state, which has stood the test of Iraqi opinion and, so far, of time. But we did not capture the imagination and the hearts of most Iraqis. The security situation became the principal stumbling block and the reasons for that are relevant to our defence against insurgent violence and international terrorism within a much broader context. The lessons from Iraq therefore have a direct application to the interests of a wide range of countries, by no means all of them members of the Coalition that occupied Iraq.
The structure and practice of international diplomacy will have to adjust to the experience of Iraq. What the United States decides to do lies at the heart of almost every international question. Each individual member of the UN wants its own direct and positive relationship with the US. But, collectively, the organised groups of developing states are not persuaded. They rail against US foreign policy choices and vilify what they see as the untouchable arrogance of the single superpower. I was left by the Iraq saga with some sympathy for both points of view, but convinced that the gap between them has to be bridged if the twenty-first century is to witness greater stability than the twentieth. Will the nations of the developing world come to understand that they can benefit from US-inspired freedom and economic dynamism without losing their cultural identity? Is the United States likely to learn from the agonies of this stormy period, and will the experience of the 11 September 2001 attacks and their aftermath bring the American people to understand the limits of hard power? Working with, and sometimes inside, the American machine, I came right up against the extraordinary mix of US strength, generosity, self-righteousness, impatience and blindness. As an ally but a foreigner, I was both invited in and closed out. It was an exhilarating and exasperating experience. Much of the non-American world must feel the same, with exasperation exceeding exhilaration the further you are in spirit from Washington.
If the United States under George W. Bush was the star around which satellite activity in the multilateral field orbited, where has the Iraq explosion left the United Nations? What is this body which so many slickly turn to when they feel outgunned in their capitals, and how has it come to represent the aspirations of such a large proportion of the planet’s population when its faults are so familiar and its powerlessness so often exposed? I became an ardent devotee of the UN during my time there, but witnessed its fallibilities from close up. Some things the UN has done well: the restoration of its operational effectiveness after the catastrophes of Somalia, Rwanda and Srebrenica; the success of its work on East Timor; the regeneration of professional competence in the Security Council’s peacekeeping decisions on Africa; the increasingly effective response of the development agencies to the millennium call for a new effort on poverty. But these achievements were set into relief, if not dispatched into the shadows, by the dramatic disagreements over Iraq, the collapse of the Middle East Peace Process, the failure to find the funds to match the ambition of development programmes and the weaknesses in executive action and accountability exposed by the investigation into the handling of the Oil for Food programme. As a result, the UN looks weaker and the world seems more polarised, and potentially more violent, than when this saga began.
In my diplomatic career, which included postings in the British Embassy in Washington in the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, I learnt that there are two areas above all that the United States guards jealously as its own preserves: superpower politics and the Middle East Peace Process. For one reason or another, I constantly found myself butting in on both.
My diplomatic career began and ended in the Middle East, but the middle part was dominated by the great historical event of our age, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the single superpower. Two superpowers presented a choice of champion, fraught with the risk of catastrophic destruction if things went wrong but allowing space for countries on the fringes of this stand-off to play one off against the other and to carve out a niche around and between the poles. The inherent imbalance of a single superpower structure has been obscured, at least from the UK perspective, by the focus since 1990 on the ordering of a free Europe and on the problems and opportunities of globalisation. But it is becoming clear, and not only through the assertions of the President of the French Republic, that the world will not settle down around a single pole. The evidence is mounting that a second superpower is taking shape, in the form of anti-Americanism. If a counter-balance to American power does not develop in a politically structured way from the emergence of a compelling new strength in China, India or any of the other large developing nations, with Russia finding a new role on one side or the other as it sees fit, it could arise from the much more chaotic, asymmetric elements of clashing cultures, failed states and terrorist violence, with or without the horrifying admix of uncontrolled weapons of mass destruction.
The global reach of British interests and its position for the time being as the world’s fourth largest economy keep the UK involved in virtually all aspects of geopolitics. The fun of being a British diplomat on the global stage lies in close involvement with the great events of the age without having to bear the ultimate responsibility. The UK’s past experience, administrative efficiency and talent for pragmatic analysis earn us a place at the table, but we have long since lost the skills and the resources for projecting real power in great campaigns. If we want to be part of the action, we have to serve with those who have built and retained those assets. It is not just for historical and cultural reasons that we have tended to stay close to the United States.
It was in the Middle East that I cut my diplomatic teeth. My first arrival in the region, a posting in the late summer of 1970 to learn Arabic in Lebanon, coincided with Black September, the suppression by King Hussein of a Palestinian uprising in Jordan. The Palestine Liberation Organization command, together with a large number of Palestinian refugees, moved on to Lebanon to set up ‘a state within a state’, changing for ever the fragile balance of communities and political forces in that country and laying the foundation for the Lebanese civil war later in that decade. As language students living two thousand feet up the mountain above Beirut, even we could not fail to be aware of the planting of these seeds of strife.
