111. The Iraq War

20 years on from the invasion of Iraq, Rory speaks to Alastair about the build up, aftermath, and legacy of the event. The second episode in this series, 'Iraq: The Legacy', will be released tomorrow. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to another episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:47Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:48Alastair Campbell?

  And this is going to be one of those where we are only talking about one subject. And it's a subject on which I have spoken many, many times, of which Rory and I both have our own personal experience. It is about Iraq. And the reason being, it is 20 years now, credible to think really, it's 20 years since the American-led coalition invaded Iraq, toppled Saddam Hussein relatively quickly, relatively straightforwardly, and since when Iraq has been and remains one of the most controversial issues, certainly of Tony Blair's time and of George Bush's and of all the other leaders who were involved.

• 2:31Rory Stewart?

  So, Alasdair, let's start with that. I'd love for us to come in and out of this and just to remind listeners where we all were during this period and how this worked. In a sense, I went to Iraq because of you. I was sent there as a British diplomat and previous to that, I'd been in Afghanistan, I'd been in Bosnia, I'd been in Kosovo. So we can talk a little bit about what led up to that. But you were right at the very, very heart of this because you were incredibly close to Tony Blair. You were in a lot of the key meetings with President Bush from 9/11 onwards through 2002 into 2003. You played a central part in bringing together the arguments around why the British government was joining the US and going into Iraq. So we'll have a chance to get into that. We'll

• 3:13Rory Stewart?

  have a chance to remind listeners a little bit about some of the basic chronology of it. But before we start it, I want to give you a chance, and we'll come back to this throughout the programme, but what is your sense, looking back now on that Iraq decision? How do you think about it? How do you, yeah, how do you, yeah, how do you think about it?

• 3:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think about it a lot. I do have the odd sleepless night, to be honest, thinking about it. I think it was, without doubt, one of, if not the biggest decisions that Tony Blair took. And ultimately, we can talk about cabinets and advisers and all the rest of it. Decisions like that, they ultimately do lie in the hands of the Prime Minister, who then has to, you know, he had, he had very solid cabinet support most of the time. Robin Cook resigned, Claire Short resigned, but generally had very solid support. He made and won the case in Parliament with a huge majority. Very big Labour rebellion, but the Conservatives backed the decision. They like to pretend they didn't these days, but they backed it. And I actually, funny enough,

• 4:16Alastair Campbell?

  I was at an event the other day, Turn the Tables, which you may have done, where I was grilled by your friend Gillian Keegan. And Emily Maitlis was grilled by Keir Starmer. And in the questioning, a woman in the audience, she asked me very directly, she said, do you still stand by the decision that Tony Blair's government took in relation to Iraq? And do you understand why people are still so angry about it? And I gave a fairly long-winded nuanced answer, and she said, I don't feel you've answered my question fully. And I said, well, I'll answer it. Yes, I stand by him. And yes, I do understand why people are angry. I do, I do understand that, yeah.

• 4:53Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's, let's keep, keep looping back to this. But before we do that, let's, let's set the context. So nineteen eighty nine to two thousand and three was the time of extraordinary optimism. It was the time of real US dominance. And it was the period, collapse of communism, rise of democracies around the world during that period, the number of democracies in the world doubled from nineteen eighty eight through to two thousand and three. There were these interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and I was involved in them as a young British diplomat. I was sent out to the Balkans during that time. And one of the things I think that fed in, and I'd be interested in your views on this, but I certainly felt that one of the things that fed into the optimism around Iraq

• 5:33Rory Stewart?

  is that many people had been predicting that the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo would be a catastrophe. There were books produced saying centuries of ethnic hatred, there'll be insurgencies, the whole thing will be a failure. And of course, people were still haunted by Vietnam, which, after all, at that period, didn't feel that long away. Remember, Vietnam in relation to Bosnia was the same distance away that the Iraq war is from us today.

• 5:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 5:57Rory Stewart?

  So people were very, very haunted by the memory of Vietnam. And then, surprisingly, those interventions were, in their own terms, relatively successful. The war criminals were arrested and put on trial, the big militias were disbanded, the war ceased. And above all, there was no insurgency. The most dangerous place for a American soldier to be was on the basketball court in Sarajevo. And there were no casualties from insurgent attacks against UK-US forces.

• 6:25Rory Stewart?

  So let's begin with that. Do you think that this created a mindset in the mind of Tony Blair and others around him where they felt, well, we've been told in the past that these things are going to be a disaster and last time around they weren't. So now we've got all these people saying Iraq's going to be a disaster, but if we just hold our nerve and push ahead, it'll be fine.

• 6:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there's a couple of things I'd say at the start of that. The first is you started the story fairly well advanced. I think it is important to remember further back from that, that Saddam Hussein took power in Iraq in 1979. Torture, execution, 1980, Iraq launched this invasion of Iran, used chemical weapons extensively from 1984, invaded Kuwait 1990, and on it goes. And so I think that that, I think it's worth just sort of putting that out now. And also, because I think this will be relevant to when we get on to talk about

• 7:21Alastair Campbell?

  the case for war, as it were. Also, we knew he was developing chemical and biological weapons because he was using them and had used them, including against his own people.

• 7:34Rory Stewart?

  Yes. So just to interrupt, you knew that he had been developing them in the 1980s. What we didn't know is whether in 2002, 2003, he was still actively developing them.

• 7:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we now know that there was no evidence post-war of that programme. But when you say we didn't know it at the time, the intelligence was telling Tony Blair clearly that there was, and we can come on to that. Don't forget as well, in 19, Tony Blair's first, as it were, authorisation of military action overseas was in Iraq in 1998, when they kicked the inspectors out and Clinton put together, again with UK probably as the second partner, and with considerable public support at the time, including, I mentioned Robin Cook earlier, including from somebody like Robin Cook. So that was Iraq, there was Sierra Leone, where that was post Tony Blair's Chicago speech, where he'd identified that, you know,

• 8:28Alastair Campbell?

  military action for humanitarian purposes in the, as a last resort was a legitimate thing to do. And that was very successful. There was a smaller military operation in East Timor involving the Gurkhas.

