So. Farewell then, Tony Blair’s reputation.

The monumental Chilcot Report on the UK’s role in the Iraq invasion is out. Here it is. Several gazillion pages.

No-one can or will read it all. But it will remain a vast trove of material for anyone interested in Diplomatic Technique and how things actually work.

This one document has captured a lot of attention – a memo Tony Blair (TB) sent to President Bush (PB) on 28 July 2002.

The 28 July 02 memo is given in full here at the Washington Post, with added if occasionally annoying annotations (click on the yellow highlighting – clever). It was written eight months before the invasion itself started. Let others rail against Blair’s apparently naive/stupid/criminal approach to these issues. What does it tell us about diplomatic technique?

We now see that TB sent PB a stream of notes setting out London’s Big Picture thoughts on all the issues arising out of the 9/11 attacks: a fuller list here.  This is foreign policy on a Grand Scale.

This earlier note (now no longer TOP SECRET, PERSONAL, UK/US EYES ONLY) dated 4 December 2001 (ie not long after 9/11) roves around the planet pointing out problems needing urgent action and ‘strategy’: Iraq, Somalia, Philippines, Yemen, Indonesia, Syria/Iran and so on.

On Iraq/Saddam it has a bleak predictive power:

Any link to 11 September and AQ is at best very tenuous; and at present international opinion would be reluctant, outside the US/UK, to support immediate military action though, for sure, people want to be rid of Saddam

It ends on a plaintive note, bemoaning the state of the Middle East Peace Plan and Other Underlying Issues:

Sorry to be a bore on this. The Middle East is set for catastrophe. The issue is whether a process of sorts can be put back on track … If it isn’t, this will complicate everything in the Middle East for a wider struggle.

Secondly, we should be working now with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and also all the other Muslim countries on the strategy for confronting Islamic fundamentalism and extremism.

Well, true. But isn’t that too big a thought to be plonked on the end of this Note almost as a lame afterthought? And how’s that working out 15 years later? These countries seem to rolling out quite a good plan for ‘confronting Western democracy and related extremism’.

This 2001 TB Note sets the tone/style for the many others that follow it. Seemingly confident, Very Big Picture analysis and ideas. Yet oddly didactic to the point of being condescending? Hi there! It’s us, the perky clever Brits spelling it all out for you lumbering former colonialists!

Back to the July 2002 memo, when US ideas for moving against Saddam were moving ahead strongly. You can see what TB is trying to do. He starts with a strong unambiguous personal message to GB:

I will be with you, whatever. But this is the moment to assess bluntly the difficulties…

This is intended to establish an “I am your best friend – but also your honest best friend” tone and baseline. It raises a basic question. If other friends and allies of the USA really want to influence Washington, how best to do it?

In this case TB and PB got on well, so TB planned to use that access/friendship to try to get what London saw as the best outcome involving the United Nations and assembling a strong coalition of active allies. This meant treading a very fine line between being direct/frank and being annoying. See also the voluminous Thatcher/Reagan exchanges described in John O’Sullivan’s superb The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister.

The risk of this approach is that it ‘over-commits’. If PB and team conclude that TB will go along with pretty much anything, why listen to him? The Note attempts to tackle that by working in folksy wisdom that PB and the Americans will take seriously:

If we win quickly, everyone will be our friend. If we don’t and they haven’t been bound in beforehand, recriminations will start fast.

TB warns PB that Washington is being overly optimistic about likely support for intervening in Iraq, especially if there is not specific UN authority:

I have to say that’s not my reading. The trouble is, everyone says: they will support action, but they add a rider and the rider is not always sufficiently heard or spoken.

And – and here is my real point– public opinion is public opinion. And opinion in the US is quite simply a different planet from opinion here, in Europe or in the Arab world … At the moment, oddly, our best ally might be Russia!

Hmm. Why not develop that idea?

TB instead makes various short big good points proposing how a wider anti-Saddam coalition might be assembled in the coming months, including boosting the Middle East Peace Plan:

My judgement is this is essential and whatever the Arabs say at one level, at another this in the very soul of their attitudes. So it is worth a real effort to get a proper negotiation going.… for the Arabs, the MEPP doesn’t have to be settled. It just has to start in earnest.

He also opines on Post Saddam, arguing that it might make sense to topple Saddam but replace him by another military figure as a step towards a democratic Iraq:

This would be very powerful. I need advice on whether it’s feasible. But just swapping one dictator for another seems inconsistent with our values.

Ah. Another problem right at the heart of any diplomacy. What do you do with Bad Leaders? Try to move fast to an OK Leader, ie side unambiguously with supposed moderates? Or accept that such a jump just won’t work and opt for a Not Quite So Bad Leader, but thereby risk disillusioning moderates and supporters?

