112. Iraq: The Legacy

It's 20 years since the invasion of Iraq - but what is its legacy? Tony Blair said to Parliament in March 2003 that what happened in Iraq would ‘determine the pattern of international politics for the next generation’. Join Alastair and Rory as they discuss the implications of the Iraq invasion and whether Blair’s speech did prove to be true... 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 Creve 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:33Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 1:36Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 1:38Rory Stewart?

  And we're now doing our second episode on Iraq because we're now at the 20th, it is, as you say, an extraordinary thing, 20th anniversary of Iraq. And I sometimes think that political careers are very much defined by that, the early stages of your career, that your mind is set by that. And I guess your formative experiences, probably your earliest formative experiences would have been the 80s. In my case, my earliest formative experiences were from 1995, when I joined the Foreign Office. And then when I was deployed to Iraq in 2003, and I served there through 2003, '04. Four, five, and then returned back to Afghanistan. And that period, which I guess

• 2:22Rory Stewart?

  is a sort of a 20 year period, was a sort of age of intervention. It was a period where the US and the UK and its allies got involved in this process of nation building, almost regardless of what we talked about in the last episode, which is the question of the justification for getting involved in the first place. Once we were there, how do we try to conduct ourselves, military, civilian, planning, money? What happens when you try to reshape another person's country thousands of miles away from your own?

• 2:55Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 2:56Rory Stewart?

  Give us a bit of a sense, to start with, Alistair, on your first visits to Iraq, your first impression when you got on the ground, what you began to hear coming back to you. So the invasion happens in March, and Saddam Hussein's toppled quickly, statues come down in Baghdad, famous appearance of George W. Bush on an aircraft carrier May saying, "Mission accomplished."

• 3:20Alastair Campbell?

  Mission accomplished, yeah. I'm not sure that was the best piece of communication I've ever seen.

• 3:25Rory Stewart?

  So give me a sense of your early memories of the post-war period in Iraq.

• 3:30Alastair Campbell?

  I think the first thing I'd say is that the military operation went really well in terms of, you know, toppling Saddam. That went reasonably, you know, relatively small number of UK-US casualties, you know, it was, I think it happened more quickly than we'd expected. Whether that gave us a false sense of hope about what would then follow, I don't know. I was very, very uneasy that when that statue was being toppled and they were putting Stars and Stripes, flags on the top of it, and I thought, oh. I think then our first visit, very, very conscious of the scale of challenge ahead.

• 4:13Alastair Campbell?

  Of course, for me, it became very, very difficult, particularly difficult very, very quickly, because it was what we were actually in Iraq. When the report that led, the report on the BBC that led to the argument we had with them and then ultimately tragically the suicide of David Kelly and the and the Hutton Inquiry that followed, that was actually happening while we were in Iraq. So I was kind of busy dealing with that. And then in the middle of that, I actually had to, we went from there, I think, to Poland and I had to leave because a very close friend of mine had died in the States and I went to his funeral. So I was maybe not with Tony

• 4:54Alastair Campbell?

  as much as I would have been. But I do, on that first, on that first visit, my sense, the other sense I had, and you criticized this in the first episode on Iraq, when you said that, you know, we were far too sort of keen to sort of praise the military and the intelligence guys and what have you. I was very, very struck by some of our really impressive troops that were there and some of the people we spoke to and the stuff that they were doing. But I think very conscious that, you know, the battle was won, but there was a long, long, long way to go. And I think we very, we quite quickly got a sense that the provisional authority that was being set up, that it was going to be very, very

• 5:38Alastair Campbell?

  difficult to, to get that up and running quickly, efficiently, with buy-in. Because don't forget, we were now trying to bring in people who had not wanted to be involved in the military operation, but were prepared to come in and help on the, on the aftermath. And, you know, and fairly quickly, it started to feel like it was, it was not in a good place. And then subsequent visits with the, in the Coalition Provisional Authority, I think first with Jay Garner, wasn't it? And then with Paul Bremer.

• 6:07Rory Stewart?

  With Bremer, yeah.

• 6:08Alastair Campbell?

  And then I suppose you, you became involved, what, how far down that process?

• 6:14Rory Stewart?

  I first got involved in, in August and summer.

• 6:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 6:17Rory Stewart?

  And I was deployed. And so I was, um, 2003. So I

• 6:23Rory Stewart?

  Just turned thirty. See, and you were in the, you were based where at that time? Well, I was, I was sent off to the south of Iraq. No, no, no, where, where were you taken from to go there? Where was I when I was sent off? I'd just finished actually walking across Asia. So I'd been walking for twenty one months at twenty, twenty five miles a day, staying in five hundred and fifty village houses. I'd taken a break from the Foreign Office. So I'd been posted in Indonesia, posted in the Balkans, Bosnia, Kosovo stuff. And then I'd taken this two year break. And who, who was it? Who was it that picked the phone up and said, Rory, we think you should go to Iraq? Well, first of all, I, somebody from the Foreign Office desk on Iraq in London called Fergus Cochrane Diet. And then I went out to Iraq and I saw a man called Andy Baerpark. Do you remember Andy? I do remember Andy Baerpark very well, yeah.

• 7:07Rory Stewart?

  A larger than life figure who's now, I think, a yogi in, in New Zealand. He's gone and become a yogi mystic in New Zealand. So he'd been Mrs Thatcher's development advisor. Yeah. And then he'd been a big figure in Kosovo. And I turned up, having got a taxi from the Jordanian border to Baghdad, because I couldn't, couldn't get in in the normal way, and went in to see him. And my first vision was of this enormous palace. So Saddam Hussein's palace, as you remember, had been taken over by the Coalition Provisional Authority. And you walked in and these huge marble rooms with great sort of portrait statues of Saddam with pickle halbers on his head.

• 7:48Rory Stewart?

  And written around the inside of the, the main atrium was, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Saddam Hussein.