• 8:40Rory Stewart?

  Yes. I mean, again, East Timor was another file that I was very much involved in. So I was a young diplomat in Indonesia. I remember Robin Cook visiting Jakarta. I was working. On East Timor East independence was very, very involved in the attempts to challenge Indonesia around its human rights record. And again, the independence of East Timor in 99 felt like part of a general move through the 1990s, which was happening all around the world. It was happening in Latin America. It was happening in Asia. It was happening in Africa, away from authoritarian regimes towards democracy. And the three that really stood out at the time that we kept talking about when I was in the Foreign Office, and of course, you and Tony Blair then started talking about a lot, and George

• 9:22Rory Stewart?

  Bush talked about a lot, were Iran, North Korea, and Iraq, which became these sort of massive symbolic examples of brutal authoritarian regimes.

• 9:31Alastair Campbell?

  And of course, the other one was Afghanistan, post 9/11. And I do think it's important, again, to set the the context of the significance of this September 11 attacks. I think that there's this phrase that lots of people use, that the many, the several various inquiries that have been about the calculus of threat being changed. And I do think, I can remember on 9/11 itself, when we were at the TUC in Brighton, we cancelled the speech, or Tony Blair went to the conference and said he's not staying, he's back to London, and sitting down on the train and writing down, him sitting with a pad and a pen, and just writing down all the issues we had to deal with and address when we got back. And I think I've said

• 10:14Alastair Campbell?

  to you before, one of them, it just said WMD slash rogue state. So that was, I think, what he meant by the calculus of threat, that there'd been this approach with Iraq of containment, you know, well into double figures of United Nations security resolutions that he defied, absolute obstruction and expulsion of the inspectors. So there was this idea that you could contain through inspections and sanctions and no-fly zones and what have you. And I think the feeling was that the threat, this is what I think our critics on this can't really accept, don't buy, but that sense that the threat was real, that the chances of a rogue state with access to weapons of mass destruction,

• 10:58Alastair Campbell?

  operating in league with people who are prepared to fly planes into the Twin Towers, that was the mindset.

• 11:03Rory Stewart?

  It was the mindset. And it became an amazingly powerful mindset, which I remember very strongly. So obviously, I served in Iraq, I served in Afghanistan, and It made it all the way through to Obama, who gave an extraordinary speech in 2008, where he made these very, very elaborate connections, which had been begun by Tony Blair and George W. Bush, but were continued by Obama, between terrorism, rogue states, failed states, democracy, and all of this stuff became a sort of paranoia, an amazing paranoia, that these states pose an existential threat to the world, combined bizarrely with a very, very extreme optimism about our ability to actually reshape these states.

• 11:46Rory Stewart?

  And it sometimes strikes me that at the moment at which the US, the UK and the West was at its moment of greatest power, it became almost manic depressive. It began to lurch between the most extreme negative dystopian descriptions of the threat and the most extreme optimistic statements about our capacity to be able to deal with it. And so the argument would be, these places pose an existential threat to global security, and they have every kind of ill in the world in them. They're places where there'll be weapons of mass destruction, where terrorism will thrive, where human rights abusers will thrive, there will be a danger to the world.

• 12:27Rory Stewart?

  And then they go on to say, but if we intervene, we can bring down the dictator, we can nation build, we can restore democracy, we can end terrorism, we can bring peace. So it was a very, very peculiar mindset, driven by people who didn't know very much about these countries, in the sense that none of you had actually lived in these places or spent any time in them. I mean, Tony Blair was very bright, obviously, very articulate, George Bush perhaps less so. But the one thing that people had in common is that you were, I say, if I was going to be rude, I'd say, your perspective was very US-European. None of you had spent much time living in the Middle East. I know Tony Blair tried to read the Quran, but what he meant by that is he was trying

• 13:11Rory Stewart?

  to read it in English translation. He had very, very little. Cultural context or background on that. And therefore, your ability to really understand that these places might be less of a threat than you thought, and that our ability to deal with them might be much less than we thought.

• 13:27Alastair Campbell?

  But that's what I think is, I think it's much to expect a president or a prime minister to speak every language in the world so as to be able to understand the world. That's why you do have advisers and experts and diplomats and intelligence and so forth. And I think that just on the point about the the direct link, so called, between Iraq and Al Qaeda, there was definitely a strand within the American system that was trying to push that the whole time. We did not. We did not, we didn't, we didn't then, and we don't now. But I think what Tony's, you know, what you call the paranoia. What I ask people to to understand in this is that he's, so he's the prime minister. And it's true that the reason why that lady that asked me that question,

• 14:12Alastair Campbell?

  a lot of the anger is driven by the fact that people say that the case for war that we made was weapons of mass destruction. Okay, that was the case for war. Now, what I'd argue is that it was part of the case for war. His record was part of the case for war. The fact that he constantly defied the UN and got away with it was part of the case for war. But nine eleven, as I, as I say, did change that sort of sense that containment could no longer work. It was too big a risk. There had to be a stepping up of the action against against Saddam. Now, what I think I'd say about Tony's approach is that it's it's twofold. One, he genuinely, you call it paranoia. I, he genuinely saw that as a threat. And the reason for that was

• 14:57Alastair Campbell?

  the fact that the intelligence picture was was developing the way that it was. Now, there's all sorts of criticisms we can make of that. Tony, when he, when the Chilcot inquiry came out, he said he is not going to criticize the intelligent people. They're doing a very difficult job in very brave and difficult circumstances. And he would take responsibility for those those failings of intelligence. But we have to accept there were failings of intelligence. I would agree with you that within the American system. There was a division going on that we, you know, we were witness to it. We were witness to it. There was, there was one occasion, I remember at Camp David where Dick Cheney, the Vice President, and there was, there was sort of Colin Powell, Secretary of State on one side, who was, he's sort of pretty cautious.

• 15:41Alastair Campbell?

  Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and these neocon guys on the other side, who were just, you know, for Christ's sake, why are we hanging around on this? And Bush was trying to manage them. And Bush literally was asking Tony Blair, British Prime Minister, to persuade Cheney that we had to take this down the multilateral route, try and take it back to the United Nations, try and get them to say, one last chance, okay?

• 16:02Rory Stewart?

  Can I come in on this and then let you develop the story? I think it's fascinating, the Camp David story. But again, for listeners to remind people, it's clear that the neocons within George W. Bush's administration wanted to get into Iraq almost immediately after nine eleven. And they had an idea, and I actually saw a lot of Paul Wolfowitz at the time, Paul Wolfowitz, who was the Deputy Secretary of Defence, a very, very major player in this. And I spent a lot of time talking to Wolfowitz. I saw him in Iraq, I saw him in Afghanistan, I saw him a lot in Washington.

• 16:34Rory Stewart?

  They had developed a theory that by toppling Saddam Hussein, they would be able to spark a chain reaction of democracy across the Middle East. And that Iraq would be the start, and then Iran would follow, and that would reshape Syria. And ultimately, you would end up with a democratic, stable Middle East. And they thought all you needed to do was the courage to hit Iraq. Now, Tony Blair encountering this as he comes into two thousand and two is facing a situation in which France, Russia and China, and actually strangely amongst these, very strongly France and then later Germany, are very much on the other side of this argument. They very much are in favour of containment.

• 17:17Rory Stewart?

  And they are doing their best to say the weapons inspectors need to have more time, et cetera. Tony Blair concludes that the only way in which he thinks that it will be legitimate to be, bring Britain in with the United States is if there is a UN resolution, if there's UN support for it. And initially, the UK Attorney General seems to suggest that this UN resolution is going to be absolutely vital for Britain coming in. That's the legal advice. George W. Bush is much less interested in that. He wants to go, he's ready to go, but almost as a favour to Tony Blair to try to build the coalition. He gives Tony Blair time to try to get these resolutions together. So one's put together towards the end of 2002.

• 17:59Rory Stewart?

  And then as we go into 2003, an effort starts to try to get a second resolution. And the resolution's all about saying Saddam is not complying with weapons inspectors. So we're going to have a vote in the Security Council and we're going to go in. And against Tony Blair and all of this is not just France, but also statements from the weapons inspectors themselves, which although ambiguous, in retrospect, you can see Hans Blyth saying, it would be a bit unfortunate if 250,000 people went onto the ground and you didn't find your weapons of mass destruction. And you've got El Barad伊 saying, we really don't have any evidence that they've restarted a nuclear weapons programme. I think they're welcoming us in, give us a few more months, peace. So when you're sitting in Camp David, to go back to this, we're in a situation in

• 18:42Rory Stewart?

  which US wants to push ahead with a very strong push from the DOD. And against that push is Tony Blair and yourself trying to say, let's take it more gently, let's try to get an international coalition, let's try to get a UN resolution. Right, at that point, I'm handing back to you with you trying to convince Cheney.

• 19:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, just a couple of things before I do that. I mean, on the Attorney General point, it's true that at one stage, the Attorney General was concerned about the legal basis, but that's because at that stage, he wasn't aware of the previous negotiating history. And when he went to the States, there was no conspiracy, again, we get accused of all sorts of conspiracies, there was no conspiracy here. When he went to the States, he discovered that in the negotiating history, and this had been the same for the UK and for the US, that Resolution 1441, which is the one that you're talking about, was linked to prior resolutions, 678 and 687, I think they

• 19:42Alastair Campbell?

  were, which, as it were, he was already in last chance saloon. And two things happened is that he realised that actually... What happened when the debate around this resolution happened is that France in particular and Russia tried to get written into the new resolution that they'd have to go back for explicit authority for further action and they failed in that endeavour. And that is what made the Attorney General find that actually that meant that the previous resolutions gave the authority.

• 20:14Rory Stewart?

  So we're slightly fast forwarding, so we'll just finish that bit of the story and then we'll take you back to your conversations with Bush and Cheney and Colin Powell. So the end of the story is that the UK Attorney General Goldsmith changed his advice, said a second resolution wasn't necessary, and the UK government concluded that they were not going to get the votes in the Security Council, they probably wouldn't get the nine votes that they wanted, they certainly wouldn't get France on side, and therefore they decided not to proceed with the second resolution. And you were right up against a timetable where the US was making it increasingly clear that they were going to go into Iraq at the beginning of March regardless, want to go in at the 10th of March, regardless of whether or not this resolution happened.

• 20:57Rory Stewart?

  And that then put Tony Blair on the spot because it forced him to decide, I think, two things. Did he fully believe in this regardless of what the US thought or was he going in because of the special relationship? And secondly, was he prepared to go in with the US without getting the rest of the Security Council on side? So take us back to your sense of Cheney and Powell.

• 21:22Alastair Campbell?

  Cheney was, I would say, quite grumpy that this sort of young British Prime Minister. And bear in mind that when it came to it, the Americans are going to be providing 95% of the input into the military action, 95%, that's a lot. We were very much, as it were, junior partner in this. And don't forget, there were other countries involved as well, right at the start, Poland, Australia, Denmark, others. And but Cheney was, yeah, I'd say grouchy, grumpy. I remember once where he he kept going on about, no, George Bush was asking why we thought there was so much anti-Americanism

• 22:03Alastair Campbell?

  in the world. And one of the things I liked about Bush is that he liked to take opinions around the room. So he did see, obviously, Tony was the the prime minister and the leader, and he was the guy that was the main guy in the room with Bush. But he was always interested in my take, for example, on messaging and communication and how things were perceived. And so he said to you, what is this, where do you think this all comes from, why we're so kind of hated in so many parts of the world? And I said, I think partly there's lots of kind of history there. But I think partly they hear you constantly talking about democracy. And they don't hear democracy. They hear you think everywhere should be like America. They hear Americanisation. And Cheney, who'd been pretty silent for most of my, he just sort of grouched and said, you know what, so we stop talking about

• 22:48Alastair Campbell?

  democracy, we start pretending we're not a democracy. And I said, no, I just think you should maybe frame this in a in a different way. And the other the other reason why I defend Tony so strongly as I do, is I actually thought, I remember David Manning, who was Tony's main foreign office policy adviser at the time, I remember at the end of this meeting, him saying to me and Jonathan Powell, he said, God, that was pretty remarkable. That was an American president asking a British prime minister to persuade the vice president to take this thing to the United Nations and to reactivate the Middle East peace process and show real commitment to that. That was pretty amazing. And if they do it, he said, this will be quite a considerable diplomatic success. And of course, he did

• 23:33Alastair Campbell?

  do it. Bush went to the UN. And he made a speech and okay, he was basically saying, you know, these were not the words, but he was essentially saying, look, you know, Saddam may be in the last chance of him, but in a way, so are you guys, because are you going to face up to this or not?

