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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 573-vi House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
FOREIGN POLICY ASPECTS OF THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM
Wednesday 19 April 2006 PROFESSOR PHILIPPE SANDS QC Evidence heard in Public Questions 288 - 378
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday 19 April 2006 Members present Mr Mike Gapes, in the Chair Mr Fabian Hamilton Mr David Heathcoat-Amory Mr John Horam Mr Eric Illsley Mr Paul Keetch Andrew Mackinlay Mr John Maples Sandra Osborne Mr Greg Pope Mr Ken Purchase Sir John Stanley Ms Gisela Stuart Richard Younger-Ross ________________ Witness: Professor Philippe Sands QC gave evidence. Q288 Chairman: Good afternoon everybody. Professor Sands, welcome. We have one hour so my colleagues will have to be very disciplined this afternoon. We will begin by referring to your important book, which you kindly sent to us. You have suggested in your book that the Bush Administration is trying to rewrite the rules of the international system in terms of dealing with the new threats and the current situation. Do you think that the existing global rules do need to be changed or are they all entirely adequate for the current circumstances? Professor Sands: Firstly, thank you very much, Mr Chairman, through you to all the Members for inviting me and having an opportunity to address these important issues. The story that I have told in the book begins with a very strong American commitment to developing a system of global rules in the period during and immediately after the Second World War and which characterises the United States' engagement with the international community for much of the next 40 years. The significant change that took place predated the events of September 11 and the Administration of President Bush came into office with a commitment to rewrite already some of the emerging global rules - one thinks of the criminal court and of Kyoto. My thesis is that 9/11 presented an opportunity to take forward that project and it did so in relation to essentially two sets of rules. Firstly, the rules governing the use of force, the jus ad bellum; and secondly, the rules governing methods and means of warfare, the jus in bello. In both cases, coming to your question, my own view is that present challenges certainly require governments to review the adequacy of existing rules, but on the basis of the information that I have available to me - that which is essentially in the public domain - I do not believe that the rules in their fundamental essence require significant change. Q289 Sir John Stanley: Professor Sands, on page 182 of your book you wrote, "Tony Blair had privately signalled his commitment to regime change very early on. On 18 March 2002 Sir David Manning, Blair's Foreign Policy Adviser, had written to the Prime Minister confirming that he had told Condoleezza Rice that, 'You would not budge in your support for regime change.'" Can you tell the Committee, in your view what was the point in time when Mr Blair had made an irrevocable commitment to Mr Bush that if Mr Bush went for regime change by military intervention the British Forces would be there with him? Professor Sands: Thank you for that question. Again, obviously I have not been privy to absolutely all the information so I can only talk about that which is in the public domain and that which I have otherwise had sight of. My personal view is that the Prime Minister took a decision very early on, in March/April 2002, to provide unambiguous support to President Bush and that President Bush had decided at that time to remove Saddam Hussein from office, irrespective of what did or did not emerge. In terms of proof - and as a lawyer, as an English barrister obviously one is very careful in answering your question - I would say that certainly by 31 January 2003 the Prime Minister had taken his personal decision to support President Bush's decision to remove Saddam Hussein from office. I refer to that date because that is a date from a memorandum that I have referred to later in the book, at pages 272 and 273, relating to a private conversation between the President and the Prime Minister at the White House, accompanied by a small number of other individuals, at which President Bush unequivocally states that he has decided to use force, and the Prime Minister unequivocally states, "I am solidly with you." And in my view everything that happened thereafter, including the UN process, the views of the weapons inspectors, did not really matter what it turned up because the decision had been taken and the start date for war had already been pencilled in. So certainly by that date there had been, in my view, on the Prime Minister's part, an irrevocable decision. That does not of course mean that he would not have to come back and persuade Cabinet, persuade Parliament and perhaps persuade others, the Military, to support the use of force, but I think his decision had been taken and his efforts on the basis of the material that I am aware of were in that direction and unequivocally so. Q290 Sir John Stanley: So you are saying to the Committee that in your view a significant period, several months before the Prime Minister had asked the House of Commons for consent to go to war, and indeed during the period when the Prime Minister was saying to the House of