• 8:01Rory Stewart?

  I don't, I didn't see that. We, we, we went, we, we had so many palaces. Which palace was it? So this was the main palace, the main, the main big Baghdad palace, which is where Bremer had his office and, and Andy. All right, we did go there though. You did, yeah. Yeah. Andy Baerpark was sitting upstairs and I went to see him in his office and. He was, half his office was one of Saddam's bathrooms and he had this whole bath full of vodka bottles. Who, who, sorry, Saddam had vodka bottles or Andy had bottles? Andy, Andy had vodka bottles in the bathroom. Why did Andy have all these vodka bottles? Well, I think he was, he was stocking up so that he could keep, keep everybody's morale up. I remember even, he then told me, he said, um, Rory, you know, everybody else who we've asked to come out is still stuck in the airport and you've managed to get in a taxi from Jordan.

• 8:44Rory Stewart?

  So I think obviously you're the guy that we need to send out to the provinces. So he sent me out to the Marsharab region of southern Iraq, down to a province called Misan and later I was posted to Nasiriyah. And initially I was the acting governor of the province. So you have to remember, I'm 30 years old, I'm a British diplomat and I'm responsible for a province of initially a million people and then later a province of another 2 million people. There's no Iraqi governor in place. The British military have been there, small units of the British military, but they're withdrawing. We set up a little office in the centre of town and I'm having from day one to work out how to deal with a small civil war that's breaking out in the middle of town, how to

• 9:25Rory Stewart?

  recruit a police force, how to hold basic district council elections, how to get the oil going because there are huge queues outside every petrol station, there's no oil, what to deal with the fact that all the electricity pylons have been torn down in order to get the copper wire off. And who were you, who were you reporting, who were you reporting to? I, I was reporting to the American, Paul Brammer. You were, you were directly reporting to Brammer? I reported directly to Paul Brammer. And how many, how many of people, how many governors? There were 14, 14 of us and I think the Brits had four. So my friend and colleague, Emma Sky, who I'm really hoping is gonna, gonna be writing something about this soon is. She should call it occupational hazards possibly. Exactly. Was posted up in Kierkuk in the north.

• 10:10Rory Stewart?

  There was a, an ex-British marine officer called Mark Etherington, who'd been given place just north of me. And then there was a British presence down in Basra and the Italians were in Nassiriyah. And it was a very, I mean, it's a period of my life that I feel very conflicted about because on the one hand, of course, it was incredibly stimulating, 24/7, dealing with crises every moment, trying to get this very, very poor, broken province back on its feet. And on the other hand, pretty quickly, it became clear to me that I should never have been there in the first place.

• 10:48Alastair Campbell?

  Did you, I mean, I've read your book and it did, it did trouble me actually because you sort of feel the, it's almost like you're in a parallel universe to the one that is happening back where policy is being made. That's kind of how it felt, or that's how it felt that you felt at the time, that you were sort of not clear about what you were meant to be doing, how you were meant to be doing it, who you were meant to be doing it with, and you having to manage all these incredibly complicated relationships.

• 11:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, there's an amazing surreal gap, you've put your finger on it. So every time I went up to Baghdad, we'd sit in the palace and I'd sit there with General David Petraeus, who'd sit next to me in these conference rooms. And you would hear about all the stuff that the US and the UK thought they were doing for Iraq. And people would talk about rewriting the university curriculum, setting up a stock exchange, getting rid of the trade unions, designing a very complicated constitution.

• 11:46Alastair Campbell?

  Sorry, getting rid of the trade unions?

• 11:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, getting rid of the trade unions. Yeah, that was something obviously didn't cross your and Tony's desk, but.

• 11:52Alastair Campbell?

  It might have crossed Tony's.

• 11:54Rory Stewart?

  One of the things that, one of the things that was going on is that it was a very, very right wing American ideological drive with American economists coming in, trying to get rid of the trade union movement, trying to create this very radically deregulated state, privatize everything, etc. So big sort of, like the sort of stuff they tried to do in Russia after 1989, what they were trying to do in Iraq. Meanwhile. Back a few hundred miles south from the place where I was based. The lights weren't on, there was no electricity, there were huge demonstrations in the street. Provincial council offices were being looted. British soldiers were standing in front of my base. People were standing there with big signs saying death to the governor, death to Rory, this kind of stuff.

• 12:37Rory Stewart?

  And I remember Andy Beppart, this man that I was talking about with the vodka in his bath, turning up to see me and he was a kind of wily person. He turned up to see me and I tried to give a presentation about all this stuff that we were doing about hiring the police and holding elections. And he said, Rory, if I can come back here in six months' time and you can serve me ice cream and there's not a civil war, I'll be pleased. And sure enough, within six months, I could manage the ice cream, but I, but we had a full-scale civil war.

• 13:05Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 13:05Rory Stewart?

  This, the, the place I was based is where there was a huge satirist militia uprising, where a man called Private Johnson Bahari got the Victoria Cross fighting against satirist insurgents. So it became a real centre of Iranian influence, many of the people I was dealing with. And this is one of the stories, of course, of Iraq is essentially what we began to see is that the intervention had handed Iraq to the Iranians. I remember, yeah, good.

• 13:30Alastair Campbell?

  No, I was gonna say, wasn't one of the American, I can't remember one of the Congress committees analysis was that the, the, the only real winner of the, the Iraq war was Iran was one conclusion. But they, but they, that, that, you know, I think I said yesterday that, that, that was the thing that we did not foresee. The, the extent to which the Iranians would, and maybe we should have done, but we didn't.

• 13:50Rory Stewart?

