In late July 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of MI6, traveled to Washington to learn where Bush administration policy on Iraq stood. He and two other civil servants—David Manning, Tony Blair’s top foreign policy adviser, and Kevin Tebbit, the permanent undersecretary of defense—met counterparts and recorded impressions. Manning noted, “Not much doubt here that the Administration is bent on action soon, and convincing itself that it has [a] strong strategic as well as a historical duty to act.” Tebbit noted that an American official had forecast an early 2003 invasion. “One is still left with an air of unreality, given the enormity of what is envisaged and the absence of planning detail or policy framework to credibly make it happen,” he wrote. Dearlove saw Condoleezza Rice and discerned that a “decision had already been taken” on an invasion, and that the “question was only how and when.”
On July 23, at Ten Downing Street, Blair convened a small group of ministers and civil servants privy to secrets about Iraq war discussions with America. Dearlove informed them not only that war seemed inevitable but also that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Foreign Minister Jack Straw called the case for war “thin.” Among the four countries presenting the greatest threat of WMD use—he listed Iran, North Korea, Libya, and Iraq—Saddam Hussein’s regime would rank fourth, he said.[1]
Yet when Straw raised the possibility of breaking with the U.S. if the Bush administration invaded, Blair said that would be “the biggest shift in [British] foreign policy for fifty years,” and he was “not sure it’s very wise.” In reality, as George W. Bush already understood from private conversations with Blair, the prime minister accepted the case for war as a last resort. During five years in office, Blair had led Britain to military interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, partly on humanitarian grounds. In 1999, he had delivered a much-noted speech at the University of Chicago laying out a qualified case for waging war to remove violent dictators and naming Saddam Hussein as an example. During 2002, he repeatedly said in public that the world would be better off without Saddam in power. And he was committed to the American alliance as a pillar of British policy. As Blair admitted to his colleagues that day, referring to plans that could lead Britain to join an invasion of Iraq: “It’s worse than you think—I actually believe in doing this.”[2]
Blair tried to condition his support to Washington. Antiwar protesters had already taken to London streets over Iraq, and his Labour Party was restive. Politically, it would be implausible for the prime minister to go to war if the Bush administration did not first seek the U.N.’s backing and demand of Saddam that he allow the return of weapons inspectors. Blair also wanted to push the White House to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the aim of countering predictable outrage in the Middle East should an invasion take place.
The prime minister advocated for a publicity campaign, one that would highlight “all the WMD evidence,” including Saddam’s “attempts to secure nuclear capability; and, as seems possible, add on the al-Qaeda link,” which would be “hugely persuasive over here,” as Blair secretly wrote to Bush on July 28. (Both MI6 and the C.I.A. discounted the significance of historical contacts between Iraqi intelligence officers and al-Qaeda.) Manning hand-carried Blair’s letter to Washington and gave it to Condoleezza Rice on July 29.
“I will be with you, whatever,” Blair’s note pledged. He proposed a military buildup that might be accompanied by a Security Council deadline for Iraq to allow inspectors back. If Saddam did not meet their demands, as Blair expected, “a strike date could be Jan/Feb next year,” he wrote.[3]
Bush invited Manning to the Oval Office. A former ambassador to Washington, Manning understood the emerging divisions in the president’s war cabinet. The Iraq “regime changers,” such as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, competed against the “multilateralists,” led by Colin Powell. As Manning now laid out the case for U.N. diplomacy, he deftly emphasized that there was no viable alternative in British parliamentary politics. If Blair was not careful, a crisis over Iraq could lead to his swift overthrow. Bush listened sympathetically but made no commitments.[4]
On August 8, in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein received George Galloway, a British Labour firebrand on the left of his party’s caucus. The member of Parliament had previously traveled to Iraq and had spoken admiringly of Saddam. Tariq Aziz attended the meeting.
Galloway sought to prevent a war between Britain and Iraq, he told Saddam. To help make the case, he suggested, Iraq could create an English-language satellite TV channel to rival the BBC and CNN. Galloway said he could assist with employees and journalists, according to an Iraqi record of the discussion.[5]
“Whatever happened to British wisdom?” Saddam asked. He and other Iraqis of his generation had grown up hearing that France and Italy had been brutal colonialists but that Britain ruled its territories “by using the simplest” of means, he said.
