To oppose the US administration would be a serious step. But this is a serious matter; and what is influence for?
Sir Michael Quinlan, 2002
He raised steel tariffs and got very little response.
Alastair Campbell diary, meeting of Prime Minister Blair and Vice President Cheney, 11 March 20021
Britain went to war in Iraq partly driven by an old ambition, to gain and ensure unequalled influence in Washington DC. It was an effort at ‘bandwagoning’ that is often misunderstood. Rather than subordinating itself to receive material benefits, British decision-makers believed that by aligning with the US in the War on Terror, they were generating the ability to steer a superpower that otherwise might run amok and jettison itself from the international community. As we have already seen, British decision-makers genuinely believed in the merits of striking Iraq, and agreed with their American counterparts on the fundamentals, that in the words of Richard Dearlove, Chief of MI6, that it was ‘very much in HMG’s interest’ and the outcome was of ‘enormous significance’ for the national interest.2 The bandwagoning was not hollow. As well as this real convergence, the ambition to influence America was driven by a number of forces: a simple fear of how America might react to the 9/11 attacks; a habitual and reflexive instinct among the British governing and political class that London could play Greece to America’s Rome; a desire to shape the consequential military campaigns that were already being conceived in Washington; a concern for Britain’s relative place in the Euro-Atlantic pecking order; a confused and sentimental concept of international ‘friendship’; and as preparations gathered momentum, a fear of being left out. As before in the history of the Anglo-American relationship, these ambitions proved unfounded on all major fronts, diplomatic, military, and economic. They are based on a flawed understanding of how American policymaking works. As friendly and as historically intertwined as the two countries are, the United States is a separate great power that pursues its interests remorselessly. It is not open to permanent capture by any one state’s lobbying. That does not make America a lesser power. It makes it unexceptional. And as an unexceptional power, the United States quickly met its own limits. Even by the second term of the Bush administration, it was seeking out and cultivating allies and clients for cooperation and burden-sharing. The implication is that Britain within the medium term, if not the short term, could have maintained the capacity to exert influence in Washington even while opposing the war in Iraq. This episode exposed a confusion around the very concept of ‘influence’: if continual alignment and harmony is required in order to ensure influence, then such influence can never be meaningfully used, and is effectively dormant. On the eve of a reckless military adventure, Britain ought to have tested the limits of its influence, and given its partner some unwelcome but friendly advice.
This chapter divides into three parts.3 In Part I, I put in historical context the ambition that London has traditionally harboured since the World War II, and its disappointments. In Part II, I examine the first reactions of the Blair circle to the 9/11 attacks, the fears and sense of possibility that it awakened, and the conception of Iraq as a platform for elevating Britain’s stature in Washington. In Part III, I identify the flaws in this vision and how those flaws surfaced in the pre-war planning and the course the conflict then took.
The history of the ‘special’ Anglo-American relationship is one of extravagant expectation and disappointment. According to Tony Blair, participating alongside America at risk of serious costs was vital to reforging the relationship with the superpower. As he asked, rhetorically, ‘Are you prepared to commit, are you prepared to be there when the shooting starts?’4 From the outset, the assumption was that participation would yield influence, abstention would reduce it. ‘If you just go to someone and say, “You’re completely wrong. Forget it, the amount of influence you are likely to have … is less”’, reasoned Jonathan Powell.5 Laying out this doctrine to an assembly of British ambassadors in January 2003, Blair explained that the ‘first principle’ of foreign policy was to remain America’s ‘closest ally’ and to ‘influence them to broaden their agenda’.6 There was always a tension within these claims. That Britain should participate in order to create leverage did not easily sit with the claim that participation against proliferating rogue states was a matter of absolute principle, born of the harmony of morality, strategic interests, and trans-Atlantic ties that was a signature theme of Atlanticist rhetoric. What is the relationship ‘in theory’, and in practice?7
The ‘special relationship’ conceit expresses a hopeful, vicarious ambition for Britain’s role in the world. To ‘bandwagon’ is to align with a stronger power in the belief that the costs of resisting it outweigh the gains.8 Britain’s bandwagoning, though, carried an unusually optimistic aim. ‘Special’ means more than a transactional exchange of services, whereby loyalty is rewarded by preference or practical benefits like intelligence sharing, consultation rights, or technology transfer. Britain, allegedly, could guide the direction of American foreign policy by bandwagoning with it. As the Foreign Office advised in 1944, ‘we can help to steer this great unwieldy barge, the United States of America, into the right harbour’.9 In return for its solidarity, as well as a European ally and a strategic base in the UK, there would be a great pay-off. This obviously reflects an assumption about the greater wisdom of the older and declining power, tutoring the new power which was potentially wayward, a concern that endures. This vision was supposedly incarnated in the Roosevelt–Churchill partnership. As former prime minister, Churchill the part-American most famously sketched the lineaments of the relationship in his ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech of March 1946.10 Churchill’s rationale was both sentimental and hard-headed. Pan-cultural identity, a sense of shared values and history, formed one part of the relationship. America and Britain were kindred, bonded through the common inheritance of Anglo-Saxon blood ties, language, and law. The second was practical and strategic. A marriage of Anglo-American power made sense because of shared security interests and interlinked global economic interests. With the US as the