  It was absolutely amazing. I remember I'd been there about two weeks and I was trying to register political parties. And I said to a man who came in, he said, I, I come from Harakat Hezbollah. And I said, how many members are there of your political party? And he said, 1,442. And I said, how do you know so precisely? And he said, because I've issued every one of them with a Kalashnikov. And it turned out that he had been based in Iran and he'd come over with these guys funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, as the name Hezbollah probably implies, and they were setting up their own armed militia groups, which were then countered by different forms of Islamist militia groups which were anti-Iranian, and this was spreading all

• 14:32Rory Stewart?

  the way through the south. Meanwhile, up in the north, there was this process of debathification. Did you and Tony Blair get very involved in this? So this this decision to sack the Baath Party, which meant that most of the senior civil servants, most of the senior army officers who'd worked from Saddam Hussein, lost their jobs, and many of those then went over to join the insurgency?

• 14:50Alastair Campbell?

  No, and I think we thought it was a terrible mistake.

• 14:52Rory Stewart?

  And and how did those conversations happen? I mean, how much influence did you have once the invasion happened about how the US were running these things?

• 15:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think the, because John Soares at some point, at a certain point, was was there, but that was a little later, I think, when he went and he was pretty much full time.

• 15:09Rory Stewart?

  That was early.

• 15:10Alastair Campbell?

  Was he running this with Ghana?

• 15:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, Soares overlapped with the end of Ghana, beginning of Brema, and then Jeremy Greenstock replaced him. So they were the British, and oddly, although I was a Brit, I didn't report to them, I reported directly to Brema.

• 15:22Alastair Campbell?

  I was going to ask you, I must tell you a story about Jeremy Greenstock afterwards, but when, when did you, were you, you say you were, obviously you were working for the coalition provisional authority, but were you, were you not sending stuff back to the the UK? Was that seen to be against your?

• 15:40Rory Stewart?

  Yes, I sent, I copied things to the UK, but strangely, the UK was surprisingly uninterested. I remember going up to see Jeremy Greenstock, who I liked very much, and he had the office opposite Brema, and I'd always stop by and brief him on what we were doing. But I got a slightly world-weary sense from him that he didn't really approve of the way that Brema was running Iraq. He was a bit embarrassed that there were people like me out in these provinces, mapping tribal groups, mapping political parties, trying to do all this stuff. He probably thought that the Americans were running a sort of colonial government, a kind of imperial colonial government, where Americans and British were directly administering. And probably because he

• 16:21Rory Stewart?

  Disapproved of the way things were happening. I think he found it quite difficult to engage with the detail of what we were doing. I couldn't really get him to talk to me about how we were trying to deal with the sadist insurgency. I could talk to American generals about that stuff, but I think the Brits, and this probably would have been a problem. I don't know whether it, how quickly it became apparent to you, but at my level, most of the military officers at a sort of major colonel level had concluded by about September, October 2003, that the whole thing was a waste of time and the quicker we got out, the better. And they were trying to hand over very large swathes of southern Iraq. In many cases, they were collaborating very closely with Iraqi militias and making the

• 17:05Rory Stewart?

  Americans very angry. The Americans eventually sent down a large Iraqi unit backed by the Americans to recapture Basra because the British had effectively abandoned it.

• 17:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, you, so you, you were never involved there in Basra?

• 17:18Rory Stewart?

  No, I was, I was north of Basra. I was in the two provinces, north of Basra. Yeah. Although I went back and forth out of Basra. But were you aware quite quickly the extent to which the Brits, the British generals, the senior British diplomats were completely out of sync with the Americans and, and, and were essentially saying that what the Americans are trying to do is doomed to failure. And the Americans, of course, were thinking, we don't like these guys because they're so pessimistic, they're so gloomy, the Brits have given up. So a very, very difficult relationship began to develop.

• 17:49Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, there was one occasion on which we, we went there and, and, and spent time with Bremer and, and John Saunders was still there at the time. And you, I had a sense of Bremer being pretty overwhelmed, probably having a kind of, on a mammoth scale, what you were dealing with.

• 18:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, provincial scale.

• 18:08Alastair Campbell?

  And a provincial scale. And I, I do think that the American, the American, look, the Americans were calling the shots, no doubt about that. And we were trying to make difference at the edges, is how I would put it. And it was very, very frustrating. And I think it was a very difficult place to operate. I think, I think the, I'd completely forgotten about Jeremy Greenstock, and I feel quite bad about this. When, that funeral I went to in America that I mentioned. While I was there, Tony asked me to go and see Jeremy and find out whether he would, he would consider taking on this role in the Coalition Provisional Authority. And I went and saw Jeremy and had a couple of long chats with him. And he said, well, it's all

• 18:51Alastair Campbell?

  very interesting and obviously very flattered to be asked. But no, I really think this is not for me and got other things to do with my life now, et cetera, et cetera. I get back to London, I see Tony, I said, Jeremy's really up here. What did he say? I said, well, he said it wasn't, you know, it wasn't quite where he wanted to be at the moment. Okay, do you want to get him on the phone? And so we get Jeremy Greystock on the phone and Tony just sort of, it shows you the power of the, the voice of the Prime Minister himself. So I've said to him, you know, Tony really wants you to do this. And Tony says, ah, Jeremy, Tony, yeah, I think you really, really could make a big difference out in Baghdad, you know, I really do think you can make, oh, do you, Prime Minister, you know, within days

• 19:36Alastair Campbell?

  he was there. So, no, I think, I think we, we, it was, it was very, very frustrating. And then, of course, you know, the day, there are many days in this whole Iraq story that kind of seared on my memory. But one of them was when John Scarlett, about whom we talked a fair bit in the earlier episode, came in to see me and said, how difficult would it be if it transpires, actually, we don't find evidence of the weapons of mass destruction programme? And I said, that would be very, very, very difficult. And he said, well, I, I fear that's where we're heading. Yeah, that was a pretty bad moment.

• 20:17Rory Stewart?

  I mean, there's so much to be, to be said about Iraq, but.

• 20:21Alastair Campbell?

  Did you, did you feel, did you feel, did you feel you, did you feel you made any big difference for the better?

• 20:28Rory Stewart?

