1 Boring Old Man

SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: I think a key condition that should have been a red line but wasn’t was that the military processes and decision-taking should be subordinate to a coherent political and diplomatic strategy. Part of the difficulties that emerged was that, as I have said earlier on, a provisional timetable, a contingency timetable, for possible military action was set for early 2003, which was, in reality, if you were going to go through the UN, to set the cart before the horse. So, with the benefit of hindsight — and hindsight plays quite a big role in all of this — I think what we should have said was, "Let’s try it through the UN, let us exhaust the UN processes, including the reintroduction of inspectors, and then, depending on what Saddam Hussein does, decide what, if anything, we are going to do militarily." Now, of course, you can’t just do it neatly like that, you have got to have some contingency planning, but I think — and I go back to what I wrote at the time — that it wouldn’t necessarily have been a panacea, it wouldn’t necessarily have solved all the contradictions and problems that arose. But if you actually planned for military action in the cool autumnal season of 2003, rather than the cool spring season of 2003, a lot of things might have been able to to have been unwound. But the key problem was to let the military strategy wag the political and diplomatic strategy; it should have been the other way round.

SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: It is my understanding, and the reason why I have said autumn is because in the following year, in 2004, there would be a presidential election campaign.
THE CHAIRMAN: You have brought me exactly to the question I was going to put.
SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: And I thought, hang on, if one is trying to buy time in all of this, how much time can you buy. So I went to the great guru, a chap known as the president’s brain, Karl Rove, and I said, "How far can this be put back?" And he said, "End of 2003, latest." He might have said January 2004. "Otherwise," he said, "We will get embroiled in the presidential election campaign and the President will be accused of using the war to win an election."
THE CHAIRMAN: Yes. But the decision on early 2003 is not driven by the domestic US political timetable.
SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: I don’t think so. Actually I don’t know where it came from, to be perfectly frank with you. It may have been a purely military planning operation.
THE CHAIRMAN: Or just the inertia of military preparation.
SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: Yes, it could be, I don’t know.

THE CHAIRMAN: Right. A quite different point, but you gave us evidence earlier about the relationship between interlocutors on either side of the Atlantic. There is an asymmetry, of course, in the situation, but as I understand it, the Number 10 foreign affairs adviser relationship with the head of the National Security Council had worked through different personalities and times. In the Bush administration the great influence of Vice-President Cheney did not lend itself to a natural bilateral relationship with either the Foreign Secretary or the Prime Minister. So how was that going to be managed? How was it managed?
SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: Well, the answer is — I say this in all due modesty: the answer is me really, not — sorry, let me back up a bit. You are absolutely right, institutionally, if you have got a very powerful Vice-President —

THE CHAIRMAN: Which is hugely unusual.

SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: — which is unusual. I remember saying to London quite early on in the administration, "This may be the most powerful Vice-President ever." I mean, his institutional opposite number was the Deputy Prime Minister. This — how can I put it? — was an unbalanced relationship and probably didn’t reap the dividends that institutionally we might have hoped and expected. [laughter]