Commons that no decision had been taken, that privately he was committed to supporting President Bush militarily in bringing about regime change by military force in Iraq? Professor Sands: Yes and the material is unequivocal. The New York Times ran a story a month after the latest edition of the book came out; they obtained confirmation from two British senior sources that the material was authentic and neither Downing Street nor the White House has challenged the authenticity of that material. That material is unequivocal and I think it follows from that that it would be, shall we say, helpful to consider very carefully what the private personal decision had been and what the public statements were. There is, regrettably in my view, a very significant gap between what was being said publicly and what had been said privately. Q291 Mr Keetch: Professor, can I turn to another subject in which this Committee has been interested, and that is extraordinary rendition. As an eminent QC could you give us your opinion of the legality or otherwise of the practice that we generally accept as being called extraordinary rendition? Professor Sands: The term extraordinary rendition does not have a legal definition as a term of art; you will not find it in any treaties or any domestic or other legislation. What it is typically taken to refer to is the practice of identifying an individual who may be associated with terrorist or related activities, apprehending him and removing him from the jurisdiction in which he is apprehended and taking him to another jurisdiction where he can be subject to treatment and, in particular, forms of interrogation, which may not be permitted by the law of the apprehending state. Q292 Mr Keetch: Therefore you would say that that is an illegal act under international law? Professor Sands: I think there is no international lawyer of whom I am aware who would say that it is justifiable in any circumstances for a State to extra-judicially or extra-legally take someone off the streets, remove them to another country and subject them to treatment, forms of interrogation which may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or torture within the meaning of the 1984 Convention against Torture. Q293 Mr Keetch: When we have questioned the Foreign Secretary, and indeed when we have questioned Administration officials on the other side of the Atlantic, one of the arguments has been, "Look, if this is going on why is there not evidence, why has a person not come forward and said, 'Look, this has happened to me'?" Have you actually identified anybody or a case or two or three, whatever, where you actually think that this practice has gone on? I am not talking about CIA jets flying in and out of airports but an actual clear example where you believe that extraordinary rendition, as defined by you, has actually occurred? Professor Sands: I am going to have to be very careful what I say - I can only speak from my personal knowledge and I do not have awareness of all of the facts, and I have been very careful in making public comments on this issue - to put a caveat that one has to look at the facts and the facts plainly, if they exist, have not yet emerged. I am aware of certain cases in which the allegations have been made. Probably the leading case is the example of an individual of Canadian nationality who was flying, it is alleged, via JF Kennedy Airport in New York, who was apprehended, it is said, with the support of the Canadian and US Police Authorities and transferred, it is said, to Syria where, it is said, he was subject to treatment that did not meet the requirements of the 1984 Torture Convention in the process of interrogation. That is the best-known example that I am aware of, but again of course the facts have not yet been established so one has to have a certain caveat. There are several other cases that I am aware of but none from my own personal knowledge. Q294 Mr Keetch: Finally, are there any of those cases that actually involve the British Government or the transition of an individual through a British airport or through a British jurisdiction, because again the Foreign Secretary has basically said to this Committee, "Look, it does not happen and if it did happen you would have heard about it somehow"? Professor Sands: It is a difficult question because I think on many of the cases of which we are aware the full facts are not out. There are individuals who are not British nationals but who have right of residency in this country who are currently being detained at Guantanamo and it is said in relation to a couple of them that they were taken off the streets of a third country and transported eventually to Guantanamo, and it is suggested that there was some involvement of British authorities in that process. But, again, this is allegation and I do not have hard evidence - these cases have not gone to court. Another example that one might refer to - and it has been written up in his book - is a former British detainee, Moazzam Begg, whose story is told in his own book and alleges that he was taken off the streets of Pakistan, transported from Pakistan to Bhagram Airbase in Afghanistan and from there transported onwards to Guantanamo. In the course of the story which he tells - and, again, it has not been tested in a court of law so one has to have a certain degree of caution - it appears that British authorities were involved in