The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
getting
some influence. If you just go to someone and say, ‘You’re
completely wrong.
Forget it’,
the amount of influence you are likely to have … is
less.
“So … there
is a trade-off between indicating you are with someone and
then
persuading
them to move down a particular route.”164
439.
Asked whether
the elements that would be essential for success were red
lines
for the UK
and absolutely essential or whether they were things that would be
nice to
have but
the UK would go along with the policy whatever happened, Mr Powell
said that
Mr Blair
was not setting conditions for UK participation in military
action:
“The point
of these Notes is to try and set out the right way to do it …
[T]hinking of
them in
terms of conditions is the wrong way to look at it. We weren’t
trying to say
‘If you
tick off all these boxes, then we will be with you’. We were saying
‘We are with
you in
terms of what you are trying to do, but this is the sensible way to
do it. We are
offering
you a partnership to try to get to a wide coalition’.
“But being
with the Americans didn’t necessarily mean going to war. The
Prime
Minister
said repeatedly to President Bush that if Saddam complied with the
UN
Resolutions,
then there would not be any invasion and President Bush agreed
with
him on
that.
“… So the
Prime Minister was saying, ‘We are with you. We need to go down
the
UN route,
but that does not necessarily mean war. It may well be that Saddam
could
comply well
short of war.’”165
440.
Mr Powell
emphasised that telling the US there were “pre-conditions” would
have
been a
mistake; the UK was “setting out a framework” and “trying to
persuade them to
move in a
particular direction”.166
441.
Sir David
Manning confirmed that Mr Blair himself had written the Note
he
sent to
President Bush on 28 July.
442.
Sir David
Manning told the Inquiry that Mr Blair had drafted the Note to
President
Bush
himself. Sir David had tried to take the first sentence out because
it was “too
sweeping”,
it seemed to him “to close off options”, and he did not think that
that was
“a sensible
place to be”.167
443.
Asked who else
had seen the Note in draft, Sir David Manning stated:
“The only
other person I’m aware of who saw the Note in draft was
Jonathan Powell
…
I went to Jonathan and said, ‘The Prime Minister should
not say this’, and we
went up to
the flat. We talked through with him [Mr Blair], and I said
that the first
164
Public
hearing, 18 January 2010, pages 39-40.
165
Public
hearing, 18 January 2010, pages 40-41.
166
Public
hearing, 18 January 2010, pages 77-78.
167
Private
hearing, 24 June 2010, pages 49-50.
76