mediator, the UK could work through it to attain a global prestige that exceeded its economic and military muscle. Britain would attain an unparalleled influence in Washington. This would be exercised through close cooperation between bureaucracies, collaboration through both militaries, through intelligence sharing, and after 1958, in relation to nuclear weapons. After 1945, it was quickly reaffirmed, when Britain’s Attlee government sent a brigade group to Korea on the basis that meaningful contributions sustained the partnership. In its most self-congratulatory form, Britain as the junior but more seasoned partner would play Greece to America’s Rome, ‘civilising and guiding the immature giant’, in the worlds of Harold Macmillan, the weaker but more seasoned ex-hegemon educating the uncouth overdog.11 Britain may no longer be a hegemonic world power. But by working through the US as well as preserving its nuclear weapons and its place on the Permanent Five of the UN Security Council, it need never resign itself to being just another European nation state. By steering the American giant, Britain could attain an outsized ability to set the agenda and mediate between the European Union and the US. In the article of faith coined by former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd in 1993, it enabled Britain to ‘punch above her weight’.12
The practice of the relationship is more fraught. Later in the same year that Hurd coined the boxing metaphor, a leaked league table ranked the importance of foreign countries to the US, numbering Britain below Germany and in the wide company of France, China, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Iraq, Canada, and Israel.13 Already in World War II, as the British Empire and the American republic fought on the same side under the aegis of the Atlantic Charter, there was between them a constant tension and power struggle. This friction was a product of the shifting material power balance between them, as Washington gradually realized its vast latent industrial and mobilization strength to outweigh Britain’s bargaining power, and it was driven by conflicting interests. Britain was fighting partly in the hope of retaining its Empire. America opposed the colonialism of old Europe, and fought with the intent to dismantle the financial and trading structures on which it rested, replacing its imperial preference system, the Stirling bloc, and the pound’s status as reserve currency with US-designed institutions (the International Monetary Fund and World Bank) and the dollar. The ‘sheep’s eyes’ telegrams of March 1944 between President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill reflected an uneasy mix of collaboration and competition, as America sought to replace Britain as the dominant regional power in the Middle East, and prise open its protected markets.14 Britain as a victor power emerged as a financial supplicant, almost exhausted by the strain of the conflict, the task of reconstruction and the unforgiven debt burden it imposed.
The fragility and realities of the relationship were highlighted by other points of collision. In the Suez crisis of 1956, the hinge event in the post-war Anglo-American relationship, the US Sixth Fleet stalked and harassed British ships in the Mediterranean, fouling their radar and sonar, menacing them with aircraft and lighting them up at night with searchlights.15 With Stirling and oil supplies under pressure, President Dwight Eisenhower coerced Britain with the simple formula of no ceasefire: no loans. Patronage could be rapidly withdrawn and regardless of recent history, blood ties, or shared visions of Western-enforced order. Former Commander in Chief Middle East Land Forces, Sir Charles Keightley, spelled out the implications of the crisis as British policymakers saw them: ‘This situation with the US must at all costs be prevented from arising again.’16 Even with its nuclear capability and European garrisons, permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and its far-flung network of bases and territorial possessions, Suez demonstrated brutally that Britain had become part of America’s grand strategy. Britain from that moment was anxious to fit its policies to those constraints. At the same time, British governments frequently hoped and tried to steer Washington in favourable directions for the sake of influence as a means as well as an end.
Even so, antagonism periodically flared up when their interests diverged. Prime Minister Harold Wilson walked a carefully ambiguous line in diplomatically supporting President Lyndon Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam and covertly contributing intelligence, military hardware, and jungle warfare training, while committing no ground forces.17 Wilson attracted denunciation at the time for his accommodation of America, whereas in the age of Iraq, he was retrospectively praised for keeping his distance. In the 1973–4 slump in Anglo-American relations, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger used coercive diplomacy to punish British non-cooperation over a US-initiated Declaration of Principles and the privacy of bilateral and UK–EEC discussions. Accordingly, they suspended intelligence and nuclear cooperation with the Heath government, and Heath later retaliated by restricting US spy-flight access to bases in the UK and Cyprus.18 Infamously, the Reagan administration’s initial triangulations between Argentina’s fascist Galtieri regime and Britain over the contested Falkland Islands created a temporary crisis in relations. And even during the post–Cold War period of general amiability, when Britain consistently supported US interventions from the Gulf to Bosnia, the allies clashed over significant policy divides: the recognition of Sinn Fein, industrial tariffs, and the recognition of the International Criminal Court. Washington’s preparedness to set aside historical solidarity to strong-arm its junior partner was displayed most consequentially during Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union in June 2016. Despite Britain spending blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq to support the War on Terror and thereby cement its standing in Washington, President Barack Obama made a blunt threat on 22 April of that year, that departing the EU would place the UK at the ‘back of the queue’ when seeking a bilateral free trade agreement.19 This ought not to shock. Great powers have a long history of doing what they want. But after constant affirmations over fifteen years of Anglo-American unity and shared sacrifice, it shocked.