identifying his presence in Pakistan and certainly, according to his account, in questioning him very shortly after he was apprehended. That would suggest, in answer to your question, there is material that is worth investigating thoroughly. I think the most important point to make in relation to extraordinary rendition is that under the 1984 Convention against Torture Inhuman and Degrading Treatment, all States' parties, including this government, which takes its international responsibilities seriously, have a positive duty to investigate allegations of wrongdoing of this kind. To the best of my knowledge there has not yet been a full investigation of that kind and such an investigation is required where there is credible evidence. Q295 Mr Horam: Coming back to your main theme, your assertion that America has tried to change the system of global rules and that the UK has been part of that as well, what role, in your view, should the UK have played? What role would you like to have seen it play? Professor Sands: One big caveat that has to be put in, which I elaborated in the book but which has not been fully brought out in the media, is I think that the situation is changing, in this sense. I think that the United States in particular has recognised that playing fast and loose with the rules comes with a price, and I think in particular in the second Administration of President Bush there has been an effort to, shall we say, reengage with America's traditional rule of law type of approach. That is evidenced, for example, I think, in the work of Secretary of State Rice, who I believe is working very hard to ensure that the rules on torture and other rules --- Q296 Mr Horam: Accepting your caveat my question is about the UK. Professor Sands: I am making the caveat because on the best possible case it could be said that the United Kingdom and the Prime Minister have contributed to that effort to reengage. Again, I am not privy to all of the material that goes on behind the scenes, but let me give two examples where I think the UK has not acted as it ought to have acted. Firstly, in relation to Guantanamo, whatever may have been said privately, publicly there has been no critique at the highest level of government of the conditions under which Guantanamo has been set up and operated. I believe that has sent a signal to those in the Administration of President Bush who feel it is justifiable to proceed in this way, and I have been told by senior officials in the Administration of President Bush that Britain's silence on Guantanamo amounts, in effect, to an acceptance that that particular policy matter is justifiable. I think if the British government at the highest levels - not some junior official - the level of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary had spoken out decisively in the spring of 2002 the story with Guantanamo may have been different - it may not have been, but I think it may have been. The second example, of course, is in the road to war on Iraq. I am certainly satisfied that the Prime Minister believed a second resolution from the Security Council would have been justified but, again, it seems pretty clear to me on the material that I have seen that there was no full effort at the end of the day to ensure that the United States' actions and the British actions were made fully consistent with the rule of law, and I regret on the basis of the material - some of which is described in the book - I do not have the sense that behind the scenes the interests of the United Kingdom in maintaining the rule of law and the United States' commitment to the rule of law was put as strongly as it should have been put. That for me, personally, is a matter of considerable regret. Q297 Mr Horam: Winding forward from that, you have no doubt heard Mr Blair's speeches in Australia and elsewhere about the use of pre-emptive force in the international global problems. How does that fit into what you are saying about how the UK should have behaved or might not behave in the future? Professor Sands: The Prime Minister has made a number of speeches. Q298 Mr Horam: The theme was the use of pre-emptive military force, the justification for using pre-emptive military force, which changes the post-war global rules. Professor Sands: The Prime Minister has made a number of speeches which are not necessarily all in exactly the same direction. In some he has apparently been more supportive of pre-emptive force, in others he appears less supportive of pre-emptive force. I take it your question is concerned with those where he is more supportive of pre-emptive force consistently with the position adopted by the United States. For me that is a matter of considerable concern. On this particular aspect I share entirely the evidence that was put before this Committee by the Attorney General which indicated, I think very accurately, the circumstances in which the international rules governing the use of force can permit the use of force in self-defence where a State is subject itself to an attack or an armed attack is threatened. My own view is that the existing rules of international law justifying the use of force where an attack is threatened are sufficient to allow a State, including the United Kingdom, to act where there is credible evidence that a weapon of mass destruction is being assembled with the intent of using it in relation to, in this case, the United Kingdom. The