The Note concludes with another strong (but over-committal?) signal of strong UK support for military action against Saddam:

We would support in anyway we can … the crucial issue is not when, but how.

* * * * *

So there it is. The innermost personal workings of top-level diplomacy revealed to a cynical public.

Yet broadly speaking the TB approach worked, in its own terms. There was a concerted push to get UN legal and political cover with other countries joining the action to topple Saddam. Part of the drama of the Chilcot Report is that it describes in merciless detail how TB himself ended up trapped in his own policy. He managed to get the UN Security Council close to approving military action against Saddam, but not close enough actually to do so outright in time for the start of the US military invasion plan that by then had momentum all of its own.

This was the heart of the practical UK/US policy dilemma. Planning the military operation to topple Saddam involved huge preparations that everyone knew about. So if the Russians and French and others had reasonable or unreasonable doubts about the wisdom of this exercise but thought that it would happen anyway, why endorse it? Much better to let Bush/Blair stew in their own juice!

Hence the TB/PB Note of 26 March 2003, soon after military action against Saddam had started but the required UN cover had not been achieved – did he already see how it would all play out?

The problem is we’re not communicating with the rest of the world in a way they understand. they get wholly warped views of the so-called right in American politics, played back through their media; until we end up with the fatuous irony of millions of liberal-minded people taking to the streets effectively to defend the most illiberal regime on earth.

TB urged PB in a rather sentimental but strangely desperate passage to ‘change the presentation’:

People need to see you as you are. No one doubts the toughness. They need to see the sensibility. We need a strategy for this after the conflict is won. Doing it now would look like weakness. Afterwards it will look like magnanimity, from a position of strength, recognising the past months have not been as we wanted it.

This 26 March 03 Note is far too long. It makes trenchant interesting points about the way that France, Germany and Russia finally opted against supporting the US/UK at the UN and how to turn that round, but then turns into a fat dustbin of ideas, strategies, challenges and so on. Did anyone in Washington up to and including PB himself care at that point, or even read it? Probably not. Blowing up Iraq was a lot more interesting.

* * * * *

By May 2007 TB was gasping for air as his own hopes sank and he prepared to hand over to Gordon Brown. AQ and Saddam had given way to Extremist Islamists:

The interesting thing is the degree to which Extremist Islamists have a well worked out alignment between their political strategy and the military one.

I believe that our problem is that we don’t. You and I both make the speeches and carry on strong but we are lone voices. New politicians are on their way, keen to distance themselves and above all, disoriented by the heavy thud of each days bad news. People start to think this is a fight we can’t win; when in reality it is a fight we have to win…

The reason why is it so important to tackle these issues altogether is that Iraq has to be bigger than just Iraq. It has to be part of a more profound and wider picture. People have to see it as a frontier in a battle across the region and the world. That is a battle, as you always rightly say, between freedom and extremism, democracy and terror…

… a complete political strategy, constantly reinforced and driven through. That’s what we need now.

This Note smacks of almost messianic desperation, as if writing the words ‘complete political strategy’ and a ‘more (sic) profound and wider picture’ somehow is attached to something and can Change The World. Sheer willpower as a substitute for Reality?

Yet here in the end TB was right. PB gave way to President Obama, a leader with no coherent vision on tackling Extremist Islamists on the level of political or moral strategy, and (worse) no apparent interest in finding one. As his period in office meanders to its self-indulgent end, almost everything TB and PB were trying to tackle is in a worse position. Core Enlightenment values are openly challenged as irrelevant or sexist. Liberals hoot for illiberalism. A deep derangement unfolds.

Conclusion?

As always one returns to my own speech in Germany in 2004 when Iraq was still seen as potentially hopeful:

Diplomats focus on three questions:

What is Legal? What is Achievable? What is Wise? They do not focus enough on a fourth: What is Done Well?

Even if our policies are Legal and Achievable, they may not be Wise. And even if our policies are Legal and Achievable and Wise – what if they are just not Done Well? The public can live with disagreements on policy. That’s democracy. What the public really likes is success. A tough job done well. And what it really dislikes is incompetence. Things not Done Well.

Or to repeat as TB put it in 2002:

If we win quickly, everyone will be our friend. If we don’t and they haven’t been bound in beforehand, recriminations will start fast.

It turned out that toppling Saddam was easy and quick. But then what? Ooops. Not Done Well.

Did the Iraq intervention blast open Pandora’s Box to create ISIS etc? Or would something like that have happened  anyway?

Was the Arab Spring good or bad?

Which is better? Intervening in Libya to get rid of Gaddafi, or not intervening in Syria to leave Assad in power?

Diplomacy is hard. Why? Because there is no easy way to link Cause to Effect over Time. And maybe somewhere in the vasty Chilcot Report that rather basic idea is acknowledged as a point in TB’s favour?