Thus, in the transatlantic relationship there is persistently a gap between words and deeds, expectations and reality. Through landmark occasions, such as D-Day commemoration, the Atlantic idea supplies a body of evocative rhetoric and politically charged images that celebrate and legitimize the role of both nations as heroic agents and allies in history. It is often framed as a ‘friendship’ between two kindred nations. This was instinctively the language President Bush used in thanking Blair for his in-person solidarity when attending the Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001.20 Yet this promise of friendship is bound to disappoint.21 It falsely personalized the totality of interests that link and separate countries. It misapplies to disparate nation states a social term for relationships between private individuals and groups, holding out the illusion that the alchemy of particular leader-to-leader relationships can supplant deeper interests. The pursuit of friendship can lead to a failure to ask difficult questions, as it indeed did. In the unforgiving history of international relations, there are no permanent friends, indeed there are few friends at all, and even dyads that think of themselves as friends will meet clashing interests, as Britain and the US did over Iraq down the track. The very notion that Britain should align itself with its ‘friend’ in order to shape its behaviour is an instrumental calculation, and not just born by affection. If harmonious collaboration came naturally between the republic and the parent country it fought to liberate itself from, the ‘friendship’ between the two would not need such constant and anxious reaffirmation.
I have already used the term ‘bandwagoning’. One feature of this concept, salient to the Iraq case, is that when weaker states align with a stronger state, that stronger state is also the potential source of danger.22 That Britain would be ‘closely identified’ with the US was already an operating assumption of government.23 Part of Blair’s first response to the 9/11 attacks was fear, the fear of America’s possible reaction, and a desire to open channels with Washington to tame its response. For the first days after 9/11, Blair fretted that Washington’s response would be ‘immediate, inappropriate, and indiscriminate’,24 one minister recalled weeks later, and that ‘TB’s immediate concern’, diarized Alastair Campbell, ‘apart from the obvious logistical steps we had to take, was that Bush would be put under enormous pressure to do something irresponsible.’ In the first intelligence briefing after the attack, the Director General of MI5 likewise forecast that ‘the pressure on the Americans to respond quickly, even immediately, would be enormous.’25 With the campaign in Afghanistan progressing in mid-November 2001, Jonathan Powell urged Blair to act as a restraining influence on Bush, to counter the ‘right wing of the Republican Party’ and the Pentagon, and resist the shift to start bombing Somalia and Iraq.26 The determination to keep America within the frame of existing alliances and institutions—in Blair’s own words, to avert the danger of the US ‘jumping out of the international system’—was affirmed by a close aide.27 Contrary to the ‘poodle’ interpretation,28 it was not a case of Washington actively leaning on allies for support. In the months after 9/11, London did more to reach out. The Bush administration did not place emphasis on ‘outreach, consultation and good relationships’.29 It was rather Blair who attempted to orchestrate the reactions of nations to Washington, and to steer Washington itself, with a heavy campaign of phone calls, trips, and transatlantic conferences, meeting with fifty-four leaders in the two months after 9/11.30 The intent, if not the outcome, was to make Britain a tutor, not a vassal.