  I felt at the time, often week by week, that I was making a difference. But none of it was sustainable or enduring is the problem.

• 20:37Alastair Campbell?

  And did you feel, did you feel that the, the local population, did you have a sense? Because I think the Americans were, one of the things that carried them away at the start was that there was a sense, day one, day two, you know, Saddam's gone, Saddam's fallen, celebration, et cetera. But that, that evaporated fairly quickly.

• 20:57Alastair Campbell?

  How quickly do you think this mood developed that actually there was a kind of a sort of occupying force that was seen more negatively than before? And were you, what was your sense of the local population and how the Americans and the Brits were seen?

• 21:13Rory Stewart?

  The problem was that we were able to do quite a lot of concrete things relatively quickly. So I was proud of being able to invest in restoring some of the schools and clinics. Immediately after Saddam had fallen, there'd been this looting where everything had been stripped out, all the electricity wires been stripped, copper wires been taken from the electricity pylons. So we restored those things. We got people back into school. We got the clinics going again. But reconstructing a totally shattered impoverished province is not something that you can do overnight. And actually, you know, some of these contracts and rebuilding the schools, of course, were going to take six, nine months before we could fully refurbish these buildings.

• 21:56Alastair Campbell?

  Have you been, have you been back?

• 21:58Rory Stewart?

  I have been back. I was, I was back in Iraq, in fact, just, just in Mosul.

• 22:05Alastair Campbell?

  Have you, have you been back to the area where you?

• 22:07Rory Stewart?

  I have been back to those places too. Yeah. And it's a very odd dynamic because some people remember me, some people even felt that I was trying to do a decent job. But very quickly, you know, within a few weeks, people would say, look, you've got rid of Saddam Hussein. Thank you for that. So this was particularly the Shia population in Iraq, very pleased that we got rid of Saddam Hussein. But could you please now get out? And very quickly, they began to feel that they were fighting for Islam and Iraq against a foreign military occupation. And conspiracy theories took off. People

• 22:47Rory Stewart?

  would begin to produce placards linking me with Israel, claim that we were in the white slave trade, that I was trying to dig for an invented material called red mercury, all these conspiracy theories would get going. And having put a lot of energy in, my final moments were in Nasiriyah were being trapped in my compound with the man that I'd had lunch with earlier that day firing 130 rocket propelled grenades and mortars into my compound with my bodyguard team up on the roof with a heavy machine guns, not sleeping for three nights, trying to convince Baghdad to send in an AC-130 Spectre gunship, which is a plane that hovers 15,000 feet

• 23:29Rory Stewart?

  in the air in order to shoot the insurgents around the edge of my compound, trying to evacuate my staff in armored vehicles. And as they drove out of the gate, the machine gun bullets hitting the sides of those vehicles as they left. And eventually retreating back into the military base, handing our compound over to the insurgents and seeing a lot of the buildings that I built going up in flames around me. And then when I returned again in 2005, to then find that our leading enemies, the people who'd been attacking me, trying to kill me, were being elected in in the elections that were held in 2005 as the governors of the province, as the provincial councillors of the province. And it was at that point that we really saw the way in which this intervention by

• 24:13Rory Stewart?

  toppling Saddam had given space to two groups in particular, Iranian linked militias, and on the other hand, the beginnings of what became ISIS.

• 24:24Alastair Campbell?

  And do you think the de-bathification decision had played a part in that?

• 24:29Rory Stewart?

  The de-bathification decision was absolutely critical to the development of what later became ISIS because many, many of Saddam's senior people

• 24:39Alastair Campbell?

  Went that way.

• 24:41Rory Stewart?

  Went off, and particularly in the Sunni areas around Mosul, they felt completely alienated from what they saw as an Iranian backed regime. They were Sunni, the other lot was Shia, and they began to create these very, very odd relationships with what was then Al Qaeda Iraq, and eventually became an entire state stretching from Syria to Iraq by 2014.

• 25:02Alastair Campbell?

  I'm going to give you more grist to your anti-intelligence services mill because there was a there was a joint intelligence committee report in February 2003, which said that specifically in the south of Iraq. The key risks that we were going to face were refugees, environmental damage, and the impact of chemical and biological weapon strikes.

• 25:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Alastair Campbell?

  And so I think we did not see that significant external threat. We also had an assumption, there was an assumption made that there'd be some kind of continuing functioning broadly effective Iraqi civil service, which presumably, what did you see in relation to that?

• 25:47Rory Stewart?

  No, it had very, very quickly crumbled away. And most of the people that we tried to bring in as directors of different departments provincially were completely either bringing in tribal allies or the one group of Iranian militia very quickly took over the Department of Health. So you ended up with a bunch of armed men at the hospitals from one Iranian militia group. Another Iranian militia group took over the Education Department. Meanwhile, the local tribal militia tried to take over the governor's office. So the state had collapsed into tribal and Islamist groups very quickly. And one fundamental strategic decision, though, was the decision to create this very

• 26:32Rory Stewart?

  heavy foreign footprint, rather than actually letting the Iraqis take the lead. The decision had been made, and I think this was because we'd learnt the wrong lessons from Bosnia and Kosovo, that instead of keeping a light footprint, which paradoxically is actually what people like Donald Rumsfeld wanted. Donald Rumsfeld wanted to go and topple Saddam and get out quickly, and he had the same view on Afghanistan. He wanted to go and topple the Taliban and get out quickly. So Donald Rumsfeld, then US Secretary of Defence.

• 27:00Alastair Campbell?

  Very much, very much in the neocon, Cheney, axis of evil.

• 27:06Rory Stewart?

