From New York to Kabul
When the al Qaeda attack on New York and Washington took place, Blair was on the point of addressing the TUC in Brighton about his public sector reforms. It seemed an important speech. Campbell had been briefing journalists that he would confront the dinosaur instincts of the unions; it would be a ‘belter’, and highly dramatic. Just then the 24-hour news channels, which had become a feature in every ministerial office and wherever journalists gathered, began showing repeated film of a burning building. As speculation spread about some dreadful accident involving a light plane, the second tower was hit. Blair reacted to the news like everyone else, with disbelief. He was quickly advised that this was a terrorist attack on an unprecedented scale. Whatever his failures of analysis, Blair is very fast on his feet and, as Diana’s death had shown, quick to find words for moments of drama and grief. Inside the TUC there had been scenes of farce as journalists and others began taking phone calls and leaving the room. Its president rebuked them and called for order, only to find ripples of horror and speculation all round. When Blair arrived he said he was cancelling his speech, briefly described what had happened, expressed his great sympathy and support for America, and sped back to London by train with his advisers.
There, he found little preparation to defend the capital from a similar attack, which might be imminent. The airspace over London was closed, RAF jets were sent up on patrol, and the thinking began in the secure basement below Downing Street. Throughout the crisis Blair would work more closely with his military and intelligence advisers than he would with his ministers. He found he could not reach Bush by phone for more than twenty-four hours and there was a flurry of anxiety in London that the President had panicked or ‘gone AWOL’. But as soon as contact was made with Bush at lunchtime on 12 September Blair was able to present not only his sympathy but also his hastily gathered briefing and thoughts about Osama bin Laden. The two resumed their mutually admiring partnership, emotionally charged by what had happened. This was a time when American flags fluttered across London, the band outside Buckingham Palace played ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, a carpet of flowers appeared outside the US embassy and the Last Night of the Proms became an act of solidarity with New York. Not since 1945 had America been as popular in Britain.
By phone, Bush had promised that he was not going to act precipitously – ‘pounding sand’ – but told Blair he would make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harboured them. This implied first an ultimatum to the Taliban in Afghanistan and then a war. Blair agreed and made clear to the Commons soon afterwards that he believed the rules had changed, and that ‘rogue states’ harbouring terrorists, who might use chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, now had to choose whose side they were on. This emphatically did not mean that Iraq was to be attacked, certainly not by Number Ten’s reckoning. We now know that at Camp David, four days after the September 11 attacks, Bush was advised by Donald Rumsfeld, his Defense Secretary, that he had an opportunity to attack Iraq but decided, for then, to concentrate on Afghanistan.
Nine days after the attack, in the midst of a frenzy of diplomacy, talking to the Germans, French, Chinese and Iranians, Blair went to pay tribute to the victims of what was already being called ‘9/11’, struggling through torrential rain to the still-smoking ruins of ground zero and making an emotional cathedral oration for the British dead. In Washington afterwards, Bush told him that Iraq was for another day. Then in his speech to Congress laying out America’s new ‘war on terror’ Bush warned that he would start with al Qaeda but not end there – another reference to Iraq. He also publicly praised Blair for showing such solidarity, turning to him theatrically, and saying: ‘Thank you for coming, friend.’ Congress rose to give Blair an ovation. Blair was using all his political capital, and the accumulated knowledge of the Foreign Office to help the United States, beyond the commitment of any other country and was receiving the emotional thanks of a President who now divided the rest of the world into friends and enemies. It was a high point of British prestige in America, certainly on a par with the Reagan-Thatcher age. Whether the mutual affection was truly influential is a moot point. For now, it encouraged the Americans to involve other countries in the attack on Afghanistan.
The strikes on the Taliban were launched less than a month after September 11, beginning with British submarines’ cruise missiles and heavy bombing by US aircraft. Immensely destructive weaponry was dropped on al Qaeda training camps and Taliban defenders, including the notorious ‘daisy-cutter’ bombs. On the ground the war was conducted by the Northern Alliance and Afghan warlords, paid and supplied by the Americans and aided by Special Forces. This was a war of the twenty-first century against the nineteenth and it was over quickly, Kabul being deserted by the Taliban just five weeks after it had begun. The several thousand remaining al Qaeda Arab fighters and their Taliban hosts retreated to a cave complex near the Pakistan border, at Tora Bora, where even the Americans were unable to dislodge and capture all of them. Bin Laden, after calling for a war by the Muslim world against the West, disappeared. Throughout this, Blair had continued his diplomacy, helping win Pakistan round to the American cause and protesting to a wide range of Arab and Muslim leaders that the conflict was emphatically not aimed at Islam. In Oman, Egypt, Syria and Palestine, he and his aides assured everyone who would listen that there would be no further war against Iraq unless evidence was uncovered of a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, Blair’s attempts to bring the other main European leaders nearer to close support for President Bush, and to kick-start a new phase of the peace process between Israel and her neighbours, were largely unsuccessful.
During these weeks of frantic activity, Blair was trying to build support for the new ‘war on terror’ but also to begin to give substance to his remarkable speech at Labour’s conference in October, when he suggested the ills of the globe could be addressed in the aftermath of September 11. It remains the single most important speech he made and the best reference point for his failures and successes as a foreign affairs Prime Minister. Though advisers contributed key phrases, the thrust of the speech was his own, the product of the Christian moralism he had developed as an Oxford student, a growing belief in his personal ability as a global leader, and a hot concentration of excited thinking, utterly unlike his vaguer grasp of domestic policy. The Twin Towers attack had simply been a turning point in world history, he told his party. After movingly describing the aftermath in New York, he tied war-making and aid-giving together as Bush certainly would not have done. Defeat the terrorists, was his message, and then deal with the refugees; take on poverty and the terrorism would drain away. From the slums of Gaza to Africa itself which he was already describing as ‘a scar on the conscience of the world’, a new world could be made:
‘From out of the shadow of this evil should emerge lasting good: destruction of the machinery of terrorism wherever it is found; hope amongst all nations of a new beginning where we seek to resolve differences in a calm and ordered way; greater understanding between nations and between faiths; and above all justice and prosperity for the poor and dispossessed.’
Some laughed in disbelief; others felt their eyes mist and their hearts beat faster. Blair was in some areas specific. He promised to make the Middle East peace process a personal priority from now on. But mostly he was visionary. The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, could be saved. ‘This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder the world around us.’ It was an undeniably powerful act of rhetoric. But was Blair already reaching too far, allowing the intoxicating moral certainty of the hour to persuade him that he could play a messianic role round the world, part Gladstone, part Gandhi? Iraq was the bloody rock which would shatter these hopes, though Blair pursued his aims doggedly in Israel and Africa too.