To illustrate, Saddam recounted a jokey fable: Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin are sitting around a table “where there is a bowl that contains water and a fish.” Who can catch the fish? Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini each grab a fork and attempt to spear it, Saddam said. They fail. Then Churchill takes a spoon and “starts to empty the water out of the bowl one spoonful at a time, until the bowl runs out of water, and he manages to catch the fish.”
“Blair is not Churchill,” Galloway told Saddam.
Saddam said he liked Galloway’s TV channel idea, yet this was just the sort of modern approach to public influence that he seemed incapable of executing. As the pressure on Baghdad mounted, Saddam was content to hand the microphone to old-school comrades such as Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan. “We are taking the threat seriously,” Ramadan told reporters that summer, during a visit to Damascus. George W. Bush leads “a despotic administration; it is an insane, criminal administration.” Some weeks later, Ramadan suggested that Bush and Saddam should resolve their conflict in a duel.[6]
During August, the divisions around President Bush over Iraq burst into public view. Brent Scowcroft, who had been the national security adviser to the president’s father, published an essay in The Wall Street Journal under the headline “Don’t Attack Iraq.” He argued that an invasion would undermine, “if not destroy,” the global effort to defeat al-Qaeda, and that Saddam, if cornered, might unleash WMD against Israel. Perhaps most stinging of all, Scowcroft refuted Bush’s judgment about why a preemptive attack on Iraq was necessary. The Iraqi leader “is unlikely to risk his investment in weapons of mass destruction, much less his country, by handing such weapons to terrorists who would use them for their own purposes and leave Baghdad as the return address,” he wrote.[7]
The essay appeared to be an indirect intervention by Bush’s father. The son was furious and called his dad. “Brent is a friend,” the elder Bush said. Scowcroft later denied that George H. W. Bush had encouraged his essay, but as the journalist Peter Baker put it: “There were those who never believed him.”[8]
Eleven days later, Vice President Dick Cheney countered with a headline-grabbing speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Cheney argued there was “no assurance whatsoever” that U.N. weapons inspections would work. “We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons,” he added, baldly overstating U.S. intelligence reporting. “Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.” Cheney skipped the common practice of clearing his speech with the C.I.A. and failed to give White House aides a heads-up, either. Bush was aggravated but declined to confront his vice president directly, instead asking Rice to reel him in.[9]
The president saw himself as a chief executive, “the Decider,” but he was losing control of his advisers. He now made a decision. Blair, Powell, and Rice all advocated for the U.N. route, on the grounds that it would isolate Saddam, build the widest possible coalition, and keep Britain viable as a military partner. On August 29, Rice told David Manning that Bush would indeed go to the U.N. To make it work, the two advisers talked about mounting “a really effective public relations campaign” about the dangers Saddam Hussein posed.[10]
At Camp David, on September 7, Bush ratified his decision about the U.N. at a National Security Council meeting. Bush met Blair later that day at the retreat and told him, “I don’t want to go to war, but I will do it.” Blair “agreed,” as Bush recalled it. The president told Alastair Campbell, Blair’s communications adviser, “Your man has got cojones.”[11]
Bush embraced “coercive diplomacy,” a phrase Condoleezza Rice favored. The premise was that a credible threat of war could persuade Saddam to “come clean” about his presumed WMD arsenal. No consideration was given to the possibility that he had nothing to come clean about. That scenario was entirely absent from intelligence reporting and White House debates. They would set the bar very high for Iraqi compliance with a new U.N. resolution. Saddam would have to cooperate unconditionally with inspectors and swallow many of the intrusions on Iraqi sovereignty that he had rejected in 1998. The demands the U.S. and Britain planned to impose on Saddam would be so harsh that “either the regime must change in response,” in order to comply, “or it would be changed by military action,” as David Manning described the thinking later. That is, if Saddam capitulated, they would have “succeeded in changing the very nature of the regime.” Or as Bush put it: “We would have cratered the guy.”[12]
Coercive diplomacy had the air of a cynical exercise, a test designed for Saddam to fail. It seemed meant to strengthen international support for an invasion that Bush had already decided on and that Blair had already committed to back. But even if Bush and Blair were prepared to take yes for an answer—to achieve Iraq’s disarmament through diplomacy and inspections—the approach they designed was all but guaranteed to provoke Saddam. The only question was how far his resistance would go. The caucus of Iraq “regime changers” in Washington were counting on Saddam’s defiance. “No one doubts that inspections will fail,” Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador, reported to London. “The argument is how hard to try for international support for the war that will ensue.”[13]
On September 12, 2002, Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly. “We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country,” he said. “Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave and gathering danger.” He issued a provocative warning that was already becoming a staple of Bush administration rhetoric: “The first time we may be completely certain” that Saddam possesses nuclear weapons would be when “he uses one.”[14]
To gain maneuvering room, Saddam decided at last to make a concession. There is no record of his deliberations, but on September 16, Foreign Minister Naji Sabri wrote U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to report that Iraq would “allow the return of United Nations inspectors without conditions” in order to “remove any doubts that Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction.”[15]