• 23:46Rory Stewart?

  The tragedy, of course, of it, though, is that David Manning there in the room, and I think this is something to remember when I think about my time as a minister, particularly in these exciting events, that you can get very, very carried away and think that you're doing something world historical, when in retrospect, it doesn't really work out. What Manning seems to be saying there is, this is amazing. Tony Blair is convincing the US president to go through the UN process and restart the Middle East peace process. True, in a sense. But it turned out that neither of those things worked out in the way that Manning would have hoped. The Middle East peace process went nowhere. The US appearance in front of the UN didn't actually get the security clearance to go forward. So the special relationship got the US to move a bit, but it didn't actually achieve the long-term strategic objectives,

• 24:30Rory Stewart?

  which is sorting out the Middle East or getting a good settlement out of the UN.

• 24:33Alastair Campbell?

  No, I accept that. But my point is, I would say there was a strand within the American administration, without a doubt, that was kind of war come what may. I'm not convinced that Bush was there in the same place as Cheney and the others. For Tony, right to the very end, he was motivated by a desire that this should not ultimately go to war, and he was essentially trying everything he could to delay that.

• 25:02Rory Stewart?

  Can I question that for a second? Because I think that is something that listeners will find difficult. I mean, in the end, he wasn't doing all that he could to delay it, because an option remained, as Robin Cook pointed out in his speech, which was to take the position that France and Germany took.

• 25:16Alastair Campbell?

  But that was the fundamental decision. And you said earlier about the so-called special relationship. That was a part of his thinking, there's no doubt about that. Part of his thinking, having had this very close relationship with Bill Clinton, which was helpful in many, many ways in relation to Kosovo, in relation to Northern Ireland, all sorts of other ways, where that relationship benefited the UK national interest. Likewise with Bush, he was determined to be close. And I think he believed in the threat. He believed that the threat was real. He believed that Saddam had been tolerated by the world for far too long. He would rather that the world had come together and somehow brought him down through peaceful means. But there was a part of him that thought for us to

• 25:59Alastair Campbell?

  break from the Americans on an issue of such significant strategic importance to them was a very, very big and dangerous decision for us.

• 26:08Rory Stewart?

  I think this is really important. Maybe we'll go to a break after this, but. I absolutely believe in your belief. I don't think the problem here is that Tony Blair was somehow insincere. I think he genuinely got himself into a headspace where he believed that Iraq was somehow an existential threat. And I think he genuinely believes that it was vital. The US and UK remained very close. The problem is, and this is something we can return to after the break, is that he was probably wrong on both those counts. Iraq wasn't an existential threat to global security. And actually, the US and the UK, their relationship would have been able to survive, the UK not going into the Iraq War, just as Germany and France has managed to rebuild their relationship. And just of course, as Britain

• 26:53Rory Stewart?

  was able to rebuild its relationship with the US when Harold Wilson made the very correct decision, despite all the pressure in the opposite direction, not to get involved in the Vietnam War.

• 27:00Alastair Campbell?

  I think first of all, I think you are, in making that statement so baldly and so clearly, I think you are underestimating the extent to which Saddam's record played into this thinking. You know, the Iraq War, a million casualties. The fact that he had used, as I said before, chemical weapons against his own people, the fact that he did, you know, evacuate in the way that he did and survive it at the end of it. So I think all that played in. And likewise, I think it's very easy now, I look, we can get on to this later, you can make the case, there has been considerable progress in Iraq, there has also been considerable setback. And there's no doubt at all that the aftermath

• 27:41Alastair Campbell?

  and the lack of proper planning that we assumed the Americans were doing, it was pretty catastrophic. But the big thing, the big thing that really changed things in the aftermath was the involvement, I think, of Iran and Al Qaeda. That was not foreseen. You could argue that was a policy mistake, it was an intelligence mistake, whatever, not foreseen. We were preparing for You know, the the fact of or the probability of some of our own soldiers coming under attack from chemical weapons. I can remember going to a briefing at the Defence Ministry with Tony Blair, where we were briefed on the level of, let me finish, where we were briefed on the level of preparedness of our troops. I can remember Claire Short coming in and Claire Short obviously totally opposed and and, you know, I understand why, as I

• 28:25Alastair Campbell?

  said earlier, but she was focusing very much on the fact that there was likely to be a refugee humanitarian crisis. We were folk, we ended up, we were focusing on the wrong things. That I accept. The truth is, none of us can prove the counterfactual. None of us can prove what would or would not have happened if Saddam had stayed in power. None of us can prove whether actually the, you know, people like to say, well, the insurgency that happened afterwards, that was because we provoked it. That was people opportunistically exploiting a situation. I accept that.

• 28:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, we're getting on to getting on to much bigger issues. So I think let's take a break and and try to come back to the the post-war stuff afterwards and and and get also into a little bit of the justifications around the war.

• 29:06Alastair Campbell?

  Cool.

• 29:59Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 30:02Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 30:03Rory Stewart?

  So there are many, many things to talk about in this and one of them is we started just before the break, talking about the fact that I don't think the question is whether or not Tony Blair and you believed you were doing the right thing, I'm sure you did. I think it was a catastrophic error and it'd be interesting to try to examine how you got yourself in the headspace and you've begun to suggest some of the history that led up to it and why you thought this stuff. But the other thing I think that has been very controversial and of course relates very closely to you because you were right at the heart of the communications machine, was the way in which this intervention was explained to the British public.