concern that I have with the Prime Minister's statements is that they tend to suggest that the existing rules are inadequate and I believe that the existing rules are adequate at present to deal with all foreseeable situations, and I believe the Attorney General gave the same evidence to this Committee some time ago. Chairman: I am conscious it has been indicated that we may have a vote imminently. If so we will break for 15 minutes and then come back and continue, but we will carry on until that moment. Q299 Mr Purchase: You have, as the Chairman said earlier, made it very, very clear that you believe that the Bush Administration used the war on terrorism as a way to obfuscate the purpose of changing the rules of the game. Given that that was nothing more than opportunism, we will say, do you think there is a grand plan in which the Americans see themselves as significantly changing the rules, in order to create some advantage, of which I know not? But if you have in your mind a way in which the rules could be changed to advantage the USA, whom would it disadvantage? Professor Sands: I think the first thing I would want to say is that I have been very careful not to talk about the USA because like any country there are lots of different views, and to the extent I have a critique, which I do, it is of the Administration of President Bush. Q300 Mr Purchase: Fair enough. For USA substitute Bush. Professor Sands: I think there is a very significant internal battle going on even within the Bush Administration in terms of the nature and extent of its engagement with global rules. There are parts of the Bush Administration that remain very strongly committed to its traditional approach, recognising that a rules-based system has provided tremendous support and advantage to the United States over the last 50 years - in the economic field, in relation to intellectual property rights and also in relation to force. You see that, for example, in the statements of Senator McCain, a Republican senator, who has led the charge against the Administration's efforts to undo the rules. But there is also another camp that is apparently led by the Vice President and by the Secretary of Defence and formerly also by Mr Wolfowitz, who believe that the rules are a fundamental threat to the United States, that they restrain the United States. You can see that most clearly in a statement of 1997 during the Administration of President Clinton by the very individuals who now occupy these high offices, in a document called The Project for a New American Century. The Project for a New American Century has a statement of principles which basically says that international law is part of the problem, we need to get rid of it, we need to remove these constraints from ourselves, and unconstrained by rules of better international law we would better be able to protect our national security. I think left to their own devices these gentlemen would get rid of the rules altogether on the belief - mistaken in my view, mistaken in the view of Senator McCain, mistaken in the view, I think, also of Secretary Rice - that the US is somehow threatened by the global rules. Q301 Mr Purchase: So the other side of that coin? Who gets disadvantaged? Professor Sands: The other side of the coin is the thesis I hold to - and which I think most people would generally accept - that in a complex globalising world we have an interest in a rules-based system setting forth minimum standards of behaviour. If you start unilaterally tinkering with the rules and getting rid of the ones that you do not like others will do the same thing in relation to the rules that they do not like. The great issue that is coming up is China. China, until the 1990s, was not a party to many of the multilateral instruments that we are very familiar with - the human rights instruments, the World Trade Organisation, the intellectual property instruments - and the Clinton Administration and indeed the previous Bush Administration expended a great deal of political capital in trying to persuade the Chinese to ratify all of these treaties, and by the end of the 1990s the Chinese had ratified the human rights instruments, the WTO and various other instruments. At the very moment that they have ratified them all in comes a new American Administration to basically shred the rules that have been put in place. So coming to your question, I think the crucial issue within the United States that is being asked right now is to what extent are America's principle emerging competitors, including the Chinese, better off unconstrained by global rules or subject to global rules - I think that is where the debate is heading - and I think the emerging dominant group is beginning to recognise that the Administration and the United States is better off with the Chinese, with the Indians and with other emergent economic powers constrained by global rules, than acting entirely unconstrained by a rules-based system. Q302 Mr Illsley: Following on with this theme of an assault on the international rules - and I think one of your conclusions is that the robustness of the international rules system, the international law as we have it, is such that it will withstand this assault and that eventually we will return to a situation of the pre-Iraq war whereby the international law regime will hold good. But looking at Guantanamo Bay where, for some three years now, you have a