The Second Plane, page 14
Kennedy said that he had been involved in the process since Bloody Sunday in 1972 (Blair’s gap year: he was a velvet-looned Bee Gee with a guitar called Clarence). Thirteen died on Bloody Sunday; and the toll for the whole period stands at about 3,500—or the equivalent of one bad month in Iraq. Later, in Basra, Blair would tell the troops that the struggle they were engaged in was “infinitely more important than Northern Ireland,” for the simple reason that it would shape “the future of the world.”
On the plane, in a brief audience with the P.M., I said that the events of the day were of course exhilarating, but they taught an ominous lesson. How long does it take to evolve from terror to politics? Could he imagine, in the Iraqi parliament of the future, the ghosts of Moqtada al-Sadr and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi smiling at each other with Irish eyes?
“It must happen,” he said. “Something like that must eventually happen.”
In Conversation—2
“The massive stroke suffered by your father. He was forty. You were eleven. And in the morning your mother came into the room. And as you said later, ‘She hadn’t even spoken and I was in tears…’”
“That’s right. I could tell by her face that something absolutely awful had happened.”
“Your mother reminds me of my mother. A saint but not a martyr.”
“That’s an accurate description of her.”
“And she died very early, didn’t she? At fifty-two. There have been many early deaths, early incapacitations, in your life story. Do you think that caused you to be…more driven?”
Blair did that thing you read about in novels: he twisted in his seat. He is made uneasy by the Freudian innuendo; he is made uneasy by the personal. It would be a waste of time to ask him about Cherie. Or about Gordon Brown (their relationship, I decided, had turned into something like a ten-year divorce between fraternal twins who happened to be married to each other). And I found, after a while, that I had stopped making notes: I wasn’t getting anything I hadn’t heard elsewhere. But I made one final try.
“It was your mother, Hazel, who was the religious one. And then you got more religious at Oxford.”
“Religion was in the air then. Like politics—something you talked about late at night.”
“And yours is a practical kind of religion, isn’t it? Communitarianism…”
“Communitarianism. The individual and society. Values.”
“Do you believe in a supernatural being?”
He twisted in his seat.
“Do you believe in an afterlife?”
He twisted in his seat.
“And all your trusted people are secularists,” I said. “You’re surrounded by secularists.” Who, I thought, must spend much of the time rolling their eyes.
“Funnily enough,” he said, “the one who had most sympathy for it was Alastair Campbell.”
Alastair Campbell, who notoriously and brutishly told the press, “We don’t do religion.”
Blair went on, “Alastair was sympathetic, but he said, ‘Look. This isn’t America. Religion and politics don’t mix.’”
“And when religion and politics mix?”
“You start saying things like ‘God made me do it.’”
Washington
“Sit Room” is not an American contraction along the lines of fry pan, sleep pill, or shave cream. Far from being the sitting room, the Sit Room is the Situation Room, where, this morning, Bush and Blair, and Condi and Cheney, are having a video teleconference with their commanders and ambassadors in Iraq. Any moment now there will be an elaborately staged side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder double-premier advance to the Oval Office for talks, with other participants, about Africa, Iran, and “energy security.” The atmosphere in these corridors, the aides, the secret-service men, the odd wandering pol with hair as rigid as caramel or marzipan, doesn’t remind you of anything else. A futuristic academy, perhaps, of pure power.
The style is not prime-ministerial but presidential: at every moment the office itself is honored and exalted. You get a sense of it on Pennsylvania Avenue, where, with your press cards (plural), your staff pin, and your photo ID, you confront the scowling, head-shaking jacks-in-office at the gate—incarnations of disgusted skepticism. The whole place fizzes with zero tolerance, with the prideful tension and frigidity of high protocol. Its peculiarly American flavor is evident in the sustained choreography, and the dread of the spontaneous. This does remind you of something: a film set. After prodigious delays and innumerable false alarms, and bungled rehearsals (with stand-ins), Harrison Ford and Hugh Grant give us their fifteen seconds, then it’s back to the delays and the false alarms and the bungled rehearsals.