  Yes, although oddly, Rumsfeld disagreed with them in one way, which was that the extreme neocons like Paul Wolfowitz really believed in the nation building democratisation bit. Donald Rumsfeld was more of an old conservative. He was more real politique, let's topple the dictators and then let's not try to nation build. And very successfully in Afghanistan, he had managed to control the number of US troops. Initially, only 2,500 troops on the ground. Hamid Kazai had been put in charge and The Afghans were largely running their own affairs. That then went wrong later because we got tempted into doing this heavy footprint in Afghanistan as well. But in Iraq, the wrong lessons had been learned from Bosnia, where in fact there hadn't been many troops outside the bases.

• 27:49Rory Stewart?

  But listening, I think, too much to people like Paddy Ashdown, who in Bosnia had said, what we need to do is basically behave more like the British Raj in India. We need to establish security, we need to establish governance, we need to eliminate corruption, and then later hold elections and let the locals take over. Bremer in Iraq tried to micromanage the whole thing, run the whole thing himself, and didn't actually trust the Iraqis to do it.

• 28:12Alastair Campbell?

  When you talk about learning lessons from previous military interventions, and we talked in the first episode about those which were seen to be much, much more successful. Do you think that we learnt the wrong lessons from Iraq when it came to Syria? And that one of those lessons at the political level, leadership level in particular, was that, do you know what? Even if you think it's the right thing to do, maybe it's best to leave it alone. Because I actually think that a lot of the arguments you made against what we did in Iraq might have played in, in the debate about Syria, where I think you both, you and I both agree, I think, that actually

• 28:54Alastair Campbell?

  once Obama's red line of chemical weapons by Assad had been crossed, that we probably should have intervened far more robustly than we did. And is that, do you think that is related to the?

• 29:04Rory Stewart?

  One hundred percent. One of the tragedies of the failure in Iraq is that it broke the confidence in the United States, made people like President Obama, who very courageously and very unusually opposed the Iraq war. He was one of the only senators to do so and took a huge risk with his political career to do that. But he got embedded in his head, as you say, an excessive lesson from Iraq, which is that he began to believe that no form of intervention could then be justified. So another consequence of Iraq was not just the humiliation of the US, but the complete erosion of American legitimacy, presence, strength throughout the region,

• 29:47Rory Stewart?

  and directly contributed, I think, to the fact that since 2011.

• 29:53Rory Stewart?

  One of the reasons the world has become more violent with more refugees, fewer democracies, more human rights abuses, more authoritarian domination, is the loss of confidence of the US and its allies which followed the humiliation in Iraq. Hmm, hmm. Well, should we take a break? Absolutely.

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• 32:31Rory Stewart?

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

• 32:34Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 32:35Rory Stewart?

  So in Tony Blair's speech in March 2003 to Parliament, he says that what Britain chooses to do in Iraq, and he says this very presciently 20 years ago, but there's an irony to it that maybe he wasn't aware of at the time. He says it will determine the way in which Britain and the world confront the central security threat of the 21st century, the development of the United Nations, the relationship between Europe and the United States, the relations within the European Union, and the way in which the US engages the rest of the world. So it could hardly be more important. It will determine the pattern of international politics for the next generation. How does that resonate with you now when you hear those words?

• 33:20Alastair Campbell?

  I'm going to read you something else.

• 33:24Alastair Campbell?

  General Franks, Tommy Franks, who headed up the military operation, he said there were eight objectives of the invasion. First, end the regime of Saddam Hussein. Second, to identify, isolate, and eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Third, to search for, to capture, and to drive out terrorists from the country. Fourth, to collect such intelligence as we can relate to terrorists' networks. Fifth, to collect such intelligence as we can relate to the global network of illicit weapons of mass destruction. Sixth, to end sanctions and immediately deliver humanitarian support to the displaced and to many needy Iraqi citizens. Seventh, to secure Iraq's oil fields and resources, which belong to the Iraqi people.

• 34:08Alastair Campbell?

  And last, to help the Iraqi people create conditions for a transition to representative self-government. So if I look at those as the objectives there.

• 34:19Rory Stewart?

  Achieved maybe one or two of them, yeah.

• 34:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, certainly one, eight, oil fields.

• 34:26Rory Stewart?

  Well, the problem is that the oil is pretty, pretty, I mean, it's very, very sad. I mean, as you, you know, I was back in Iraq recently. Where I live in Jordan is actually right on the Iraqi border and very sadly Iraq really hasn't been able to bring its oil production on stream. So it remains, remains, and the representative democracies barely functioning. I mean, the government is so astonishingly corrupt. And despite the oil, its inability to actually extract oil or use the revenue it gets from oil to begin to invest. I mean, it's heartbreaking because you're aware that before Saddam Hussein, Iraq was considered one of the most literate, educated, developed parts of the Middle East. And, and one of the real changes in the world is that if you put the clock back

• 35:11Rory Stewart?

  50 years, the real centers of the Arab world were Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine. These were the places where the intellectuals were, where you went to find great Arab writers and music and books. And part of this story is the collapse of all those places and the shift of the center of the Arab world towards, towards the Gulf, towards places like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, which didn't feature.

• 35:38Alastair Campbell?

  And by the way, I'm not avoiding your question about Tony. I just, I just thought I'd give you that assessment as well. I will point out, just to support that though, that there was analysis, I think it was the BBC did 10 years after the invasion, we're now 20. Be interesting to see if they went back and did the same thing, which basically said that there were huge security concerns, lots of problems. But GDP had grown exponentially, oil output had increased, internet, mobile phone usage taken off. And the number of people in absolute extreme poverty had fallen and life expectancy at birth was 10 years greater. GDP up, life expectancy up, et cetera. So that.

• 36:12Rory Stewart?

  And the, the problem then is that they did that just before.

• 36:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:16Rory Stewart?

  Before ISIS.

• 36:17Alastair Campbell?

  I know what you're gonna say, I know, but I'm saying, I'm saying, that's what I'm saying, it would be interesting if the same people went back and did the, now I think. I think on, I think on, on Tony's points, let's go, just read them again one by one. Let's go through them one by one.

• 36:30Rory Stewart?