group of people who are not classed as combatants, so they are outside the Geneva Convention, they have no status within the United States Judiciary because they are outside of the American territories, and you have this group of prisoners who are simply prisoners with absolutely no status anywhere within the international regime, how confident are you that the regime will come back to normality, given that we are three years into this and there are people in America commenting that these guys could be in Guantanamo Bay for the rest of their lives? Chairman: You have a quarter of an hour to think about the answer! We will come back in 15 minutes and continue. The Committee suspended from 2.59 pm to 3.13 p.m. for a division in the House Q303 Chairman: Professor Sands, if you would answer Mr Illsley's question, thank you. Professor Sands: I do not want to be unduly optimistic nor do I want to be unduly starry-eyed about the state of international law or its prospects for resolving all the ills of the world, but there are strong signs that the all-out assault has failed. Whether you look at Senator McCain's efforts successfully to get the US to reengage with its obligations under the Torture Convention or whether you look at the rules governing the use of force, which were decided by the leaders of the world at the UN Summit in September 2005 as adequate to meet all of the changes that we presently face, including the United States, including - and it must have been rather painful for him to sign off on it - John Bolton signing the Millennium Outcomes document, I think what has concentrated minds is the recognition that if you abandon the rules you pay a significant price. The situation that we now face in Iraq is plainly worse than it would be if the rules had been followed and the present events in relation to Iran, which are beginning to concentrate the mind on the adequacy of the rules and the circumstances, if any, in which force can be used has, I think, brought even the Bush Administration back to a re-engagement with multilateralism, and even in the last 48 hours President Bush has said without excluding any other options we will go down the multilateral route of diplomacy, if we can, to sort out the Iran situation. The difficulty, of course, is that we heard precisely the same thing in relation to Iraq and we now know that whilst public words were being given on the diplomatic and multilateral route, privately other actions had already been decided upon. So there is a certain scepticism, but subject to that I think that there is a broad recognition that the rules generally serve a useful purpose and you pay a price if you abandon them. Q304 Mr Illsley: I came back from America yesterday and running over the weekend were comments by Senator Lugar, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who had called upon President Bush to negotiate directly with Iran, which might have prompted his comments on multilateral diplomacy. The Committee met with Lugar during its last visit to the USA and with Senator McCain and one of the things Senator McCain said to us was there has to be a process for Guantanamo, and he was taking the argument that whether it was the Geneva Convention or whether it is a new process there has to be a process to address this issue. Yet we are not seeing any progress in relation to that. I was wondering, given that in America now there are articles appearing and generals are being interviewed on TV setting out how many troops it would need to invade Iran and what the strategy would be for military strikes. So this is gathering momentum - and I hope this does not happen - and it looks as though in the future this type of ad hoc attack on other countries for regime change or whatever is likely to be the norm, rather than how we would expect a properly conducted war with declarations and so on, against a war against terrorism, and it is likely that this informal assault on the rules is going to continue for years to come. I take a pessimistic outlook towards it and I cannot see any end to it. Professor Sands: I am afraid I disagree very strongly with that view. If you look at the situation in Iran, what is going on in Iran, the allegation is that it is engaged in the production of nuclear material for the purposes of producing an atomic bomb. If that is the case - and facts obviously are central - it would be in violation of its obligations under the 1968 Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Imagine the scenario now in Tehran when Jack Straw or Condoleezza Rice or Tony Blair or George Bush tell the Iranians that they are not complying with their obligations under international law. The Iranians turn around and they say, "You have not been complying with your obligations in relation to Abu Ghraib, in relation to Guantanamo, in relation to the use of force in Iraq." What has happened is that the credibility of Britain and the United States has been significantly undermined and that is broadly recognised in both countries. There is, therefore, in both countries an effort - the right effort, I think - to re-engage. If you are going to have a go at other countries for breaking the rules you need yourself to be in a situation in which you can credibly say you are meting your international obligations. Regrettably that is not the situation and I fear that it will not be the situation until we have a change of government in