• 30:43Rory Stewart?

  And the Chilcot Inquiry came up with a letter written by Tony Blair and he's trying to explain to the US what's required to get the British public on side at the end of 2002. If, he says, "If we recapitulate all the weapons of mass destruction evidence, add Saddam's attempt to secure nuclear capability and as seems possible, add an al-Qaeda link, it will be largely persuasive over here, plus of course, the abhorrent nature of the regime." So somewhere in the discussions around this, a decision seems to have been made somewhere in Tony Blair's head that a lot of emphasis needed to be put on weapons of mass destruction and that that was going to be the thing that was going to persuade the British public.

• 31:29Rory Stewart?

  Do you want to sort of explore why that became the thing that you focused on rather than the human rights of the Iraqis, democratisation or any of the other arguments that might have been made?

• 31:37Alastair Campbell?

  I think those other arguments were made, but what was happening at that time was that this was obviously a really big issue, it was a subject that was dominant in Parliament, it was dominant in the media for quite a long time.

• 31:52Rory Stewart?

  Well over a year, I mean, I've been, almost here and a half, I've been looking at your diaries and one of the things that's striking is you and Tony Blair go on a tour to South Africa and the whole thing is then derailed by questions around Iraq.

• 32:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 32:05Rory Stewart?

  And of course, beginning of 2003, you have a million people in the streets demonstrating against the Iraq war and you're having to worry about the Parliamentary Labour Party because you're about to go into the biggest rebellions that have been seen since, you know, the 18th century in terms of the number of MPs voting against. You guys are having to think very, very hard about how you make the case for the war.

• 32:25Alastair Campbell?

  And what Tony is saying to media, to other leaders, to the PLP, when he's at PLP meetings and saying, for God's sake, Tony, we're not going to do this, are we? He was saying, well, look, I'm seeing intelligence day after day, week after week, and it makes me more not less concerned. It makes me more not less concerned. And if you just go through, if you look at the Butler Report, you look at the Chilcot Report, I mean, the thing that people can actually see the raw intelligence now, or not the raw intelligence, they can see the intelligence reports that Tony Blair was getting. So, for example, March 2002, the Joint Intelligence Committee, so this is crossing his desk, okay? It's clear that Iraq continues to pursue a policy of acquiring WMD and their delivery means.

• 33:09Alastair Campbell?

  Intelligence indicates planning to reconstitute some of its programmes began in 1995. WMD programmes were then given a further boost in 1998 with a withdrawal of unserved inspectors. Then goes on to say Iraq is pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. We continue to judge that Iraq has an offensive chemical warfare programme. Iraq currently has available number of biological agents could produce more within days. September, Iraq has a chemical and biological weapons capability and Saddam is prepared to use it. Now, yes, he can challenge that, he can test it. He's reading that and he's the Prime Minister. He's not, he's not some Tory backbencher, he's not some commentator on the, on the papers, he's the Prime Minister.

• 33:45Rory Stewart?

  So, so let's, let's, let's get into that for a second because I absolutely agree the JIC was saying that. There was an incredibly deep, in, in Chilcot's word, ingrained belief in the UK and US intelligence community that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons. And there was also no real desire to examine the possibility that there were none, despite the fact there had been no significant finds. And it's a very, very striking, strange failure of the whole system. And I'm, I'm not here putting the blame on you or Tony Blair. I'm partly putting the blame on John Scarlett, on Richard Dearlove, on a lot of the key

• 34:28Rory Stewart?

  players, the people who chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee, the key figures in MI6. Why was it they were not putting the effort into examining the possibility, which turned out to be true, that the guy didn't actually have these things? How did they get themselves in this world of believing that he had them?

• 34:44Alastair Campbell?

  But if you read, if you actually read, so, you know, we're talking here about the case that we were making and this centered, this is why I became so central to this, this became, this centered on the weapons of mass destruction so-called dossier, not to be confused with the so-called dodgy dossier, which was a kind of very, very minor part of this whole story, which has been conflated, but the September weapons of mass destruction dossier at the time.

• 35:08Rory Stewart?

  Okay, interrupting just to explain what's this, so 24th of September 2002, the British government, and this is Alastair Campbell helping on this document with Tony Blair, publishes a document on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and it's out of that that The Sun produces the headline "Brits 45 minutes from doom", and that that becomes one of the most central claims, and very controversial within this dossier is the fact that since it was published, a memo has now come to light from John Scarlett, the key figure eventually running MI6, saying, talking about the benefit of obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD, Iraq is not exceptional.

• 35:52Rory Stewart?

  In other words, although the international, I completely agree, the intelligence community's all saying Iraq has WMD, but of course-

• 35:57Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, including the French and the Germans.

• 35:59Rory Stewart?

  Including French Germans, but that in terms of the threats to the world, most people didn't put Iraq in the front rank, they would have put Iran and North Korea ahead of Iraq in terms of the kind of threat it posed to global stability, and Iraq had become almost a choice of the United States because it seemed the more convenient place to go, rather than a real statement that it was more dangerous than Iran or North Korea.

• 36:19Alastair Campbell?

  That, that is all fair, and that's all reasonable, however, I go back to my point, Tony Blair's sitting there- He's seeing this stuff. Now, he's, yes, did we challenge this stuff? Did we say, well, how do we know this stuff? Did we say, well, can we be sure? And they would often say, and I think this did come across in the dossier, there were caveats. In fact, at the time, most of the media, including the wretched Gilligan, who later became central to this story himself, Andrew Gilligan, the BBC guy. Most of their reaction was, there's nothing much here we didn't know. It was subsequently, even at the point about 45 minutes. So that was a, that was within the intelligence reports that they wrote. Okay, we went through a very careful process. And this was, by the way, this was a difficult exercise for the intelligence agencies.

• 37:04Alastair Campbell?