Pretty well everyone, from the semi-literate windbags of the blogosphere (“So! The poddle of Downing Street once agian feel’s the tug of his masters leish!”) to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (who has started defying the Americans because he “doesn’t want to be known as the Arab Tony Blair”), pretty well everyone agrees that the P.M. has vitiated his premiership by cleaving too close to George Bush—an association described as “tragic” by Neil Kinnock and “abominable” by Jimmy Carter. And Blair himself, I thought, was arrestingly forthright when he said, in a recent interview on NBC, that “at one level…it is the job of the British Prime Minister to get on with the American President.” This is a tradition that goes back, with certain fluctuations, to Churchill and the termination of Britain’s imperial sway. One should not pretend that it is a frictionless business, saying no to America. It is one thing to be “a leading member of the EU.” It is quite another to be what Clinton called “the world’s one indispensable nation.”
I am given a clandestine glimpse of this disparity in the Roosevelt Room, while chewing on a bonbon graciously offered to me by a passing Karl Rove (“We need a little glucose here”), and waiting for Harrison and Hugh to start their next scene. A few prime-ministerial staffers are comparing notes with a presidential equivalent on the question of foreign travel. When Blair goes somewhere, he relies on a staff of thirty (and five bodyguards). When Bush goes somewhere, he relies on a staff of 800 (and 100 bodyguards); and if he visits two countries on the same trip, the figure is 1,600; three countries, and the figure is 2,400. Having reached his destination, Blair will throw in his lot with whatever transport is made available. Using military aircraft, Bush takes along his own limousine, his own backup limousine, his own refueling trucks, and his own helicopters. “Mm,” murmurs a chastened Brit. “You make our lives seem very simple.” This, shall we say, is the diplomatic way of putting it.
Lurking in a Roosevelt Room doorway, I am privileged to receive a two-second once-over from the President as he and Blair make their stately way from the Sit Room; I admit, for what it’s worth, that I inclined my head at him. I am also allowed a couple of minutes in the Oval Office as the principals take their seats. And there is an incident.
“Did you hear that?” a Blair liaison officer later asks me.
“Yes, I did.”
“Do you intend to put it in your piece?”
“Yeah, I thought I might.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t.”
And I obeyed—though of course I have no compunction about slinging it in here. Bush was saying, of something or other, “I’ve never seen so much bullshit in my life.” Then, much more interestingly, he jerked to his feet, yelling at the cameraman, “Give me the tape! Give me the tape!” That is to say, the President was going to confiscate the evidence—the evidence of his profanity. Blair’s people didn’t want to add to Bush’s problems. No headlines saying, “Prez in ‘Bullshit’ Storm.” No month-long frenzy of bullshit about the “bullshit.” Every little helps—what with the 30 percent approval rating, the dead-duck second term, the double-or-quits “surge” in Iraq.
Bush and Blair exchanged their political farewells at a press conference in the Rose Garden. The President, by now, fancies himself a great wit (among other things), having spent six years surrounded by people who double up at his feeblest crack. But it has to be said that Bush was at his very best that day, generous and affectionate, and quick to acknowledge the political pain he had inflicted on his (necessarily) junior partner. Then, too, there were the coded salutes to Blairean “influence” in Bush’s mention of global warming (“a serious issue”) and his tolerant reference to the two-state solution in the Middle East.
The P.M., for his part, gave a passionate restatement of his crystallized rationale: after September 11, the West had no choice but to unite against a planetary enemy; and he did what he did because he believed it was right. While the two men spoke you could hear the distant bawling of the protestors on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was as if an incensed but microscopic goblin was off in the bushes somewhere, down by the ornamental lake, his voice strained to the maximum yet barely louder than the endless miaows of the cameras.