both this country and in the United States because the credibility of both heads of governments has gone, because of what happened in the road to war in Iraq. In the meantime the central and crucial thing to do is to re-engage public trust and I think that is what Senator Lugar and Senator McCain are trying to do, and I think they are doing it pretty successfully and they are doing it off the back, also, of an effort by others who have been very senior in the Bush Administration, who have publicly stated that they consider, for example, that Vice President Cheney has violated the rules of international law such as he himself may be a war criminal. The highest authority to have done that is Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Chief of Staff of Colin Powell throughout the entirety of the first Bush Administration, and that leads me to the answer to your question, which is that the United States is a complex country in which political processes take time, but there has been a backlash against what has happened and there is now, I think, a concerted effort to reengage with its classical traditional position and marginalize those who say you can consign people to a legal black hole, you can use force against recalcitrant States and you can do X, Y and Z. So my reading is that the situation is changing, but I think it is absolutely right to be cautious about the state in which we find ourselves. Q305 Mr Pope: What happens when the international rules shortchange us? Intervention in Kosovo in the late 90s was probably illegal under international law but was certainly defensible morally, I would posit to you. So what happens when the rules are not good enough; the rules that were drawn up a long time ago are not fit for purpose in a modern world against failed States, rogue States. What is your view of that? Professor Sands: Assuming the assumption that underlies that question is right then obviously States and governments have a duty to reassess the adequacy of the rules. In the case of Kosovo it is probably right that the majority of international lawyers would have said that that use of force was contrary to international law. My own view is that there was a decent argument to be made in circumstances where mass atrocity is happening or is likely to be about to happen that States cannot sit idly by and do nothing when the Security Council fails to act. Interestingly, in the context of Kosovo after that conflict the Security Council did act and did adopt a resolution which, in the eyes of some, myself included, amounted to an ex post facto justification of the use of force. Of course that has not happened in the context of Iraq, but again very sadly because of the circumstances in which the war in Iraq was arrived at the emergent justification that States could use force to protect fundamental human rights in third countries where the Security Council does not react has been stopped in its tracks, and it is understandable why it has been stopped in its tracks because other countries around the world are highly sceptical, to speak frankly, of claims by large or middle-sized western powers that they are going to use human rights justifications to use force. So another price we have paid for Iraq, regrettably, is that it has made it much more difficult to justify the use of force in relation to Darfur or in relation to other places where a response is needed. Q306 Mr Pope: So if Tony Blair had been successful in getting a second resolution in the spring of 2003 it would have been legal? Professor Sands: Yes. Q307 Mr Pope: Are you saying that the determination of legality is whether or not we can persuade the French? Professor Sands: The determination of legality is simply whether or not we follow the rules. There are five permanent members of the Security Council; they are each entitled to exercise a veto and each has on different occasions, and it is part of the rules of the game that if one of the permanent members exercises a veto that is, according to the rules, the end of the matter. I happen to have spent some time reading very carefully the statement that President Chirac made, which was used to justify the claim that France would have vetoed a second resolution under any circumstances. He did not say that; he was very, very careful what he said. He dealt with the situation as it was in March 2003, namely on the basis of the facts then available there was no justification to authorise the use of force because there was no compelling evidence that Iraq was in further material breach. I have included further material in the book and from my perspective it would be entirely appropriate for this Committee to seek through its own methods to obtain some of that material because if I have seen it then certainly this Committee also ought to see it. But that material includes communications between the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister in which the Foreign Secretary recounts to the Prime Minister a telephone conversation with Colin Powell in which Colin Powell, coming to your question, says, "If there is insufficient evidence to get a second resolution then the US should not act unilaterally." That is the same answer that I have just given you and I think it is the right answer. Q308 Mr Pope: We can debate whether or not President Chirac said "never", which I think he did. Are you suggesting to the Committee that this, de facto, makes