  So he says, this will determine the way in which Britain and the world confront the central security threat of the 21st century.

• 36:38Alastair Campbell?

  So what do we, what do we define now as the, as the central security threat? A lot of people in the United States would say it's China.

• 36:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, or Russia. I don't think we any longer think the central security threat of the 21st century is lower middle income, Middle Eastern countries with nutty dictators who are trying to develop, you know, biological chemical weapons programs.

• 36:59Alastair Campbell?

  So did, for example, one other part of the aftermath that we've not talked about is there was, it did seem that there was a link between the firmness of action against Saddam and the decision of Gaddafi to give up his WMD program. So that, you know, so it could be that actually that, that what Tony's saying there can be judged two ways. One is good, one is bad. What's his next bit?

• 37:22Rory Stewart?

  And the development to the United Nations. Now, now there I'd say he's right. It does affect the development of the United Nations unbelievably negatively because your decision to go in without UN sanction in an invasion which Kofi Annan said was technically illegal because it didn't have the sanction of the Security Council was the beginning of the absolute hollowing out of the legitimacy of the UN, which up till 2003 had had a very good 90s.

• 37:48Alastair Campbell?

  Well, hold on.

• 37:50Rory Stewart?

  Period of Kofi Annan's domination.

• 37:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but there were very, there were very, there were big, there were some very difficult discussions about the decisions in relation to Kosovo in the UN. I mean, I think people, you know, Tony said, I remember Tony said in his statement at Chilcot that, you know, the the tougher the politics, then the, the often in relation to international law, the tougher the law, the, the, the legal questions are inextricably linked with, with, with the, the political. But I look, I would certainly have said, whether you could say this is all down to Iraq, I don't think so, but I'd certainly say it played a part in people thinking that the UN was not functional. But I think, I remember Derry Irvine said something very interesting, Derry Irvine, who was Lord Chancellor, and he said something very interesting at one of

• 38:34Alastair Campbell?

  the cabinet meetings. I can't remember if he was in cabinet then, but he certainly, he said something that the trouble is, you guys have argued and argued so much and fought so hard for a specific second resolution, that people think you needed one to take the action that you did, whereas in fact it was legitimate under the previous resolutions.

• 38:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, that I guess is also something that you with your comms hat on may be worth reflecting on. I mean, presumably, Derry Irvine was right that just even from a comms perspective, that was a huge mistake to put, allow people to put so much emphasis on a second resolution, which you then didn't go for.

• 39:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but the point was that we were, you know, we were genuinely trying so hard to get it. So what was Tony's next point?

• 39:19Rory Stewart?

  Yep, the relationship between Europe and the United States.

• 39:23Alastair Campbell?

  None of us predicted Brexit at that time, did we?

• 39:26Rory Stewart?

  Well, he also said the relations within the European Union.

• 39:30Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, right.

• 39:30Rory Stewart?

  And the way in which the United States engages with the rest of the world were history. So, relationship between Europe and the United States, well, of course, it did have a big impact, certainly in Germany and France, on their vision of the US, and they felt, with the benefit of hindsight, enormously vindicated. And it very much created the narrative that fed into Trump that the US was becoming a rogue player. And then says the way in which the United States engages, the relations within the European Union, of course, it was a fracture between Britain, France and Germany. The way in which the United States engages with the rest of the world, well, and paradoxically, what it actually did was spark a period of isolationism, sparked a period which ultimately leads up through

• 40:15Rory Stewart?

  Obama to Trump, of Trump. A lot of his campaign was an anti-Iraq war campaign, saying these guys idiots and saying, you know, well, let's listen to George W. Bush, he's some kind of genius, etc.

• 40:26Alastair Campbell?

  And also, America first wasn't just about, you know, the domestic message, it was part of his international message as well.

• 40:33Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. So then he finishes, "So it could hardly be more important. It will determine the pattern of international politics for the next generation." Well, it did, it did, didn't it?

• 40:44Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think in relation, if you take it in conjunction with what then happened in Syria and what's now happening in Ukraine, then I think you can make that case. And again, as you say, you can make it both ways. I think what we've seen here, though, is this happening at a time when, this goes back to the point you made right at the start in the first episode, is that it was flowing from a time when we felt on top of the world in terms of being liberal democracies, on top of the world in terms of our security strengths, and there's been a lot of change since then.

• 41:21Rory Stewart?

  And just on the personal side, it's difficult for me to really see in the person that I know today with your views on the world and what I occasionally tease you about, which is I think you becoming more left-wings, you get older. It's difficult for me to fully recognise the person that I find in your diaries 20 years ago. Do you feel that you've changed over time and that you think about these things in a slightly different way to the way that you thought about them then?

• 41:52Alastair Campbell?

  Just unpick what you just said, though. In what way do you see the difference between then and now, other than that I'm maybe a little less frenetic and...

• 42:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think you're much more liable now to be more nuanced, more prudent. You probably, if I try to suggest that we were going to go into Iraq today, I'd imagine you'd be more likely to suck your teeth and say, well, what's going to happen after the event? How's this going to be perceived? How are we going to keep, you know, you put a lot of emphasis on France, Germany, and Europe and keeping them on site. I mean, you don't sound to me anymore as though you're somebody who would be, yeah, the modern Alastair, I don't think, is somebody who'd be pushing as hard into the Iraq war as you did then.

• 42:42Alastair Campbell?

  I find it very strange that I still get a lot of kind of flak and I'm always put into the centre of these debates, obviously not as much as Tony, but certainly as much as the other members of the Cabinet, Geoff Hoon, Defence Secretary, Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary. I think I took a lot of heat, partly on their behalf, and I'm not complaining about that. I think that was part of the function I played a lot of times as a sort of lightning conductor. But I was at the time, I mean, Tony was genuine driven by a sense of conviction on this, I don't think there's any doubt about that. I think if I, funny if I was with Sally Morgan, who was Tony's, one of Tony's key advisers for a lot, a lot of the time, including

• 43:26Alastair Campbell?

  during this period. And I was with her the other day. And you've got to remember, my job was to go out and represent Tony Blair and the cabinet's view to the world. That was my job. That's what I had to do. I've said to you before that Jamie Rubin said to me after I left, he's in two thousand and three, he said, listen, this is the hardest thing you're going to find. One of the hardest things is working out what you really think. Because you've programmed yourself. And but if you, but if you.