This fear, of the superpower becoming a runaway train, flowed also from older anxieties. Before 9/11 opened the new era, British officials worried that the new Bush administration was dangerously unilateralist and would dismantle the structures of internationalism and peace, as former ambassador Meyer recalled, ‘We were very, very worried that if the Americans went gung ho for getting rid of the anti ballistic missile treaty and started dismantling some of the key elements of old detente that this could unravel—seriously could prejudice the relationship with Russia and all kinds of other repercussions’.31
In retrospect, it is easy to forget the openness of the post-9/11 moment, when the international audience held its breath in anticipation of America’s reaction. Consider that the most powerful state in history had just been on the receiving end of a major act of urban terror. It had suffered the butchery of thousands of its citizens and a humiliating attack on its nerve centres. The hijackers had not just slaughtered, but inflicted unimaginable fear on civilians who chose to leap from the skyscrapers rather than burn to death. Anthrax attacks in Washington seemed to have been directed against members of the administration. This had become personal. Amidst expressions of international solidarity, there were eruptions of anti-Americanism, from open Palestinian celebrations in East Jerusalem of disputed size, to a jeering open letter from Saddam Hussein, and before a BBC Question Time audience, accusations directed at the US ambassador that Washington had brought al-Qaeda’s aggressions upon itself.32 There were rumours, including wild ones, of fifth columnists celebrating and preparing further attacks.33 Whether or not such displays were truly representative of wider reaction, they were perceived, and a feedback loop formed between hostility, resentment, and retaliation. Going by the historical record, the US was a state that had struck back remorselessly when attacked or when it met resistance. It had interned populations, levelled cities and countrysides, destroyed jungle with napalm, and had been the first and only state to incinerate civilian populations with atomic strikes. The occupant of the White House had a Texan drawl that triggered memories of Lyndon Johnson and his merciless bombing of Indochina. Bush as governor had keenly presided over the death penalty. As president he was deploying the ‘dead or alive’ language of the Wild West, and at one point, even promised a ‘crusade’. Even worse, they were not reacting in the knowledge that, over fifteen years later, 9/11 would remain the only mass casualty terrorist attack of that magnitude. Fair or unfair, crude or sophisticated, there was, especially in Europe, a long-standing nightmare that the familiar, English-speaking power whose capital, protection, and products the world craved could transform quickly into a brutish and culturally different Leviathan, especially when wounded. These fears were magnified for the British government when the NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson rallied the transatlantic alliance to invoke Article V of its Charter, committing members to common defence on the basis that the attack on the US was an attack on them all. This historic step, however, met with perceived indifference in Washington. This perception of indifference may have been unfounded, and may have come about more as a result of procedural delays than disregard,34 but Robertson and European onlookers feared that American hardliners in the hour of emergency wished to keep their power unfettered.35 Officials like Sir Jeremy Greenstock who believed that Britain’s objective should be to prevent regime change being the default option, feared a policy vacuum over Iraq and argued there ‘was an urgent need’ to craft a strategy with the US ‘at a level which binds in the whole Administration’.36
Therefore, British policymakers could be forgiven for anticipating a faster, bloodier, unilateral, and more indiscriminate response. Only in retrospect do we know that compared with the speed and violence with which it could have responded, the US was at first relatively restrained. Compared hypothetically to other great powers in history, the tentatively and carefully planned military campaign in Afghanistan that did not open until 7th October, almost a month later, and even the programme of torture and rendition, were comparatively limited. How might Ottomans, Mongols, Mughals, Hapsburgs, Romanovs, Caesars, Victorians, Manchus, Shoguns, or Nazis have reacted to an equivalent atrocity, if they had possessed the same destructive capabilities? How patient would they have been to appeals for proportionality, to consult allies, seek the approval of international institutions, or to uphold the nuclear taboo?
A less dramatic fear also presented itself, one rooted in historical memory from Suez. The contemplation of war with Iraq could leave Britain marginalized. In December 2001, the FCO in its communication with Downing Street identified an ‘unwelcome dilemma’, ‘support unlawful and widely unpopular action or distance ourselves from a key US policy’. This suggested in turn that Britain take part in the discussion. Before decisions in Washington took place, ‘we need to influence the debate.’37 Downing Street was already engaged in ways that the FCO and MOD were unaware of, through a traditional channel of Anglo-American dialogue, the discrete communication between Britain’s SIS and the CIA.