After a session at the British Embassy celebrating Northern Ireland, we were given the full totalitarian motorcade from Massachusetts Avenue to Andrews Air Force Base. At every crossroads, junction, and side-turning there was a square-on squad car keeping the lid on a half-mile Tony tailback. And on we sped—our limousines, our Rolls-Royce, our SWAT truck—across the overpass above a Beltway shorn of all traffic, and onto the tarmac where our plane would take us, via Heathrow, to Kuwait City.
Here’s something that I bet Tony’s people didn’t dare tell George’s people. The plane we’re flying in (an executive jet with three classes and a little bedroom for the P.M.) was chartered, on the open market, from a company based in the Middle East.
In Conversation—3
After the ten-hour flight from Washington, we had time for a coffee and a biscuit on that strange surface, solid ground (in a joint called the Royal Suite at Heathrow), before wisely returning to the plane for the ten-hour flight to the Gulf. On the way I was to have my heart-to-heart with Tony on Iraq.
Giving an informal speech in Northern Ireland, the P.M. told of the time at Hillsborough Castle when, after a long night of negotiations, he went upstairs to find Ken McGinnis (a formidably butch politico) asleep in his bed. “I am devoted to the cause,” he said—but not that devoted…We had just finished lunch, somewhere over the Balkans, when I was asked to step forward; and I wistfully wondered if Tony and I would have our chat in all the privacy and comfort of his little love nest near the cockpit. But no. I rose from my seat in business (coach, normally empty, was crammed with extra press, most of it televisual), and went forward to Blair’s throne in first.
“What would have been the price of saying no to America?”
“Saying no to America would have been huge.”
“Didn’t Jack Straw say we would ‘reap a whirlwind’?”
“It is very, very difficult to say no to America. It would have meant staying out of the aftermath. It would have meant not being involved.”
“I suppose we’re all involved. There are no Switzerlands in this fight.”
“I don’t know about Switzerland,” he said, not wishing, presumably, to offend the Swiss. “But yes. There are no neutralist positions.”
Blair would agree, perhaps, that he played his hand too early. He committed himself to Washington before securinga) a promise to push for a broader coalition, and b) linkage with what statesmen call MEPP (the Middle East Peace Process). But wasn’t the tempo of the whole effort fatally brisk? I said,
“Everything that went wrong went wrong because of tempo, didn’t it? Even Abu Ghraib. No trained interrogators and no interpreters. Just Mr. and Mrs. Lynndie England.”
“Yes, well, the pace of it…”
It was the tempo, the pace, the rush—the power rush. We talked on. Hereafter he made only one statement that I hadn’t heard before. He said,
“Al-Qaeda actions are treated as morally neutral. They’re treated like natural disasters.”
Or like acts of God. Where were we—over Turkey? Over Syria? Below, the clouds presided over their shadows on the sand.
“You don’t lose your emotional response,” he said, “but you can’t lose your nerve. You get to the point where you’re unable to do the job unless you’re prepared to make the decisions of life and death.”
Iraq
My support for the war, non-existent until it actually began, received no noticeable fillip as I donned my ten-kilo combat vest (as if in preparation for a viciously searching X-ray) and my flak helmet, and trudged up into the rump of the Hercules C-130—for the flight from Kuwait City to Baghdad. It didn’t feel like a plane. It felt like a hangar.
I had earlier been roused by a 4:30 wake-up call, and had then extracted a) two bottles of water from a minibar childishly infested with 7UPs and Oranginas, and b) a full toilet roll from the adjacent bathroom (what I really wanted was a Depend Undergarment). My breakfast, too, was untypically light on the All-Bran and the cups of fuming black coffee. We gathered in the forecourt and advanced to the airport, by humble motor coach, through the almost artistic cheerlessness of the Kuwaiti capital—a conurbation seemingly put together, from top to bottom, without a woman’s touch, its only colors commercial, its only curves devotional, under a sinister mist of damp dust.