Three days later, Sabri delivered a speech to the U.N. General Assembly that was written for him by Saddam. He finally offered condolences for the victims of September 11. Sabri also quoted a letter from the Iraqi leader. It decried Bush’s speech of a week before as full of “utmost distortions . . . so as to make American citizens believe the deliberate insinuation that Iraq was linked to the American people’s tragedy of September 11.” Saddam declared that Iraq was “clear of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,” and he called for an end to “the cyclone of American accusations and fabricated crises against Iraq.”[16]
He acted very late. His misjudgments about where his self-interest lay during the first months after 9/11 and his complacency about America’s percolating threats during the spring of 2002 had deprived him of precious time. If Saddam had allowed U.N. inspectors back into Iraq the previous autumn or winter, he might have provided Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei with a chance to close out the nuclear file and to establish that many sensitive sites left uninspected since 1998 contained no incriminating evidence. That in turn might have allowed France and other European governments opposed to an invasion of Iraq to persuasively argue that U.N.-led disarmament was working once more. Their campaigning might have strengthened the antiwar lobby in Britain and perhaps even in the United States. Bush might well have ordered an invasion anyway, but Blair’s position would have become more difficult. It is impossible to have confidence about this counterfactual scenario, but it can be said that by waiting until September 2002 to permit the return of inspectors, Saddam lost the initiative and allowed Washington and London time to shape how the coming inspections would be judged.
On September 24, Blair published a blockbuster dossier, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government. It drew on secret intelligence. Britain had no prior practice of releasing intelligence in this form, and Blair took the additional step of writing his own foreword. He explained that the dossier was based on the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee, a sixty-six-year-old Cabinet Office body where the chiefs of Britain’s major spy services synthesized intelligence for ministers. Blair wrote that he believed the available information “established beyond doubt . . . that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons [and] that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons.” The prime minister’s “belief” that Saddam’s active production of chemical and biological weapons had been “established beyond doubt” overstated the evidence in his own dossier, according to the later findings of a parliamentary committee. On nuclear weapons, an initial draft had qualified Blair’s opinion: “The case I make is not that Saddam could launch a nuclear attack on London or another part of the U.K. (he could not).” The line was cut from the published version.[17]
One claim in the dossier would echo for months and eventually roil American politics: “As a result of the intelligence, we judge that Iraq has . . . sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it.” On its face, the allegation strongly implied that Saddam was again cooking up an atomic bomb. The finding was based on two very recently developed MI6 sources—one with “documentary evidence”—that described attempts by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger.[18]
Even if true, the allegation could mislead audiences unfamiliar with the complicated science of nuclear-bomb manufacturing. Iraq’s acquisition of raw uranium or uranium oxide would be an early and relatively uncomplicated aspect of any drive to rebuild a bomb program. (The hard part was separating fissionable uranium isotopes to create “highly enriched” uranium.) Moreover, British and American intelligence agencies judged that Iraq would need years to enrich uranium to bomb grade unless it acquired the stuff from smugglers or another government, an unlikely prospect.
On October 7, in a speech delivered in Cincinnati, Bush repeated his terrifying formulation of the nuclear threat: “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” A week later, in Dearborn, Michigan, speaking of Saddam, Bush added an assessment entirely untethered to intelligence reporting: “This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al-Qaeda as a forward army.”[19]
That month, the C.I.A. published its own unclassified white paper, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs. The key judgments declared that Iraq “has continued” its nuclear-, biological-, and chemical-weapons programs and that the regime “has chemical and biological weapons.” Since 1998, when Saddam expelled U.N. inspectors, Iraq had “invested more heavily in biological weapons; most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” That language echoed findings in a Top Secret National Intelligence Estimate hastily assembled by the C.I.A. and distributed to Congress and cabinet members around this time. Such estimates are designed to be the most authoritative documents issued by U.S. intelligence; they are overseen by the C.I.A. but draw on information from all major spy services. In both the public white paper and the Top Secret NIE, many of the key judgments “either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting,” according to a later Senate Select Intelligence Committee investigation.[20]
To support the charge that Iraq was rebuilding its atomic-bomb program, the NIE cited the continuing visibility of Iraq’s Atomic Energy Commission and the salaries and offices provided by Saddam’s regime to top scientists, such as Jafar Dhia Jafar. It also cited an attempt by Iraq, before 9/11, to import high-strength aluminum tubes of a type subject to export restrictions by the Nuclear Suppliers Group—and therefore off limits to Iraq under U.N. resolutions. C.I.A. analysts judged that Iraq wanted the tubes to restart its 1980s-era secret centrifuge program to enrich uranium to bomb grade. Iraq said it had wanted the tubes to build conventional military rockets. Finally, the estimate offered its own take on allegations that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium from Niger, but the C.I.A. had doubts about Britain’s Africa reporting, and the matter was not included among the document’s “key judgments.”