  And, and actually, I, I absolve John Scarlett in this. I think John Scarlett was incredibly cautious the whole way through. I think Dearlove possibly got a little bit too caught up in the closeness to power and being the guy in the room with the Prime Minister and all that. But even he, I think, was, they weren't sort of saying, this is slam dunk. They were saying, look, it's a very, very difficult place to get in, to gather intelligence. But this is the best that we can do. This is what we genuinely think, based upon all that we do know.

• 37:31Rory Stewart?

  Quick one of that, because again, I was very close to the intelligence community at that point. And one of the things, one of the dynamics that I felt was very, very unhealthy and very dangerous, if we want to learn lessons from this, is that because everybody assumed that Saddam had chemical weapons, and one of the reasons they assumed that he had chemical weapons is that he wasn't cooperating with weapons inspectors. So the assumption was-

• 37:51Alastair Campbell?

  And, don't forget, and that he'd used them before.

• 37:54Rory Stewart?

  And that he had them in the past. And certainly, certainly had them in the past, used them in the past. So everybody assumed he still had them. And if he didn't have them, why wasn't he cooperating more with the weapons inspectors? So as a result, when people produced intelligence reports saying that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, they were not approached with the skepticism that they might have been, had people not all assumed in the background he had them anyway. And what seems to have happened, I think, is that there was a huge demand for these reports. And when there's a huge demand, what happens is intelligence officers go out into the field. They look up agents, many of whom don't have very good access. It's quite difficult actually to penetrate the Iraqi regime.

• 38:38Rory Stewart?

  You ask them questions about weapons of mass destruction and they will say to you, because the agent is paid by the intelligence officer and they want to keep getting paid and they want to seem relevant, yes, yes, yes, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. And you say, well, where does he have them? Oh, he hides them. Where does he hide them? He hides them in the desert. How quickly can they use? Oh, I heard somebody say they can be used in forty five minutes. This is then packaged into a report that's sent by the intelligence officer up to their boss through a reports process and then finds its way up to the desk of a minister, eventually the prime minister. And the problem is that in this process, everybody, could be Richard Dearlove, but everybody wants to be relevant. Everyone wants to be the person bringing that document in to show. And there aren't

• 39:23Rory Stewart?

  enough people in the system saying, is this really true? Because the bar is very low because the background assumption is that he's got them anyway. So it doesn't really matter that this might be a pretty dubious, out of date.

• 39:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, I think you apply an awful lot of hindsight here. Let me paint an counter narrative, which explains, and I'm speaking here as somebody who was sitting alongside Tony Blair, but obviously seeing people like Richard Dearlove and John Scarlett and the others who were coming in and briefing him. You can't just wipe out that sort of record as being a big part of the, of the thinking, nor can you write out the fact that the inspectors were being kicked out. There was also an assessment that what Saddam was doing in terms of sort of playing down the sense of him being, not being a threat was all about getting sanctions stopped so that he could, then this came out in the Iraq Survey Group after the invasion, after the war, came out that he was hoping to get

• 40:19Alastair Campbell?

  rid of sanctions so that he could reconstitute, for example, the nuclear programme. All I'm saying to you is to, it's very easy to sit here and say, well, all these intelligence agents were carried away with the sort of, you know, the drama of the thing. I think that's very unfair on them.

• 40:31Rory Stewart?

  Well, well, well, Alice, let me come in on that because I want to be unfair to them. They got it catastrophically wrong. Their sources were bad, their intelligence was bad, and it turned out on the biggest call imaginable, a call that ended up with hundreds of thousands of people being killed, three trillion dollars being spent, there were no weapons of mass destruction. That was the one call the intelligence agents need to make.

• 40:53Alastair Campbell?

  Right, but I'm-

• 40:54Rory Stewart?

  And they got it totally wrong. So we can't exonerate Dear Love and Scarlet and that system. They fucked up really, really bigly.

• 41:01Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not exonerating, I'm not, I'm, okay, okay, I'm simply saying, I think your portrayal of them is unfair. I also think-

• 41:09Rory Stewart?

  What's unfair about it, Alsa? You think they were diligent, that their sources were good, that their information was good?

• 41:15Alastair Campbell?

  Look, there were failings in the intelligence process. I think everybody accepts that. I actually, when I watched the way that John Scarlett in particular was operating, I saw somebody who was really, really conscious of how difficult it was. He never went in there, not once did I see him go in there and say, "This is so slam dunk compelling." He went in there with all the caveats. Ultimately, Tony Blair in the cabinet had to make a judgment, there was a big judgment call. I'm simply saying to you that, let me just try and give you a counterfactual, that actually, that he did have a weapons of mass destruction

• 41:59Alastair Campbell?

  programme, that the invasion happened, and they were found, and they were used, and they were used against our troops, okay? Or, let me give you another one. Let's imagine that he had it, and that in fact, they did eventually get used, okay? And then, these intelligence reports come out. Tony Blair was advised about all this, and he did nothing. Tony Blair sat on warnings that this was happening, that was on, so all I'm simply saying, I think it was one of those situations, it was a very difficult place to gather intelligence. They never said there's a hundred percent clear picture. We were dealing with the reality of the American, part of the American administration that was, that we were trying to restrain,

• 42:41Alastair Campbell?

  but they were going gung ho. I'm simply asking you, I think, to be a bit more reasonable in your assessment of the, of why Tony Blair was making the decision in that way, going through a process, where, and this is why I get personally so kind of- Angry at the levels of criticism and okay, you're saying you're you're clear, you're not saying that Tony Blair was deceiving anybody and or that I was, but that is what we get accused of the whole time. That is where we decided we were going to help the Americans come what may, and we sort of manipulated this thing, exaggerated and so forth.

• 43:14Rory Stewart?

  I didn't think you would, I didn't think you'd deceive him.

• 43:17Alastair Campbell?

  And I think we were, and I think we were challenging the intelligence agencies, by the way, we were challenging them.

• 43:22Rory Stewart?

  But but you but you probably didn't know enough to know how to challenge them properly.

• 43:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but that goes, that goes back to your point about the fact that, you know, Tony Blair can't read the Quran in a in a in other than English.

