Doomed diplomacy: Jeremy Greenstock’s memoir of Iraq

The first words of Sir Jeremy Greenstock’s memoir of Iraq are among the most revealing: “For Anne [his wife], who suspected long before I did that Saddam had no WMD.” Greenstock was the UK ambassador to the United Nations during the build-up to the Iraq war in 2003, and subsequently the British deputy to the American-run occupation of the country. He is by general acknowledgment one of the most talented diplomats of his generation. Iraq: The Cost of War amply demonstrates why, and yet this insider’s blow-by-blow account of the hectic, ultimately unsuccessful diplomacy before the war and the chaotic attempts at reconstruction afterwards is, inevitably, a story of failure.

Greenstock is too fair-minded and loyal to shovel the blame on to the shoulders of the politicians alone. Instead, he describes the failure of a system — of bright people getting it wrong because of the aggregation of flawed judgments, famously faulty intelligence and misguided assumptions. The enterprise might have survived one or two mistakes but was overwhelmed by the compound number. There is a sense in the book of accumulated errors building on each other until there was no way back.

First, there was the original sin of the small clique around vice-president Dick Cheney that connected Saddam Hussein spuriously to Osama bin Laden. Then came false claims about Saddam’s arsenal. After the first Iraq war, Saddam Hussein was found to have more weapons of mass destruction (WMD) than expected, so why should be it different this time? For people a little further from events, such as Greenstock’s wife, it was perfectly possible. But in the hermetic official policy world of Washington and London the existence of WMD in Iraq seemed beyond reasonable doubt.

For the Americans, the legitimacy conferred by UN Security Council backing was desirable but not necessary to have. Much more important was that their own Congress had authorised war. As always, in their eyes the world revolved around Washington, not the UN in New York. Finally, it was complacently assumed by many in London and Washington that Iraqis would overwhelmingly welcome the invasion as a liberation, not an occupation. Getting these big choices wrong led to cascading errors of judgment about voting intentions in the Security Council and, later, securing peace in Iraq.

The scepticism of Security Council members who did not share these judgments was never going to be overcome even by Greenstock’s powerful eloquence; nor was the wider world going to be convinced of the legitimacy of such an undertaking. My perspective as a senior UN official observing these debates at the time was that the British and Americans always seemed likely to lose the diplomatic fight, just as they would inevitably win on the real battlefield. Nevertheless, there was respect and admiration for how Greenstock and his team made the best of a bad hand. Dangling the argument that Saddam only responded to the perceived threat of unblinking force, he and others coaxed antiwar members of the Security Council to support a first resolution insisting that Saddam comply with the Council’s demands. Even Kofi Annan, who like most of us around him opposed the rush to war, worked hard to secure a unanimous Security Council decision as this seemed the only way to push Saddam into compliance and thereby avoid a conflict. But, for the same reasoning, securing a second resolution that would have allowed war was a giant step too far for even the most nimble British and American diplomacy.

As Greenstock spins his considerable magic, what also comes across is the partial view that even senior participants in crisis-management often have. Greenstock was the critical point person for Britain’s determination to secure UN backing for the war; nevertheless, he was often out of the information loop between London and Washington, and indeed sometimes within Whitehall itself.

This year’s Chilcot report on the Iraq war magisterially demonstrated the broken decision-making processes in London that excluded cabinet and official naysayers. Fear of leaks and of opposition meant that those with responsibility for the Iraq project operated in need-to-know information silos. Like blind men feeling the different limbs of an elephant, few it seemed had a sense of the whole. It is almost an axiom of modern British government that when a prime minister does not like particular advice, the messenger is excluded. The Brexit saga is the latest case in point.

If the White House’s original sin was to buy into a false cause for war, Downing Street’s was the vanity of believing that staying by the side of the US would allow it to exercise restraint on its ally. Once again, the special relationship looked a lot more special from London than it did from Washington. And that error was not limited to Tony Blair: the British diplomatic establishment had been brought up to guard this relationship at all costs. Greenstock speculates whether the British might have done more good for themselves — and, indeed, their US ally — if they had held back and refused military support as Harold Wilson had done in Vietnam.

An astonishing footnote is that this book sat unpublished for 11 years, initially because Jack Straw, the then foreign secretary, would not countenance its publication. He seems to have been burnt by another very different and gossipy ambassadorial memoir published at the time, but perhaps he also nursed the hope that history would look more benignly on the war. However, today it looks a bigger mistake than ever, with consequences for international, regional and domestic western politics that are still playing out. The only defence left is that, however high the price, some of the mistakes at least were honestly made by decent people. This is their story.

Iraq: The Cost of War, by Jeremy Greenstock, William Heinemann, RRP£25, 480 pages

Lord Malloch-Brown is a former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations. He was administrator of the UN Development Programme at the time of the Iraq war