Blair's 10-day rush to war with Iraq haunts him still

Tony Blair

The document bore a single-word heading above the lion and unicorn crest of the British crown: "Secret".

War on Iraq was imminent. The United States and Britain had set a deadline 10 days away - March 17, 2003 - by which time the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had to comply on six key demands. If he did not, then the US would let slip the dogs of war, with Britain at its side.

The document was not what the Prime Minister wanted to read. Its 13 pages gave Tony Blair six reasons why the war might be adjudged illegal. Worst of all, the briefing was signed "Peter Goldsmith, Attorney General", the Government's chief legal officer.

Three UN Security Council resolutions were key here. Back in 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, resolution 678 authorised war - using "all necessary means" to "enforce peace and security" - to remove Iraqi troops from Kuwait. The following year, resolution 687 placed continuing obligations on Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, and indicated that force against Iraq could resume if they breached these conditions.

A decade later, after the September 11 attacks, the US turned its attention to Iraq once again.

It was now that Lord Goldsmith had his first briefing on the subject. With the benefit of legal advice seconded from the Foreign Office, he advised Tony Blair that there was "no justification for the use of force against Iraq on grounds of self-defence against an imminent threat".

Blair, a lawyer, disagreed. He had bought the American view that resolution 687 gave any permanent member of the UN Security Council the right to declare Iraq in further material breach of its obligations to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction. Blair told his Attorney General to keep quiet in public.

Two months later came the third crucial UN resolution. On November 8, 2002, the Security Council unanimously passed resolution 1441 giving Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations". It warned Saddam of "serious consequences" if he did not. The resolution was ambiguous about whether military action was legal without further resolutions. Two weeks later, UN weapons inspectors arrived in Iraq for the first time in four years, as 250,000 American and British troops moved to Iraq's borders.

The chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, repeatedly reported back to the UN with mixed verdicts on Saddam - but also expressing doubts about some of the "intelligence" supplied by the US and Britain. Back in London, the Attorney General continued to express his unease. Towards the end of January 2003, he wrote a memo to the Prime Minister voicing his concerns.

The following month, February 2003, Britain and America began an attempt to persuade the UN Security Council to pass a further resolution authorising the use of force. The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, presented evidence that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction, and Lord Goldsmith was again briefed by British Intelligence. Then, in mid-February, he was instructed to go to Washington to hold talks with senior American officials. He was still not entirely convinced.

On February 28, Lord Goldsmith met Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister's chief of staff, and Sir David Manning, his foreign policy adviser, and expressed his views. Also present was Baroness Morgan. Lord Goldsmith was then asked by Downing Street to put his views in writing.

Saddam continued his brinkmanship. On March 1, Iraq began destroying its al-Samoud 2 ballistic missiles - the largest act of disarmament since UN weapons inspectors returned to the country. "Naturally, Saddam will play his game," Mr Blair said publicly. Meanwhile, US and British warplanes continued bombing Iraqi military installations.

March 7 was a fateful day. It was then that Hans Blix told the UN that Iraq had taken significant steps to disarm. There were still unanswered questions, he said, but more time was needed to complete his task - "not years, nor weeks, but months".

The same day Mohamed El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Authority, said there was no evidence that Saddam had any nuclear weapons nor that he had been trying to acquire them.

Still, Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw insisted that Iraq would be considered to have "failed to take the final opportunity" unless by March 17 it demonstrated full, unconditional and immediate co-operation and gave up all banned weapons. That same day, Tony Blair was considering the Attorney General's memorandum.

Now that that document has been leaked, we know that Lord Goldsmith, in addition to setting out the six arguments why the war might be considered illegal, gave no definitive opinion on the legality of an attack. Rather he said "the safest legal course would be to secure the adoption of a further resolution to authorise the use of force." If no such United Nations resolution came then a "reasonable case can be made" for war relying on the authority of resolution 678. But to do that "we would need to demonstrate hard evidence of non-compliance and non-co-operation".

Moreover, in light of the latest reports by the weapons inspectors, Lord Goldsmith told Mr Blair: "You will need to consider very carefully whether the evidence of non-co-operation and non-compliance by Iraq is sufficiently compelling to justify the conclusion that Iraq has failed to take its final opportunity."

This March 7 document was never shown to a full cabinet meeting. Mr Blair later suggested he could not trust some members of his cabinet with such papers.

Three days later, on March 10, Tony Blair spoke to Hans Blix. The Prime Minister set out five or six key disarmament tasks for Iraq, which become known as "benchmarks". Mr Blair suggested that the disarmament inspections could not continue until April/May but the deadline might be extended beyond March 17. The Americans, however, were unwilling to extend the deadline.

On March 10 - as newspaper editors were warned that journalists in Iraq risked being subject to WMD attacks - the office of the chief of defence staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, had different concerns. He had seen Lord Goldsmith's March 7 document and he needed a more definitive declaration.

If the war was illegal, not only would British troops be potentially liable to face prosecution under an international war-crimes tribunal, but legal action could be taken against the Ministry of Defence by injured soldiers or relations of troops.

That evening, French President Jacques Chirac said that France would veto the new resolution that the US and UK wanted unless the inspection process was given enough time to disarm Iraq. At this point Washington gave up on Europe. Two days later, on March 12, Tony Blair was alarmed to discover that the US Defence Secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, had written Britain out of the US invasion plans.

It took two late calls to President Bush to establish that Mr Rumsfeld had been "only trying to help".

It was on March 13 that Lord Goldsmith was summoned to meet Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan. Exactly what was said then is not known but the Attorney General left with the view that war would be lawful under resolution 1441 without any further Security Council authority. So sensitive was Lord Goldsmith to the events of these few days that he was reluctant to speak about it during his two closed appearances before the later Butler inquiry. The Attorney General even suggested that he could not show the committee the now controversial March 7 legal advice, giving in to their demand only after they told him they would abandon their inquiry and announce the reason why.

On March 14 - the day the UK abandoned its attempt to secure a second UN resolution, citing the French veto threat - Lord Goldsmith's legal secretary wrote to Mr Blair's private secretary asking for confirmation that "it is unequivocally the Prime Minister's view that Iraq has committed further material breaches as specified in paragraph 4 of resolution 1441". The question was significant. In the March 7 advice, Lord Goldsmith had said it was essential that strong evidence existed that Iraq was producing WMD. Now he was asking if the evidence existed.

The next day, Mr Blair's private secretary replied: "It is indeed the Prime Minister's unequivocal view that Iraq is in further material breach of its obligations".

At the Azores summit on March 16, the US, UK and Spain gave Saddam a 24-hour ultimatum to enforce their own demands for immediate disarmament, or face war.

On March 17, Lord Goldsmith attended a meeting of the Cabinet. There he read out a brief statement, just 337 words long, saying that "authority to use force against Iraq exists from the combined effects of resolutions 678, 687 and 1441". There were no questions. On March 18, Tony Blair went to the House of Commons to set out the central justification for war to MPs. Two days later, the invasion of Iraq began.

But had the Attorney General's full advice from March 7 been read out in Parliament, wavering Labour MPs might well have voted the opposite way.

- THE INDEPENDENT