The interior of the Hercules was without surfaces; it was all innards—sacking, wiring, tubing, webbing. DANGER, WARNING, EMERGENCY GROUND, and DITCH. A soldier hollered out our survival instructions, not a word of which I caught, and of course there were no tranquil updates from the captain, and no accessible portholes, so the only progress reports were acoustical: fantastic snortings and screechings, as in some low-mimetic science-fictional piece about a ravaged freighter toiling through the intergalactic voids. Another novelty was the direction of the G-forces, which came at you sideways-on, bending your torso to the right as the plane lifted off, then to the left as it walloped back to earth.
Tony rode in the cockpit, and spiffily disembarked, at Baghdad International, in suit and tie. At no point, so far as I saw, did he encumber himself with the neck-ricking headgear or the snarling Velcro of the flak jacket. And I remembered that first journey when, in rather more agreeable surroundings, he disdained the use of the seat belt in his armor-plated Jag. What is this prime-ministerial trait? The rest of us, by this stage, were carapaced in sweat and grit. But not Tony. Rumor predicts that on his retirement Blair will seek solace, along with his wife, in the bosom of Rome. But surely he is Calvinism incarnate—the central doctrine being that your salvation is secured by your confidence in it. In Iraq, Tony crossed the runway like a true exceptionalist: one of the chosen, the redeemed, the elect.
Needless to say, there would be no eye-catching motorcade for “the Highway of Death” to Baghdad. Tony climbed into his Black Hawk; I climbed into my Cobra, and watched, with fatalistic detachment, as the tawny teenager fed the cartridge belt into the tripod-mounted machine gun. We steered low, just above the telegraph wires. At this height (I was told), no missile would have time to arm itself before impact. The Cobra would take the hit, but it wouldn’t actually explode. Perfect, perfect: I couldn’t feel more secure. We also fired off flares as we flew, so that the enemy projectile, with implausible credulity, would seek their heat rather than ours—the baby firework rather than its farting, yammering sire. If you closed your eyes you seemed to hear music, military but atonal, like tinnitus.
Mortar fire had just savaged a Toyota Land Cruiser in the parking lot of the British Embassy, our first stop in the Green Zone. While Tony took his rictus and his frozen eyes from handshake to handshake, I got talking to Jackie, a member of the managerial staff. “Every day now we have an incoming,” she said. “For six weeks we’ve been getting it. If you’re inside you’re all right. It’s the hot metal—the shrapnel. If you’re outside there are these duck-and-cover units. They’re like boxes, and you’re supposed to scramble into them when you hear the five-second warning. You don’t bother if you’ve got a clean white skirt on.”
We bustled ahead, in stop-start convoy, to a press conference at the unpalatial “palace,” or the Prime Minister’s residence: heavy sofas, gilt-trimmed chandeliers, artificial roses, artificial light. Al-Maliki shuffled along the damp red carpet to greet and kiss the grandly waddling figure of President Talabani, and they disappeared behind the inevitable stockade of TV cameras. There were hostile questions, and you could hear Blair’s weak protesting treble and Talabani’s didactic baritone: progress, improvement, the Iraqi security forces, the dialogue with the tribes, constructive talks, the way forward, the channel to Iran…We shunted on to Maud House, HQ of the British Support Unit, just in time for another alert. General David Petraeus—Wolfowitzian in appearance, with a nervous, wincing laugh—barely blinked as the sirens took up their weary and long-suffering squawk.
“It’s Apocalypse Now meets Disneyland”: this was the twinkly verdict of a British staff colonel. And there came an interlude, on the helipad (like a drained swimming pool of gray concrete, the size of a city block), where you could find some shade and try to bring order to the skein of impressions and the vague, persistent tickle of the unreal. The Green Zone resembles the embassy district of a minor South American capital after a period of immiseration and collapse, where the powers that be, or the powers that remain, are exhaustedly girding themselves for the chaos and butchery of revolution. I found myself staring at a discarded ornamental armchair (its symbolism all too cooperative), which grimly presided over a heap of undifferentiated rubbish. Then it was wheels up, nose down, and we clattered over Baghdad, the apartment blocks like low-rise car parks, with trash everywhere, and greenmantled standing pools.