That the new unipolar Rome would need an experienced Greece to tutor it in the ways of international life was both a private apprehension and a public rallying cry. If Britons were averse to a unilateralist, vengeful, and unruly superpower overreacting to mass terrorism, Blair argued that joining Bush’s posse under an international banner was a necessary step in applying restraints. Wariness about America’s proclivities itself became a reason to participate. Making the case for war in the Commons in March 2003, Blair warned that standing British forces down at the final hour would damage American internationalism, turning it into a dangerous lone wolf: ‘if our plea is for America to work with others, to be good as well as powerful allies, will our retreat make them multi-lateralist? Or will it not rather be the biggest impulse to unilateralism there could ever be’,38 an argument he made also to the cabinet: ‘we must steer close to America. If we don’t we will lose our influence to shape what they do’.39 UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw also warned that to abandon support for the US at the late stage of March 2003 would accelerate American unilateralism and ‘reap a whirlwind’.40 During a briefing meeting on the campaign plans for Iraq, Secretary of Defence Hoon had asked Blair to use his influence to restrain Bush, who was ‘going for it’ and whose ideas could inflict lasting damage on Iraq.41 Hoon’s consistent view was that British involvement would enhance US planning, thus putting the Greece–Rome logic into concrete form, but he had added a qualifier, that if the US lacked a credible plan, Britain could hold back support.42 From the vantage point of military planning, earlier engagement and earlier commitment were pressing, as Britain’s lead-time for any deployment to the Gulf was longer than America’s, but this pressure circumscribed just how far Britain could exert leverage. As Colin Powell’s leaked memo for the Crawford summit indicates, Blair knew this was a commitment of political capital. He ‘knows he may have to pay a political price for supporting us on Iraq, and wants to minimise it. Nonetheless, he will stick with us on the big issues. His voters will look for signs that Britain and America are truly equity partners in the special relationship’.43
If the ‘blood price’ was the necessary down payment on continual influence, that blood would be offered through ground forces and a land commitment. The British armed forces are one of the main instruments through which the special relationship is symbolized, asserted, and measured. Britain defines its military-strategic power in relation to its American ally. Its Defence White Paper of 2003, Delivering Security in a Changing World (supplemented in 2004), presumes that Britain can only conduct major operations within a NATO or US-led coalition. It asserts that Britain should aim to shape the conduct and outcome of such campaigns, and regards interoperability with US forces as a ‘major focus’.44 At a higher level, Britain designs its forces ‘to maintain its influence with America and its place at the international top table’.45 This asset, of privileged access to Washington, must be recurrently fought for. Thus, General Sir Richard Dannatt, Britain’s former Chief of the General Staff, argued in June 2009 that Britain must increase its commitment to Afghanistan because ‘maintaining military-strategic “partner of choice” status with the US offers a degree of influence and security that has been pivotal to our foreign and defence policy.’46 The Army can boast a long history of working alongside American forces. It has been continuously engaged as a coalition partner since 9/11. It has a higher rate of deployment abroad than any other European power since World War II.47 And it can draw upon a heritage of minor wars cherished within its institutional memory.
Whitehall behaves strategically rather in the manner of an inveterate gambler with a small pot of chips. Britain wishes to stay in the strategic “game,” the rules of which are set in Washington, and it perceives that in order to do so it needs to place a stake on the table. That stake is the Army.48
As well as seeking long-term diplomatic influence, Britain sought to influence the Iraq campaign as it was being prepared. Yet paradoxically, this created the pressure to conform. Momentum to participate triggered fears that influence would diminish if Britain pulled back once engaged, and that because of the demands of timetables, failure to engage early enough would result in the door being closed. Except for helping persuade Bush to address Iraq via the United Nations, anxiety to be included in CENTCOM’s rapidly evolving plans trumped any concern to set preconditions for British participation. These pressures to make a firm land contribution are reflected in MOD correspondence. On 29 October 2002, the Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Defence advised David Manning that the US military was beginning to plan its campaign with the assumption that the UK would not be involved, and that,
If we are to keep the option open, and continue to have the strongest military cards to underpin our political influence, the Defence Secretary believes that we should indicate to the US that they should plan on the assumption that the land contribution should be available, subject to final political approval.49
That influence might be better exerted through the threat, implicit or explicit, of withholding support, and a reputation for selective support, even at the risk of exclusion, was hardly entertained. The permanent Under Secretary of State for Defence, Kevin Tebbit, placed emphasis on the need to conform with the broad outline of US policy in order to exercise influence within in. Reporting back from Washington as the US moved to a ‘war footing’, he advised ‘if we want our advice to be heeded’, ‘we need to place it in the context of counter-terrorism post 11 September’.50 Tebbit in January 2003 advised the Secretary of State that were ‘HMG’ to fail to ‘go along’ with the US in the event of action against Iraq without a ‘further enabling UNSCR’,
there would be significant damage … having valued profoundly the way we have stood shoulder to shoulder with them so far, the US will feel betrayed by their partner of choice … the damage to our interests and influence would be felt most immediately and strongly in the foreign policy and security field.51
Later recalling the logic of the decision to commit, Tebbit explained that ‘If the United States is making a blunder, we must not allow them to make it alone’.52
The flawed logic of the ‘special relationship’ is here demonstrated. Influence, so the theory goes, must derive from acquiescence, and continued acquiescence to the outlines of US policy is necessary to retain influence.53 This renders any influence highly circumscribed. Having pledged support for a policy, that support must continue and Britain can only influence its execution. Otherwise, the ability to influence policy will be withdrawn and estrangement or even punishment will follow. Past solidarity creates a path-dependent pressure to tow the line, in order to obtain an influence that Britain in the most critical hour dare not exercise or test. Accordingly, discussion within government of the option of holding back and the potentially pernicious consequences of joining the campaign was only rare and sporadic. When one aide suggested Britain not support the war, Blair dismissed the advice, on the basis that it would be the biggest shift in foreign policy in fifty years.54 This begs the question of when, precisely, influence that has been painstakingly cultivated can be actually used. This issue was especially troublesome for the MOD. There was always an undercurrent of scepticism about the feasibility of the Iraq project, but it remained largely an undercurrent. It was outweighed by the instinctive traditional Atlanticism reflected in Tebbit’s warnings, and by the anxiety that participation was not a simple ‘yes/no’ choice but required prior involvement with US planning, in ways that made early commitment hard to avoid.