• 43:32Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's not not just that. He probably doesn't, he probably, but did you, I mean, it'd be an interesting question. Did you try to understand who their sources were, how reliable they were, how they'd reported in the past? Because it turned out that the forty five minute claim came from somebody sitting in a taxi who'd overheard a comment.

• 43:47Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Sotis said.

• 43:48Rory Stewart?

  Well, did you try to get into it, I guess?

• 43:50Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think we did, we did in terms of saying, you know, I can, I'll give you another example. I can remember very, very late on in the process, I think it was, there was a new piece of intelligence came in that we did challenge it and we did say, look, you know, because this was while the dossier was still being prepared. And in the end, we didn't put it in because we were challenging it. So, look, I, I think you're, you're, you're be, you're asking, you're asking us, you're asking me now whether we challenged every single line of intelligence that came through the door. Probably not, probably not. Were we challenging it at the level of, are you sure? Is this something that you can be? And

• 44:33Alastair Campbell?

  their argument would be, you know, we are reasonably sure, we're as sure as we can be. You know, so I think, and I, and I do think that there were people in the intelligence communities, you know, who were not Dear Love, not John Scarlett, but who were lower down in particular, who were not at all happy that we were doing, that this exercise was happening at all. But the, back to my point about how Tony Blair was, when he was out in public and in Parliament, essentially, he was saying, if you, the line, his argument really was, if you people saw what I saw, you'd be a little bit more worried than you seem to be. That was what led to us wanting to share the intelligence with the public. That's what led to the dossier. Now, was that a good idea or a bad idea? People can

• 45:14Alastair Campbell?

  argue about it. I think in the modern age, it's no longer the case that you can just say, we never comment on intelligence matters, because intelligence gets out there anyway.

• 45:23Rory Stewart?

  I'm with you. I mean, I think the tragedy of the thing. Isn't really about the question of you and Tony Blair lying. I mean, I think that's, that's in a sense, has put the whole conversation off half cock. I think the, the more fundamental point is an enormous failing of the British system, of the intelligence system, which ultimately said that they were reasonably sure about stuff that they were completely wrong about. I mean, not only were they not reasonably sure about it, they had no evidence for it at all. I mean, literally no evidence. So they were claiming they were reasonably sure, basically on the basis that he'd had this stuff a few years earlier and they assumed he still had it.

• 46:06Rory Stewart?

  So they were selling something to you, which was a crock of shit, right? I mean, there was, there was literally not a single agent who was in that chemical weapons programme, who'd seen a single batch of chemical weapons anywhere within Iraq within the previous 12 months. I mean, it was completely nonsense. And I think this is to do with something that worries me about the British system, which is there is a sense, it's part of the sort of smugness of Britain of, well, you know, if you saw what I was doing and, you know, my agent's on the ground and

• 46:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but hold on.

• 46:37Rory Stewart?

  And also all our deference. I mean, you're incredibly polite about people, right? And it's part of the thing that worried me in government.

• 46:44Rory Stewart?

  People are incredibly deferential towards intelligence officers, soldiers, police officers don't like to challenge them because they think these are public servants who are doing a good job in dangerous circumstances.

• 46:56Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's true. That is true.

• 46:57Rory Stewart?

  Politicians and journalists feel a bit shy about saying, you may be making this stuff up. Where is your evidence? Where's the information here? Where is this agent? Who did he meet?

• 47:06Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we did, listen, I think honestly, Rory, I think you're mischaracterising it because you're asking with the benefit of an awful lot of hindsight, questions that are basically asking us to, to reprocess something that was going on over months. I can remember being at a meeting at SIS headquarters, having exactly that sort of conversation. How do you know? What are the methods that you use and so forth? And they, you know, there were, when it came to publishing my diaries, for example, you know, as I've said to you before, some of the stuff that was removed was because of intelligence. It wasn't because of, you know, to help them or to present them in a better light. It was because they were telling us stuff and we were challenging it. And, you know, I think some of it, they probably could reveal these days, but maybe,

• 47:51Alastair Campbell?

  you know, maybe it will, it will be done in a longer time. But if you go, and the other thing, Rory, just remember, this all gets overlooked because it doesn't fit the sort of, fit the picture. The Iraq Survey Group, which, you know, that was there afterwards. And that was fourteen, fourteen hundred people headed by a UN weapons inspector. So not just the sort of British, American thing. Fourteen hundred people who go there on the basis of interviews, including with Saddam. Now, okay, not necessarily the most reliable witness, but including with Saddam, including with all the leading people who'd been, who'd been arrested and been locked up, including with lots and lots of people at every level of the regime, including some people who turned against Saddam.

• 48:33Alastair Campbell?

  And they said that in the, they reported in the late nineties and in two thousand, two thousand and three, the priority of the government was to get sanctions lifted. And as once they were lifted, to reconstitute a programme because he believed it was essential to his personal and political survival. And they, and they, and they found, and they found that he had plans to go back to a nuclear programme because he feared the development of nuclear weapons in Iran. So that's big stuff to just say, oh, well, you're not showing me where the phone call is that says you got that. Therefore, we're not going to act on it.

• 49:02Rory Stewart?

  But, but so, so there are, I mean, there are, I think, lots and lots of different problems. But one of the problems is, even if he were doing this, what kind of a threat really was it to the UK or the US? So the nuclear programme.

• 49:18Rory Stewart?

  Yes, he might well have wanted to get it going again, but it would have taken him a very, very long time to get himself in any position to pose a threat on a nuclear programme. Even if he had the uranium to hand, the capacity within Iraq to process that was a process of a year, two years, three years. Hence, people are going for containment. And again, he didn't have the delivery systems for his chemical weapons. So in a sense, we get caught up in the fact that he had had chemical weapons, which allowed him to be an unbelievably brutal, horrifying dictator, who used them against his own people, notably the Kurds, killed. But that's quite different from saying that these weapons of mass destruction posed an

• 50:03Rory Stewart?

  existential threat to the United Kingdom. They didn't. And in fact, the French and Germans turn out to be entirely vindicated and saying it would have been much more sensible to contain.