In early October, when the White House tried to include the African uranium claim in public remarks by Bush, the C.I.A.’s director, George Tenet, weighed in personally. He argued that the “president should not be a fact witness on this issue” because C.I.A. analysts believed the “reporting was weak.” Yet the allegation would survive zombielike in the archive of speech-ready evidence used by the Bush administration. That autumn, the C.I.A. published a classified handbook of reference material about Iraq that “policymakers, intelligence officers, and military personnel could easily access,” as the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s investigation later reported. The handbook contained an alarming adaptation of the British finding: “Iraq may be trying to acquire 500 tons of uranium—enough for 50 nuclear devices after processing—from Niger.”[21]
Further, the latest C.I.A. reports alleged that Saddam not only possessed dangerous biological weapons—germs and toxins that could potentially sicken or kill entire populations—but also now manufactured them in secret mobile labs that would be hard to find. Saddam’s mobile labs could supposedly produce within three to six months as many deadly agents as Iraq had managed to make in all the years before 1991. One “credible source” of this information was a Germany-based Iraqi defector, the source code-named Curveball, who would turn out to be a notorious fabricator. His true name was Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi. Seeking asylum, he invented his eyewitness claims about mobile labs, but because he had worked in Iraq’s weapons complex for a time, he was able to make himself believable.[22]
All these judgments reflected a “collective presumption” among intelligence analysts and collectors that Iraq had definitely restarted WMD work. The Baghdad regime’s deceptions during the 1990s had left the C.I.A. and other agencies with an assumption that the Iraqis continued to lie. This history led analysts to “both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program” and to “ignore or minimize” exculpatory information, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s investigation later found.[23]
George W. Bush suffered regret over going to the U.N. almost as soon as negotiations began with France and Russia on a new Security Council resolution. He told Tony Blair that he was “having trouble holding on to my horse,” referring to the flak he was taking from the right. On October 10 and 11, Congress voted overwhelmingly to authorize force against Iraq, by 296–133 in the House and 77–23 in the Senate. Bush was now politically fortified to wage war. For his part, Blair increasingly grasped that the Bush administration was “ruthless about its own power and position,” as Alastair Campbell put it.[24]
French president Jacques Chirac and Russian president Vladimir Putin refused to accept initial American and British proposals that would bind the U.N. to endorse war automatically if Iraq cheated or interfered with new inspections. “The French were simply making clear they would not support war at all,” Jack Straw recalled. “The Chinese didn’t care, the Russians were playing hardball.”
Chirac’s stance was pivotal. He looked with contempt on Blair’s decision to side with Bush’s “radical” determination to overthrow Saddam, despite the instability a war would cause in the Middle East. Blair “made no secret to me of the fact that he felt very close to the American point of view,” Chirac recalled, and that he believed the best way to forge international peace was “to get rid, one way or another, of leaders like Saddam Hussein.” Chirac thought Britain too often “had its eyes riveted on the other side of the Atlantic.” He was “saddened and angered” by Blair’s failure to “make greater use of the former experience that his country had of the Middle East” during Britain’s days of empire, to steer the U.S. away from an invasion based on naive assumptions.
Although he had been charmed by Saddam Hussein in the 1970s, Chirac insisted during an interview with The New York Times that “we do obviously want” a new government in Baghdad. But he objected to American unilateralism and preemptive war. Chirac forged an alliance with German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who ruled out German participation in any invasion. They would use their considerable influence to block Anglo-American plans at the U.N.