• 43:56Rory Stewart?

  On, on, on that for a second. So essentially, you're saying, in the end, you were not running the policy. You were not an elected minister.

• 44:03Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 44:03Rory Stewart?

  And, and, and it wasn't fundamentally your job to sit with someone like me and try to work out if I said to you, Alistair, I've just come back from the ground, it's all messaging. You wouldn't really have seen your job on being trying to provide a completely independent analysis.

• 44:18Alastair Campbell?

  No, I would, no, I would have done that. I would have done that. And I did have people, I remember lots of people that would come and see me as a way of trying to get, you know, a message to Tony or trying to influence him in some way. So I did see a lot of that thing. And I, I saw it as part of my job to do that. So did Jonathan Powell. So did the rest of us. But the point I was, I was making, I think if you look in the diaries, there, there is, for example, there's one point where I said to Tony, and I think actually Sally Morgan may have been with me, because Sally was always very, very worried about the politics of this, about where this was going to play out in terms of Tony's reputation and Labour's chances and all those legitimate concerns that, that you should have in politics. And I remember saying to Tony, Tony, look, you know, this was at a time when Rumsfeld

• 45:03Alastair Campbell?

  had said to Jeff Hoon, listen, we can do this in alone. We can, we don't need you, you know. Jack Straw got the same message from Colin Powell and Tony got the same message direct from George Bush. Tony, you know, he said, I think he said to her at one point that I'd rather have you there as Prime Minister, not having been part of this, when we're, you know, dealing with the aftermath and what have you. So don't feel you have to do this for me. And this is another occasion where Tony said, look, I believe this. I believe this is the right thing to do. And I remember saying to Tony, look, if, just imagine a scenario where you've had, you've won an amazing landslide in 97, you've done some incredible things like the peace process and the minimum wage and Scottish devolution

• 45:46Alastair Campbell?

  and the New Deal. And then you've gone into your second term and you're doing public service reform. And then you go into a third term. Okay. And just imagine if that in terms of a lot of the public mind is wiped out by this, is it really, really, really, really worth it? And he's, and so that was probably at a deeper level where I was kind of coming from. I don't know.

• 46:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah. And it must, and you feel it in the preface to volume four of your diaries, where you do talk about all the things you were deeply proud of in the Labour legacy. And you're obviously aware that actually, 2004 was a less successful election result than the two that you got.

• 46:22Alastair Campbell?

  Two thousand five.

• 46:23Rory Stewart?

  Sorry, 2005, much, much less successful, right? Lost a lot of seats. And it was becoming clear to you that Tony Blair probably couldn't run again. And a lot of this is the Iraq War.

• 46:35Alastair Campbell?

  For sure.

• 46:35Rory Stewart?

  And you were also presumably having to deal with the fact that most of your friends, I guess, or many, many of your friends will have been deeply against the Iraq War. The Guardian was against the Iraq War, the Mirror was against the Iraq War. Many of your friends within the Labour Party would have been deeply against it.

• 46:50Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the one that mattered was Fiona.

• 46:53Rory Stewart?

  Who was against it?

• 46:55Alastair Campbell?

  Passionately. And, you know, I remember, to be fair to her, she didn't go on the Iraq War march, but I know that Jonathan Powell's wife did. And I know that Mike Boyce, the Chief of Defence Staff, that his family did. So we were all getting that. And we were also having, you know, we're having Grace, my daughter, who does this, she's a comedian now. I went to see her new show at the weekend. And she does a whole thing about what it was like going to school, having to fight your way through anti-war protesters, you know. So that, you know, that, that, and a lot of them were local members of the Labour Party. They were people that I knew.

• 47:27Rory Stewart?

  And so, and so you found presumably over that period that It changed relationships quite dramatically. It was one of the things that really, more than Tony Blair's economic policies or public sector reform, was a real break between you and many other traditional members of the Labour Party.

• 47:45Alastair Campbell?

  I don't feel I lost any genuine friends. I don't feel that anybody who was really close to me became any less close. But I'd say at the next level out, as it were, people that I would see around and know well, there'd be a real difficulty attached to it.

• 48:01Rory Stewart?

  And do people come up to you in the street? I mean, do you get people, you know, have you got people shouting at you? Do you get?

• 48:08Alastair Campbell?

  A lot less so, a lot less so. But, you know, I suspect on the back of this, just you and I talking for a couple of hours about this and the way that we've done, there'll be a very mixed reaction. You know, as you've seen, most of the reaction we get to our podcast, including on Twitter, is incredibly positive in the main. It's overwhelmingly positive. A lot of people, they can't see, they can't see beyond Iraq in terms of Tony Blair and they can't see beyond me, other than in terms of Tony Blair. And so, but I find now, it's very rare now, this could be famous last words, but when I'm out and about, I still get a bit, I still get a bit. And, you know, I had it the other day, I was at Stirling University, there was a protest

• 48:52Alastair Campbell?

  outside, but that was the first, when I was speaking there, that was the first time for a while.

• 48:57Rory Stewart?