Reinforcing these pernicious trends was the problem that military plans and political choices were delinked in time. Britain’s de facto commitment predated the concrete consideration of war plans, and Blair was only fully briefed on military plans on 17 January 2003. Striking is the overall timidity of military advice regarding the long-term potentiality of the campaign, with the exception of the worst-case scenarios warned of by the Chief of the Defence Staff.55 Professional military advice only rarely raised problems of inadequate post-war plans and possible worst-case scenarios, even in the run-up to invasion, and the focus was restricted largely to the combat phases. There was scarce discussion between arms of government (MOD, the FCO) about the major implication of Britain’s campaign plan to advance through southern Iraq, that it would take responsibility with that region and would be committing not to leave quickly. An earlier warning in September 2002 by the MOD Strategic Planning Group that one potential reason for not participating would be that in the US policy vacuum, British commitment would be ‘open ended’, was a concern that faded quickly.56
Between going in and staying out, there was another option that was smothered before it could get the airing it deserved. This was the less dramatic ‘Harold Wilson’ model of limiting Britain’s liability, of offering diplomatic support and limited material involvement, without any appreciable land commitment. One of the most sophisticated pieces of advice came in a memo from Peter Watkins, Private Secretary to the Secretary of Defence on 22 July 2002, pulling together the judgements of key advisors. It judged the case for attacking Saddam ‘deeply flawed’: because of a lack of need given that containment had kept the WMD programme limited, because the attack could have ‘unforeseen geopolitical ramifications’ and could be the catalyst for an ‘upsurge of violence’ from Gaza to Kashmir, and because it could create a focusing crisis that robbed the occupying powers of the capacity to act elsewhere. Watkins also feared a long and destructive ‘siege’ of Baghdad that would benefit al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and given that Saddam could have prepared such a combat, it was a reasonable caution. Yet Watkins also estimated that refusing any support, such as basing access in Cyprus and Diego Garcia would ‘severely damage’ the relationship. But with the likelihood of a US campaign, the UK should offer ‘reasonable’ support while avoiding offering more. This option hardly penetrated the decision-making. It would not satisfy the requirement of ‘being there’ when the shooting starts, however, and would forego the prize of being a senior coalition participant.
Evidently, something was wrong with the expectations entailed in the ‘special relationship’ as it was perceived in London. The UK does not exert exceptional influence, though neither is it ‘zero’. Not only does the pursuit of vicarious power exaggerate British influence. More fundamentally, it misconceives the nature of policymaking in the United States. It wrongly treats that country as susceptible to any one country’s designs. And conversely, it overstates American power, inflating the long-term costs of opposition or disagreement.
We might reduce the confusion generated by the Anglo-American relationship by framing the duality of American policymaking in terms of ‘day’ and ‘night’. By night, American policymakers (and many ordinary Americans) genuinely revere the memory of the Churchill era, the wartime alliance, and ties of blood, language, and shared history. If anything, the Churchill cult is more intense in the United States than in Britain, as the creators of Winston Churchill High School in Maryland could attest.57 In the Iraq era, elite Anglophilia was strong. Historian Andrew Roberts, promoting his hyper-Atlanticist History of the English Speaking Peoples, was enthusiastically received at the highest levels by elites on an American tour in March 2007.58 General David Petraeus toured Churchill’s map and planning rooms in September 2009, and felt ‘transported back to that earlier era of extraordinary US-UK cooperation’.59 On taking office, President Obama praised British sacrifices in Afghanistan and reaffirmed the common bond of both nations, and the New England Historic Genealogical Society discovered that Obama and Churchill are distant relatives.60 Blair’s rousing speech to the Labour Party conference of October 2001 ‘resonated’ around the United States.61 The relationship still has mystique. It is a ritual totem to mobilize around.
Affection at night, however, does not necessarily translate into material influence in the cold light of the Oval Office, or the Congress. At the very time that Britain deployed 45 Commando into Afghanistan, the US put tariffs on exports from UK of speciality steel.62 There is a persistent disconnect between the payment of the blood price and the response of the recipient. Sir Christopher Meyer, the British envoy closest to the action in Washington, observed the American capacity to compartmentalize their ‘sentimental and sincere affection’ from the ‘single minded pursuit of national interest’, yet claimed that ‘It is a gap we have to closel.’63 How Britain could close that gap was not clear.
