Confidential and
Personal PR.121
From: P F Ricketts,
Political Director
Date: 22 March 2002
CC: PUS
Secretary of State
IRAQ: Advice for the Prime
Minister
1 You invited thoughts
for your personal note to the Prime Minister covering the official
advice (we have put up a draft minute separately). Here are mine.
2 By sharing Bush's broad
objective" the Prime Minister can help shape how it is defined, and
the approach to achieving it. In the process, he can bring home to
Bush home of the realities which will be less evident from
Washington. He can help Bush make good decisions by telling him
things his own machine probably isn't.
3 By broad support for
the objective brings two real problems which need discussing.
4 First, the THREAT. The
truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's
WMD programmes, but our tolerance of them post-11 September. This is
not something we need to be defensive about, but attempts to claim
otherwise publicly will increase scepticism about our case. I am
relieved that you decided to postpone publication of the
unclassified document. My meeting yesterday showed that there is
more work to do to ensure that the figures are accurate and
consistent with those of the US. But even the best survey of
Iraq's WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years on
the nuclear, missile or CW/BW fronts: the programmes are extremely
worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.
5 US scrambling to
establish a link between Iraq and Al Aaida is so far frankly
unconvincing. To get public and Parliamentary support for
military operations, we have to be convincing that:
- the threat is so
serious/imminent that it is worth sending our troops to die for;
- it is qualitatively
different from the threat posed by other proliferators who are
closer to achieving nuclear capability (including Iran).
CONFIDENTIAL AND PERSONAL
We can make the case on
qualitative difference (only Iraq has attacked a neighbour, used CW
and fired missiles against Israel). The overall strategy needs to
include re-doubled efforts to tackle other proliferators, including
Iran, in other ways (the UK/French ideas on greater IAEA activity
are helpful here). But we are still left with a problem of bringing
public opinion to accept the imminence of a threat from Iraq. This
is something the Prime Minister and President need to have a frank
discussion about.
6 The second problem
is the END STATE. Military operations need clear and compelling
military objectives. For Kosovo it was: Serba out, Kosovars
back, peace-keepers in. For Afghanistan, destroying the Taleban and
Al Qaida military capability. For Iraq, "regime change" does not
stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam.
Much better, as you have suggested, to make the objective ending the
threat to the international community from Iraqi WMD before Saddam
uses it or gives it to the terrorists. This is at once easier to
justify in terms of international law, but also more demanding.
Regime change which produced another Sunni General still in charge
of an active Iraqi WMD programmme would be a bad outcome (not least
because it would be almost impossible to maintain UN sanctions on a
new leader who came in promising a fresh start). As with the fight
against UBL, Bush would do well to depersonalise the objective,
focus on elimination of WMD, and show that he is serious about UN
Inspectors as the first choice means of achieving that (it is
win/win for him: either Saddam against all the odds allows
Inspectors to operate freely, in which case we can further hobble
his WMD programmes, or he blocks/hinders, and we are on stronger
ground for switching to other methods),
7 Defining the end state
in this way, and working through the UN, will of course also help
maintain a degree of support among the Europeans, and therefore fits
with another major message which the Prime Minister will want to get
across: the importance of positioning Iraq as a problem for the
international community as a whole, not just for the US.
PETER RICKETTS
CONFIDENTIAL AND PERSONAL