  Just to come back then towards the end to wrap up, one of the people who clearly was uncomfortable with the way in which intelligence was being presented around the Iraq invasion, before the Iraq invasion, was David Kelly. And David Kelly had some kind of conversation with a BBC journalist. It became clear in the Hutton Inquiry that a lot of the things the BBC journalist claimed he'd said, he hadn't actually said. But Kelly was clearly uncomfortable with the direction which the intelligence was going, was uncomfortable with the Iraq war. And in July of 2003, David Kelly took his own life. Driven, I think, partly by the the stress and the tensions around this argument

• 49:42Rory Stewart?

  that he'd had around the invasion, the difficult choices he felt he'd had to make, weighing up his own conscience, speaking to a journalist against his loyalty to the organisation. And that, again, was something that was brought back to you because you were involved in many of these documents that that he was implicitly criticizing. I mean, tell us a little bit about David Kelly, how that struck you, how you think about it today, how your views have changed over time.

• 50:05Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, it's interesting, we've, you know, we've gone two hours talking about all this and and I've I've felt perfectly calm, perfectly rational. I'm actually very tired because I've not been sleeping, not to do with this, but and when you started to talk about that, I felt my I did feel my pulse racing a little bit. The Gilligan is, I don't despise many people, but I despise what he did. Because actually, when I'd never met David Kelly, and it's very strange to have somebody with whom you're closely identified,

• 50:44Alastair Campbell?

  who you never actually met. And what emerged through the process after he outed himself, told the MoD that he might be Gilligan's source, he said that he might be because he said he'd said some of the things that Gilligan said, and that's and he did see Gilligan from time to time. But he didn't say the things that became very, very controversial. And also, he wasn't against the war, he wasn't against the the idea of taking down Saddam. I don't know whether he had worries about the way the intelligence was being presented. I don't know. I saw no evidence and I heard no evidence of that. But the thing was, you

• 51:24Alastair Campbell?

  know, it was, I mentioned Sally Morgan, Sally Morgan and I had been in America with Tony. Tony made his big speech to Congress and, you know, he then went on to Japan and I came Sally and I came back to London. And we landed at Heathrow and I turned on my phone and there were just dozens of missed calls. And the top one was, you know, phone duty clerk urgent, phoned Nick Matthews, the duty clerk, and who told me David Kelly's body's been found. And

• 51:59Alastair Campbell?

  I just, I don't think I've ever had a feeling like it. And it wasn't, it was obviously the tragedy, but he kind of, you know, we, I don't mean this in a callous way, but we'd had lots of bad news like that of soldiers being killed and we'd had the same in other conflicts. And you feel terrible about it, but, but this felt very, very different. And, and the reason, it wasn't because I felt directly responsible, because I don't believe that I was. I, I, I do, if, if we're talking about blame in here, and I hate playing the blame game in any, any circumstances, but he should never have felt that he had to take his own life because he'd been put in this invidious position. And he was put there, to my mind, by Gilligan. And I think a lot of that came out in the, the inquiry.

• 52:41Alastair Campbell?

  But I knew that this was, this, I said in my diary, you know, there's a, I could feel a juggernaut coming towards me. And, and, and it was, it was, it was horrible. It was like, and, and I, I got home, sitting through in the kitchen through there with Fiona, Philip Gould, who is my closest friend, he knew I was going to be in state. He was at the house when I got back from Eathrow. And I just wanted out. I just thought this is the end of the road for me. I've had it. I can't do this another day longer. And Tony persuaded me to stay. Charlie Fortner, Peter Mandelson, I remember I spoke to Neil Kinnock, who's a really, you know, old and close friend who, and, and they all said, listen, you, you cannot go. You cannot go in these circumstances because people will put two and two together and make five and more. And so I stuck it out to the inquiry and then,

• 53:26Alastair Campbell?

  but I knew, I knew, I knew I'd, by then I knew I had to go.

• 53:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Okay. Well, I have to thank you, thank you very, very much. And I mean, there'll be many, many more questions. As you say, the controversies that we will have sparked in, in two episodes are huge. And I think it's very interesting listening to you, that the, the sort of, the texture of it, which is that on the one hand, as you said in the beginning of the first episode, you still support it. On the other hand, I'm hearing a lot of things through it that suggests that you, you can also, or I also feel that you're reconsidering bits of it all the time as time's passed.

• 54:01Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'll tell you, I think, I think how I'd sum it up is that for the whole, you know, obviously for those soldiers who were killed, who died.

• 54:11Alastair Campbell?

  For all the other people who were who were killed and injured for all the the trouble there's been, I can make the case that a lot of the aftermath problems were created by forces who would be doing other terrible things elsewhere were not there and might even have been doing it there. But at the same time, I recognize that, you know, I it's it's one of those things that you just put into the category, you just wish it had never happened. You wish it had never happened. You wish that you'd that Tony Blair and the government had never been put in that position. But they were. And and I think I think, look, I still talk to Tony about this. I talk to him a lot. And I think he thinks about it a lot and thinks about it deeply. And and I think if you would if you were to talk to him and have the same conversation with him, I think he'd push back a lot harder.

• 54:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, then then I have had. I have had.

• 54:58Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 54:59Rory Stewart?

  And he and he does. Yeah.

• 55:00Alastair Campbell?

  So I I I do marry these two things of I I understood at the time, I remember sitting down with Robin Cook when we wrote his resignation letter together.

• 55:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Alastair Campbell?

  And and so and he him saying to me, I said, I can't believe you are so strong on this with Tony. I can't believe you don't see why I see the see the way it's way I see it. And I said, Well, I see why you see it that way. I do see that. But at the same time, I'm with him because he's having to make this decision. And, you know, my job's to be there and and do whatever I have to do in those circumstances. But it doesn't mean you can't see the nuance now.

• 55:34Rory Stewart?

  Thank you, Alastair. Thank you for your fairness. We're not going to get full closure here. We're not going to solve all these issues.

• 55:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you might you know, my therapist.

• 55:42Rory Stewart?

  Even in even in two hours here. But thank you to all the listeners. We're aware we haven't done the usual episodes covering current affairs this week, but we want to do this topic justice. And we'll return next week with our normal episodes. And thank you all very much indeed.

• 55:55Alastair Campbell?

  Take care.

• 55:56Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

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