Iraq exposed the limits of British influence, in the same campaign that was supposed to confirm its stature as America’s leading deputy. Britain, though, only exercised a marginal influence at best. Blair privately and unsuccessfully opposed the siege of Fallujah in 2004.64 The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) overrode British concerns over the De-Ba’athification process of liquidating the ruling party from the entire Iraqi civil service, as well as British advice on economic development.65 And if one of Britain’s explicit aims, declared in its Defence White Papers, is to shape the way America designs and conducts its military campaigns, British officers often did not achieve this ambition. This became clear in the leaked report for the Chief of the General Staff, Stability Operations in Iraq: An Analysis from the Land Perspective, which found that the UK was powerfully constrained by the ‘timetable and ideological views set in the United States. As one Senior Officer put it: ‘the train was in Grand Central Station, and was leaving at a time we did not control.’66 An interview with Colonel J.K. Tanner, formerly chief of staff, Multinational Division South East, also reflected the disappointments and anxieties of the ‘special relationship’ mindset.67 In statements tainted with the suspect myth that colonial experience from generations before gave the British a distinctive capability to ‘treat with Arabs’, Tanner claimed that dealing with Americans corporately is like dealing with ‘Martians’, and that Britons were treated the same as other European countries such as Portugal. Americans conducted very little dialogue with them. Worse, they were confronted with the worst fear of British Atlanticists, that America might regard them no differently than other European nations. President Bush, extremely close to Blair, still did not fulfil Blair’s vow that British support in Iraq would be repaid by a renewed American commitment to the ‘Road Map’ resolution of the Israel–Palestine conflict. The one notable anomaly is Blair’s successful move to persuade the US against its preferences to pursue a second UN resolution authorizing military action in Iraq.68 Other than that, if the yardstick was influencing the US to ‘broaden its agenda’, this demonstrably failed.
More broadly, as a pattern of observed behaviour, America historically and recently has often acted against and despite Britain’s expressed wishes, even during periods of apparent closeness. Overriding British warnings, President Ronald Reagan’s US invaded Grenada in 1983 and bombed Libya in 1986. In 1994–5, the US went against British advocacy and recognized the Provisional IRA as a negotiating partner. Kinship made Ireland as special to America as Britain. The UK has not altered America’s stance on a range of fronts. It has not persuaded America to sign the Kyoto Treaty, nor did it dissuade President Donald Trump from withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. It has not steered it towards signing up to the International Criminal Court. Similar failure is apparent with the Ottawa Convention on Land Mines. The two nations persistently diverge on the missile defence shield, and there is little evidence that President Obama’s change of policy was attributable to British influence. British solidarity has not resulted in America making generous concessions on its industrial subsidies and tariffs. Demonstrably, Britain’s power and capacity to influence America is more limited than the special relationship mindset allows.
There were tensions in the rationalizations given. At times, Blair publicly stressed that this was a grand transaction, that British participation was a vital brake on potential American unilateralism. Yet at other times, as we have seen, the commitment he articulated was absolute and irreversible. This was born of a simple defect in the ‘grand bargain’ theory. It overlooked the cold reality that influence can only be exerted with the coercive threat of abandonment or at least non-support, express or implied. Support given regardless of repeated non-reciprocation is more likely to generate complacency, not influence. Junior allies who wish to moderate the hegemon’s behaviour are more likely to succeed by playing harder to get. When Blair took the absolute stance on the day of 9/11 to ‘stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends’, promising they would ‘not rest until this evil is driven from our world’,69 amidst the grand ideological declarations there needed to be hard-headed calculation. That in turn would require a greater dose of realpolitik even in the emotive aftermath of the 9/11 atrocity. At the highest levels of government, life is not supposed to be easy.
Subsequent diplomatic history suggests fears that non-participation—or less participation—would damage Anglo-American relations in the long term were overstated. Within only one presidential term, Washington was reaching out to states that had opposed its policy.70 The Bush administration had initially been truculent in its treatment of countries opposed to Iraq. It looked to punish dissidents, only to discover soon afterwards a need for international cooperation. ‘As we were looking to the first proposals for rebuilding Iraq’, recalled former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, ‘The Pentagon wanted the contracts to go to the countries which had supported the war … in practice it made the United States look petty. Eventually we would want help from everyone—a lot of help—to rebuild Iraq.’71 The ‘Petraeus revolution’, with its surge of fresh troops and renaissance in counterinsurgency technique, encouraged greater American engagement with British practitioners. And the Bush administration in its second term worked to reverse its isolation among anti-war European states and ease the strains created by its swaggering unilateralism. The White House altered its personnel, removing figures who had pressed for a swaggering unilateralism—Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, and later Donald Rumsfeld—and replaced them with pragmatists. It reached out to cultivate allies in the Middle East and in ‘Old Europe’, and even in March 2006 revealed that it had attempted to open dialogue with Iran over the condition of Iraq.