For weeks, Blair clung to hopes that the credible threat of war might preclude a need for war. Britain’s goal was Iraq’s disarmament, not regime change, he insisted, and he declined to assure the Pentagon that British forces would join an invasion. On October 31, after being informed that the U.S. was now preparing for a war without U.K. troops, he finally offered British ground forces “for planning purposes.”[25]
In early November, exhausted negotiators tabled U.N. Security Council 1441. The resolution set rules for a tough new round of inspections in Iraq to be led by Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei. But it did not resolve the most important disagreements among Washington, London, Paris, and Moscow about how future Iraqi violations might lead to war. The resolution demanded that Iraq submit a new and truthful declaration about its WMD and missile programs. Paragraph four clarified that false Iraqi statements or omissions in this document would constitute a “material breach” of its obligations to the U.N., which the U.S. might choose to interpret as ample cause for an invasion. Yet the resolution’s critical provision, paragraph twelve, stated that if Blix or ElBaradei reported that Iraq had lied or committed other violations, the U.N. Security Council would merely “convene immediately . . . to consider the situation.”[26]
On November 8, the Security Council unanimously adopted the resolution. The Bush administration explained its favorable vote: “If the Security Council fails to act decisively . . . this resolution does not constrain any Member State from acting.” The upshot was that if the administration could not obtain U.N. backing, it would blame the U.N. for failing to do its job and go to war with a coalition of willing allies, whoever these might be.[27]
In late 1995, during the confessional period that followed Hussein Kamel’s defection, when Tariq Aziz had asked Jafar Dhia Jafar to produce an extensive written history of Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program, Jafar had brought together about thirty veterans of the former bombmaking enterprise to work on the document. The scientists and engineers drafted a lengthy declaration for the I.A.E.A., drawn largely from memory, since U.N. inspectors had seized many of the archival documents. Jafar’s one-thousand-page Full, Final, and Complete Declaration, submitted in 1996, lay at the heart of the physicist’s disputes with Blix and ElBaradei over whether Iraq deserved a clean bill of health in the nuclear arena—arguments that had continued into the summer of 2002.[28]
The latest U.N. resolution gave Saddam thirty days to produce another full, final, and complete declaration about all of its banned weapons and missile programs. Saddam’s aides asked Jafar to handle the section about nuclear weapons. The earlier document was “completely accurate so far as I am concerned,” and no new work on a bomb had taken place since it was written. So Jafar essentially resubmitted the earlier declaration, topped by a new “extended summary” of about two hundred pages. “All facilities, equipment and materials of the former [Iraqi bomb program] have been destroyed or rendered harmless,” he wrote in the new summary.[29]
He did not initially address the two allegations making headlines in America during late 2002—that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Niger and that it had imported aluminum tubes to restart uranium enrichment. Jafar knew these charges to be unfounded, and he had not yet considered how to refute the claims, he said later. The Niger deal had supposedly been orchestrated by Wissam al-Zahawie, a friend of Jafar’s who had worked on nuclear diplomacy during the 1980s and ’90s. At a time when Saddam was looking to break Iraq out of its political isolation, Zahawie had been sent on a four-country African tour to invite leaders of those nations to visit his country. He had held meetings in African capitals but had not shopped for uranium. Iraq had six hundred tons of yellowcake and two hundred tons of pure uranium dioxide in its stores, so it already had what it required if it were ever to resort to indigenous enrichment again. Eventually, Jafar detailed all of this in a letter that refuted the allegations about nuclear material sourced from Niger.[30]
On December 7, in Baghdad, two U.N. staff members loaded nearly twelve thousand pages—the entirety of Iraq’s latest declaration—into black, rope-bound suitcases to lug them to New York. (The document would not be made public because it contained “cookbook” information about how to make chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.) In his office on the thirty-first floor of U.N. headquarters, Blix began reading. He hoped the report would provide “fresh revelations and a fresh start” for his inspectors, who were by now already back in Iraq, digging around.[31]
As the inspectors mobilized, Saddam sat for an interview with an Egyptian journalist. It was his first interview with any foreign media outlet in more than a decade. He called America’s designs on Iraq a “prelude” to its conquest of the Middle East. “From Baghdad, which will be under military control,” the U.S. would “strike Damascus and Tehran,” he predicted. The American plan was to “create small entities” across the Middle East that would be “controlled by safekeepers working for the U.S., so that no country will be larger than Israel. . . . This way the Arab oil will be under its control. . . . The purpose is to make Israel into a large empire in the area.”
“Mr. President, do you think that the attack is imminent?”
