Today is the anniversary of one of the most significant dates in recent history, now largely forgotten by all but the most dedicated Iraq war geeks. 10 March 2003 was the secret date of the planned invasion of Iraq, agreed behind closed doors in Washington by George W Bush and Tony Blair just over two decades ago.
A memo written by Blair’s national security adviser, Sir David Manning, on 31 January 2003 showed the American president and the British prime minister were prepared to go to war without proof that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and without a UN security council resolution specifically authorising action. While the world was being told that all diplomatic channels were still being pursued, the decision to go to war had already been made and a specific date for invasion agreed upon.
Why should this concern us more than two decades later? Because such flagrant disregard for the rule of law prepared the ground for the Trump era of power politics, untethered from the restraints of international law.
The story of the Iraq war was one of systemic failure. Internationally, the UN was fundamentally and perhaps terminally undermined. In the UK, our key institutions (parliament, the judiciary, the military and the intelligence services) were weakened as a result of the government’s determination to push the country to war.
And where was the media in all this? The newspaper where I worked, the Observer, was in favour of the invasion. This was typical, Fleet Street was largely supine and, in some cases, actively promoting a false narrative fed to them by the US intelligence services or the authors of the infamous “dodgy dossier”, hastily cobbled together from a student’s 12-year-old thesis.
Once again, the media is heading down the same hawkish road, apparently willing to abandon any thought of an independent foreign policy. The Times leader of 2 March was unequivocal: “It is up to Mr Trump, of course, to define his war aims and clarify what goals the US and UK should share. But there is no doubt that in a struggle to curb the malignant influence of Iran this country should be there, fighting at America’s side. Britain should be stepping up, not looking on.” The Mail this week called Keir Starmer “gutless” and claimed Britain's international status had deteriorated thanks to his “quibbling and hesitation in support of our allies”. The Telegraph accused Starmer of equivocation.
As in 2003, a large section of the UK public is sceptical about further British involvement. Half of the people questioned in a recent Survation poll said the UK should remain neutral in the conflict, while 20% actively opposed intervention. Just 17% said we should be actively involved. The Fleet Street consensus is that we should be more enthusiastic about a war the public doesn’t want. The dodgy-dossier generation are at it again.
The Bush-Blair memo, the existence of which was first revealed by UK human rights lawyer Phillippe Sands in his prophetically titled 2005 book Lawless World, proved what some of us reporting on the build-up to war in Iraq had already suspected: that the leaders of the free world were short-circuiting the diplomatic process.
As part of a team of reporters at the Observer, I had helped verify another memo, also written on 31 January. The “Koza memo”, named after Frank Koza, the US National Security Agency’s head of regional targets, was sent to codebreakers and linguists at GCHQ in Cheltenham and later leaked to the Observer by the whistleblower Katharine Gun. It ordered a spying operation on delegates at the UN to gain access to “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals”. We now know that in the meeting in the White House later that day Bush clarified what this meant on the ground: “The United States would put its full weight behind efforts to get [the desired] resolution and would twist arms and even threaten.”
Blair could not have known that Saddam possessed chemical or nuclear weapons. It was a kind of delusion that prefigured the post-truth world where Trump makes up his own facts
Such talk of UN resolutions and diplomatic processes may seem quaint in the light of Donald Trump’s shameless contravention of international law with Operation Epic Fury. But there is a direct connection between the arm-twisting and secret war plans of 2003 and the bombing of Iran two decades later.
There is a key scene at the beginning of the 2019 film Official Secrets, which tells the story of Gun and the Koza memo. The young GCHQ translator, played by Keira Knightley, sits on her sofa watching Blair on a news bulletin talking about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. “What we know is that Saddam has this material,” announces the British prime minister with great certainty and authority.
Martin Bright and Katharine Gun at the "Official Secrets" photocall, Zurich film festival, 2019. Photo: Andreas Rentz / Getty
“We don’t know that,” Gun shouts at the TV. “He just keeps repeating the lie. Just because you are the prime minister, it doesn’t mean you get to make up your own facts.”
The truth is that Blair could not have known that Saddam possessed chemical or nuclear weapons. It was a kind of delusion that prefigured the post-truth world where Trump does indeed get to make up his own facts. Vibes have replaced UN resolutions in justifying war.
Iran is not the same as Iraq, but there have been striking similarities in the rhetoric used to justify intervention. Like Iraq, this is said to be a rogue regime which has murdered its own people, posed a threat to its neighbours and developed weapons of mass destruction that could hit the west and its allies.
Few would mourn the fall of the ayatollahs and many will argue, as they did with Iraq, that the regime needs to fall by any means necessary. Indeed, the case for the Iranian threat is compelling, as evidenced by its deadly retaliatory strikes on Israel and American bases across the region.
Reporting on this war is near impossible in the conventional sense. There is no independent journalism in Iran, where the government has used internet blackouts to suppress dissent. At the same time, the Washington Post is not the only foreign bureau to have been eviscerated. But that does not excuse the widespread acceptance of the White House’s lines.
It does matter how you prosecute a war. It matters if you fail to plan for the aftermath. It matters if you ignore international law.
If there’s one thing the dodgy-dossier generation now running our government and media organisations should have learned from Iraq, it’s that you really can’t make up your own facts.
Martin Bright is editor-at-large at Index on Censorship, senior lecturer in journalism at the University of Essex and a former Home Affairs editor at the Observer