Against claims that Britain had to join the fight to maintain influence, a suggestive rebuttal is the case of France.72 French opposition to the invasion of Iraq was strong. Its President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominic de Villepin expressed it in systemic terms, defining a France–German united Europe as the counterweight to American hyper-power, blocking the attempt to obtain a final UN resolution supporting war in March 2003, and exerting pressure on European states that supported invasion to fall in line with Paris.73 With Saddam overthrown and America’s campaign in its ascendancy, American officials and lawmakers, with the open acknowledgment of Secretary of State Colin Powell, earmarked France for retaliation, entertaining plans to impose trade sanctions, exclude it from international forums, and lessen its influence within NATO.74 The bitterness of the fallout was impressive. It is therefore significant that within four years of the invasion, France under a new president successfully re-embraced the United States, and within six years of the invasion, it joined NATO’s military command. Franco-US relations rebuilt around agreement on other international questions—the Iranian nuclear programme, Afghanistan, and Kosovo’s independence. And Paris achieved this without changing its position on Iraq, and while criticizing the Bush administration’s position on the environment.
Just as strong British support did not translate into exceptional influence, so too did outright French opposition not lead to permanent exclusion or punishment. Not only did the mythology of the Anglo-American ‘special’ relationship overstate Britain’s capacity to shape American behaviour. It overstated America’s level of strength. Even the superpower’s abundant resources and appeal could be rapidly spent. Even a swaggering leadership in that superpower did not want to become a pariah amongst a significant share of the nations and with a damaged capacity for collective action. America was a great power of unprecedented relative strength. It was not a ‘hyper-power’.
In a counterfactual universe, Britain may not have been able to prevent the invasion of Iraq. But the price for trying would have been neither as steep, nor as lasting, as feared. Opposing war would have alleviated Britain of significant material costs in the meantime, and would have served one intangible but vital interest. In another context, one critic suggested what Australia ought to have done in 1974–5, instead of acquiescing to a more predatory invasion and annexation of East Timor:
We should have warned the Indonesians that they could not subdue the colony. We should have warned them that they could expect no support, only condemnation, from Australia. And we should have warned them that they were marching into their own Vietnam. Do I believe that this would have made a difference to the outcome? No. The history of East Timor would have been the same. But Australia’s history would have been different in one crucial respect. We would not have shamed ourselves.75
This forewarning did not happen between ‘friends’ in 2003, and as a result Britain took part in a disastrous war that brought shame and humiliation in its wake. Such friendly advice did not happen partly because of a misconceived notion of how to pursue and obtain influence. And it did not happen because decision-makers generally agreed with Washington’s calculus, and sought to shape its execution.
A fragile assumption lies at the root of any argument for waging war for the sake of credibility and reputation, namely the assumption that the campaign will succeed well enough to generate such dividends. Should a war for credibility falter, should it have the ironic result of raising doubts about one’s reliability, commitments create pressure for further commitments. Thus, fighting for the sake of keeping stocks high in another capital can create a ‘credibility trap’. One significant consequence of Britain’s Iraq campaign, once it found itself overextended, was to raise pressure to succeed in the concurrent campaign in Afghanistan. As Tim Bird and Alex Marshall demonstrate in their account of the fraught ‘Af-Pak’ war, there was a tragic feedback loop between anxiety over reputation, deterioration of Britain’s position in Iraq, and the alternative theatre. By early 2004, Britain’s presence in Southern Iraq
was both increasingly unpopular domestically and onerous in terms of resources. As the Iraqi security situation began to deteriorate markedly through 2004 and 2005, a growing yearning became evident in London to reduce the British commitment. The problem was how to do this while maintaining the positive relationship with Washington that had been at the heart of the British decision to join the invasion of Iraq in the first place. Taking on some of the ‘stabilization and reconstruction’ burden in Afghanistan appeared to provide a neat solution. UK forces could be presented not as ‘going home’ but rather as redeploying to the Afghan theatre.76
‘Stabilization and reconstruction’ was an attractive scenario, born of a limited intelligence picture and a concern to deploy and redeem the Iraq failure, ahead of rigorous appraisal. As it happened, British forces were about to deploy into the hardest fighting since the Korean War. Capable of regeneration, the Afghan Taliban had an insolent way of deciding for themselves whether the campaign would now move into a low-intensity stage of development in a fragile state. And the disturbing possibility was revealed within the rationale of fighting for alliance influence. Not only would commitment in Iraq not create meaningful strategic leverage once the shooting started. By 2014, according to a Freedom of Information Request, British forces had fired 46 million rounds of ammunition in Afghanistan.77 Hunting the Great White Whale of transatlantic stature, the shooting would have to go on, and with no end in sight.