“We are getting ready as if the war will start in an hour.” Iraq was not stronger than America, since the U.S. possessed “long-range missiles and naval forces.” Yet Iraq “will not turn the war into a picnic for the American or British soldiers. No way!”
When his interviewer asked if he thought that time was on his side, Saddam said, “We have to buy some more time.” It was an admission of what the Bush administration feared. If he could draw things out long enough, he predicted optimistically, the “American-British coalition will disintegrate . . . because of the pressure of public opinion in the American and British street.”[32]
On December 9, in Washington, Richard Dearlove, the British intelligence chief, met with George Tenet and Condoleezza Rice. President Bush was being “griddled,” Rice said. Republicans had accused the White House of indulging the U.N. unwisely. She was confident that Iraq’s massive new written declaration, which the administration was still reviewing, “would be a sham.” Rice’s “impatience for action was much more obvious than her commitment to secure international backing” for war, David Manning reported to London. She “made no effort to hide the fact that the Administration would now be looking to build the case for early military action . . . probably mid/late February.” Her mood had “hardened substantially.”
Manning told Tony Blair he even feared that the Americans, in their exasperation, might “overdo the pressure on Blix” and “force him into resignation,” an event that would have “damaging repercussions.” He recommended that Britain undertake “maximum efforts to find a smoking gun” in Iraq that would prove Saddam’s guilt.[33]
Blair was already on the case. He described himself as “cautiously optimistic” that inspectors would soon make a major breakthrough, or that some late-arriving defector from Iraq would provide unshakable evidence about Saddam’s weapons stocks or ongoing WMD work. Dearlove cautioned the prime minister that the odds of this happening were about 20 percent.[34]
As he made his way through Iraq’s latest “Full, Final and Complete Declaration,” Hans Blix found it disappointing. Iraqi technocrats writing about the country’s chemical, biological, and missile programs had mainly followed Jafar’s example: they had recycled documents already provided in 1996 or 1997. “What new information there was—some of it useful—related mostly to development of missiles and peaceful developments in the field of biology,” Blix recalled, referring to evolvements since the departure of inspectors in 1998. Iraq had revealed no “long-hidden truths. It looked rather like a repetition of old, unverified data.”[35]
On December 19, 2002, he shared this assessment with the Security Council. After decades at the top of the U.N. system, judicious by training and temperament, Blix had a gift for sailing through gale-force political crosswinds. He rarely gave voice to his own opinions, except when arguing about how inspections should be conducted or about what particular pieces of evidence showed or did not show. David Manning worried needlessly; Blix was not the sort of person who would resign because of American pressure. He would ride Washington out, as he had done many times before during his career at the I.A.E.A.
He and his inspectors were still investigating, he told the Security Council. They had already conducted dozens of inspections across Iraq. They had found nothing of special note. Blix said he was “neither in a position to confirm Iraq’s statements, nor in possession of evidence to disprove them.” He was merely a steward of the evidence. Washington, London, Paris, and Moscow could make of the facts what they would.[36]
That autumn, Tony Blair asked MI6 to produce a psychological profile of Saddam, “not least for the pointers this may give on splitting off Saddam from his regime.” The resulting paper pointed out that “personal survival, survival of the regime, and Iraqi-led Arab unity are the three most powerful factors that motivate Saddam. . . . He is a judicious political calculator.” The paper assessed that Saddam would “not wish a conflict in which Iraq will be grievously damaged and his stature as a leader destroyed,” but it observed that Saddam’s ideas about losing were “far more focused on reputation than on [Iraq’s] physical or economic standing. . . . If he feels he is losing control . . . he can become very dogmatic, increasingly impulsive and extremely non-compliant.” As long as Saddam believed that he could derail an American-led war, he would play it cool, so there was no immediate danger of “radical or unpredictable action.” But that was likely to change if Saddam sensed an invasion was imminent or inevitable.[37]
Even this unusually incisive analysis did not fully account for Saddam’s thinking as 2002 ended. He did not possess WMD or operative long-range missiles, so he did not have the options for radical military action that he had available in 1991, the last time U.S. and international troops massed on his borders. And he was not quite the same person he had been then. Age, isolation, and a decade of family struggles had sapped some of his fire. That fall, Saddam published his autobiographical novel, Men and a City, a treatise on the Iraqi nation laced with personal nostalgia. As winter arrived, he devoted many hours to a new novel, this one a screed against America. The strategic provocateur of the Iran and Kuwait wars had evolved into a commander in chief as interested in letters and legacy as in victory at arms.