• 50:11Alastair Campbell?

  No, you can't say they turned out to be entirely vindicated. You wouldn't say that. What you don't accept, refuse to accept, is the possibility of that insight that Tony Blair had about rogue state getting in league with terrorist organisations, right? That was driving a lot of this. The feeling that this guy had been tolerated for so long, and he had finally to be confronted. And I also think you are being, you're sort of just dismissing this. I mean, for a fact, he'd used those chemical weapons against his own people and against other nations. For a fact, had consistently lied about them, obstructed the inspectors, et cetera, et cetera.

• 50:55Alastair Campbell?

  For a fact, had killed thousands of his own people with no respect whatsoever for human life, norms of civilised behaviour. Now, what you're saying is, there's no point at which you actually say, do you know what? Having defied so many times the United Nations, having continued to show the kind of regime that this is, are we seriously saying that stays there forever? At a time when that threat, which you, fair enough, is your principled, held with conviction opinion, just as Robin Cook held it, just as Jack Sheerac held it, just as Gerhard Schröder held it, but Tony Blair held a different view. And you can't say with absolute conviction that he was wrong and they were right.

• 51:39Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think.

• 51:39Alastair Campbell?

  Because what is is they made a different decision and that meant that they can now sit there and say told you so. But actually, they can't sit there and told you so. They can't. They can't. They can say they don't agree with what's happened.

• 51:50Rory Stewart?

  I think what we can say, or people like me would like to say, and I'm sorry to put my cards on the table, I was wrong about this too, right? I went out to Iraq to work in Iraq as somebody who believed this intervention was going to do good. I was completely wrong. And I think the difference between you and me is that I've changed my mind, right?

• 52:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 52:09Rory Stewart?

  And the longer I spent on the ground, the more catastrophic it became clear it was. And it now seems to me self evident that the correct policy was containment, that Saddam did not pose a sufficient threat to justify the unbelievable horror, carnage, expense, misery that was inflicted on the world by invading Iraq. It would have been much, much better to give more time to the weapons inspectors and try to contain.

• 52:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you say give more time to the weapons inspectors. The weapons inspectors were being given the run around the whole time. But do you at least accept, do you at least accept that there were risks to containment as well?

• 52:44Rory Stewart?

  Yes, there definitely were. And I absolutely accept that a lot of what we're saying here is with the benefit of hindsight. But I think the benefit of hindsight and the judgment of the historians will be that, given what we know now, containment would have been by far the better policy.

• 52:59Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. But we were, but, but yeah, okay. But as well, at least you do accept that. And so he was, so Tony's sitting there seeing this stuff. He's thinking, look, containment, he essentially, he's saying containment has run its course. The threat has, the threat has increased because of what we saw happen in nine eleven. Alongside that, we're seeing all this intelligence suggesting a growing programme. I take your point about the intelligence agencies, and clearly they do have questions to answer. I've not heard, I'm going to listen to it, but I know Gordon Carrera has done a, is doing this 10 part series for the BBC. Somebody at the swimming pool this morning who has been listening to it said that they felt that Richard Dillough came across very, very badly in whatever interview he has done. I think we did challenge the intelligence agencies, I do. But, you know, and you're

• 53:44Alastair Campbell?

  right that we're, we're not, neither I nor Tony Blair nor David Manning. I mean, the, well, I suppose, you know, there are people who have worked in the Foreign Office who've got that experience of intelligence of that region. But in the end, the reason why, when I was asked by that lady that I mentioned at the start, you know, do you still support Tony Blair? Yes, is because I saw the care with which he took the decisions that he made in his position as Prime Minister. Do I understand why people are still very, very angry? Yes, I do, because things did not work out as we hoped and said they would.

• 54:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 54:19Alastair Campbell?

  I get that. And what I don't accept and never will accept, and it's fine you say, oh, that sort of debate is dealt with. But honestly, Rory, you take a look at my social media most days of the week, take a look at social media after we've done this. It is still the deception, the lie, the deceit, the false reasons. And that's the stuff that gets thrown at us most.

• 54:40Rory Stewart?

  I think one of the most striking things is the sense of absolute belief from Tony Blair, and that it wasn't just about the US relationship. He gave this extraordinary interview to The Guardian, and actually in your diary, you have him saying something very similar to the Cabinet. He says, if the Americans were not doing this, I would be pressuring them to do so. It's worse than you think. I'm truly committed to doing this irrespective of the US position.

• 55:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Rory Stewart?

  So I think he had really got himself worked up into a lather where he had decided that there was this extraordinary combination.

• 55:16Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, can we at least, I mean, look, paranoia worked up into a lather, got it into his head. I mean, you'll be very dismissive here of a Prime Minister that I saw going through a very, very rigorous process and judgment. And ultimately, the reason why some people, you know, are Prime Minister and President and so forth, is they have to make these massive decisions. It wasn't, he wasn't just developing an opinion, he had to make a decision.

• 55:41Rory Stewart?

  But the fear is, I mean, sorry, I'll take back the language about getting a lather into his head, but I think my intuition is, and I think there's still gesturing with that language, is that he had somehow taken on a worldview that he believed in very, very, very strongly.

• 55:57Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 55:58Rory Stewart?

  And it's a worldview that turned out, and this is maybe what we can get on to when we return to this in our second episode, which we're just about to do, where we'll look at the post-war events, a judgment which I believe will turn out to have been Completely wrong, but it's a judgment and a worldview which was shared by people as various as George W. Bush and ultimately even in this 2008 speech by Obama. And it's a very strange worldview. It's a post 9/11 worldview, which is very difficult to recapture today, but I'm not doubting his sincerity in any way at all. Anyway, thank you for your time.

• 56:31Alastair Campbell?

  And we're coming back to what you want to talk about when you were running part of Iraq.

• 56:36Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. Thank you, Bast.

• 56:38Alastair Campbell?

  All the best.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 57:00Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 57:04Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 57:07Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 57:13Speaker 05

  Espolone Tequila, balanced, delicious, 100% acave, 0% ego. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. For a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 57:23Speaker 06

  Espolone Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Campagna America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.