Shortly after our arrival in Lebanon I had the first of many minor car collisions. I was rather taken aback when the other driver leapt from his car and dragged me into a ditch on the side of the road. Four days in foreign territory, I thought, and I was going to have my throat cut for denting a radiator. Then I became aware of the sound of gunfire and the occasional bullet pinging off the rocks around us. It turned out that my imagined assassin was trying to save me from injury: he explained that the death of Gamal Abdul Nasser – President of Egypt, father of pan-Arabism and nemesis of the British and French in the Suez Crisis of 1956 – had just been announced and the people of Lebanon were declaring their grief in time-honoured style by firing their guns into the air.
Learning a language within the region brings the huge advantage of absorption in the local culture. The villagers of Shemlan, for whom the Foreign Office’s language school, the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS), provided a major economic asset, guarded us conscientiously. Not only were they ready to see off any physical threat, drawing on the massive stash of weapons hidden behind the blacksmith’s shop, they also happily participated in the elementary exchanges of greetings and polite enquiries that got the beginner going in Arabic conversation. As mountain people, they were tough, kind and old-fashioned. It was only when we sped down the hill into the lively city of Beirut that we discovered how the French–Arab culture had created new vernacular impulses that could leave even the brightest students floundering.
Our early lessons in local politics were full of Maronite, Orthodox, Druze, Islamic and other distinctions and we expected to come up against these divisions within the Lebanese system, but on arrival at MECAS we learnt that our student community was itself divided into two bitter camps. A long-running spell of the board game Diplomacy had ended in betrayal and acrimony that extended into everyday relationships. They say that the British abroad go to greater lengths than any other nationality to absorb the culture and mannerisms of the local people. I dropped straight into strong supporting evidence of that.
We took our language-learning very seriously, at least during the morning lessons. But Lebanon, Syria and Jordan were there to be explored, with mountains, sea and desert so close together that the sports and pleasures of each could be experienced within a single day. After eighteen months, our feel and affection for the Arab world, its history and its traditions were running deep, even if we had learnt little of the practical arts of diplomacy. I never spoke Arabic as well again as when I took the final MECAS examination. My next posting took me to Dubai, where a mix of English and Urdu could see you through most situations. Even when I served later in Saudi Arabia as head of the Embassy’s Export Promotion section, English was the lingua franca of the merchant class. When I finally returned to a real need for fluency in Arabic, in my wholly unexpected move to Baghdad in my sixty-first year, the rust had bedded in too deep and I could never manage a full business conversation in the language. Nonetheless, those early days at MECAS and my acquaintance with the hard desert culture in the Emirates and in Saudi Arabia left me full of admiration for this remarkable part of the world.
This experience, with natural personal variations, was multiplied through the UK’s Diplomatic Service. We Arabists referred to ourselves affectionately as the Camel Corps. Others used the phrase with more suspicion or contempt. The diplomatic world recognised in the British and, for similar historical and professional reasons, in the French an inherited and empirical familiarity with the Middle East region that no other foreigners possessed. Captain William Shakespear would have stood at the side of King Abdul Aziz through the whole creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had he not been killed in a desert skirmish in 1915. Gertrude Bell, adviser to the British High Comissioner in Iraq, was instrumental in the choice of King Feisal of Iraq in the early 1920s and worked with T. E. Lawrence to bring some form of colonial order to that impossibly fractious territory. My wife’s grandfather, William Ashford Hodges, worked as the Egyptian Government’s chief architect in the early years of the twentieth century. Colonel Hugh Boustead provided close advice to Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi in the formative years of his transition from local chieftain to internationally recognised President. There are still British advisers at the Court of Sultan Qaboos of Oman.
When I moved on from Lebanon to Dubai in 1972, it was very few years since British diplomats Martin Buckmaster and Julian Walker had placed the territorial markers of the Trucial States in place, creating the internal boundaries for what is now the United Arab Emirates. In my first formal job in a British Embassy, and without an hour of legal training in my background, I became the last Assistant Judge of the Trucial States Court. From genuine pioneer to lowly desk officer, generations of Britons have breathed in the history and the dust of the region. Throughout the Arab world the British were admired, resented, accepted and suspected in equal measure. The Lebanese referred to the language school in Shemlan as the Spy School, since George Blake had passed through its doors, and they claimed they could hear the sound of gunfire up on the roof – in reality not agents practising their marksmanship but the noise of the ball hitting the tin in our echoing squash court. Above all, we are remembered as the progenitors of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which set the terms for the establishment of the Jewish State in what was then the mandated territory of Palestine.