the Prime Minister a war criminal? Professor Sands: I think the war was illegal. I think the material that has been put into the public domain, in my book and in an article in The New York Times, makes it clear that the decision to go to war was taken before the United Nations' process was over. In those circumstances the Deputy Legal Adviser at the Foreign Office, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned, and in her resignation letter - which you will also find in the book - she makes it clear that the reason she felt compelled to resign was she could not contribute to the work of a government which was engaged on waging an illegal war that constituted the crime of aggression. In those circumstances it does indeed appear strongly arguable that those who prosecute an illegal war could be subject to investigation for the crime of aggression. Q309 Sandra Osborne: In relation to having a rules-based international law, that can only surely work if it is seen to be fit for purpose and reform of the United Nations is at best faltering, partly due to the influence of the United States. So what is your take on the capacity of the United Nations to deliver in the modern setting? Professor Sands: The United Nations was designed for a world as it was constructed in 1945, and I think as some of the questions of your colleagues have made clear the world has changed very significantly since 1945. There are far more States - there were only 51 States originally in 1945 and there are now about 200. There are malign non-State actors who are committed to doing very nasty things to lots of people around the world and the structure of international legal order was not really designed to deal with those types of entities. Over six decades the United Nations has evolved and last year the high level panel convened by the Secretary General of the United Nations, with the support of all the permanent members of the United Nations, produced a high level report which identified areas for political change in the structuring of the United Nations. Governments deliberated for about a year on that high level report and governments agreed on some of the changes that needed to take place, but they were not able to reach agreement on all of the changes and I think it would be wrong to identify any single permanent member or any single country as having been particularly problematic in those changes - the United States is a sovereign state, it is entitled to have its views and put them through the negotiating process; the Russians have their views, the Chinese have their views, Britain had its views, France had its views - but ultimately the changes which were adopted were regrettably very limited and I think insufficient to apply the changes that the Secretary General's high level panel required, particularly, for example, in relation to the question of a state's responsibility to protect. What do you do when a massive and fundamental violation of human rights is taking place in another country, do you stand by and do nothing at all? The high level panel came up with reasonably specific rules to try to move the UN rules along a little bit and State said, "No, we are not having that, we are basically satisfied with the rules as they are." So at the end of the day it is very easy, I think, to point the finger at the United Nations, but State members of the United Nations have the responsibility for making the changes and in their wisdom they have decided that they are going to stick more or less with the United Nations that they have, subject to a few changes, some of which are rather cosmetic. Q310 Sandra Osborne: We heard the view in the United States that because of that the UN in some ways could not be relied upon to take decisive action when that was necessary and that that situation could not continue. What would be your view on that? Professor Sands: I would agree with that view in the circumstances which are described in your question. The crucial issue is: who decides whether the rules are inadequate? That in essence was the problem with Iraq and the difference between Iraq and Kosovo. In Kosovo you had, broadly speaking, a decent coalition recognising that action was needed; in Iraq that did not exist and that de-legitimised what happened in Iraq. But coming back to the fundamental question: are the rules adequate to deal with the threats that we now face? My view is that they are adequate, that if the State finds itself in a situation in which a malign organisation, al Qaeda or some other entity, is assembling weapons of mass destruction, it does not have to wait until the Security Council has authorised the use of force; if it is threatened by the actual use of force it is entitled to use force in self-defence. So those rules remain adequate to deal with a changed situation. So it is the positive side of the rather amorphous nature of international law rules that they are sufficiently ambiguous to evolve with time to take into account new situations. They are not set in stone. Q311 Sandra Osborne: If that view was really put to us in relation to Iran and the Security Council's capacity to deal with that situation what would be your view of that, and could you see a situation where military action would be legal? Professor Sands: I think that is, with respect, a very important question. We are at the beginning of a process in which I think the first stage is to establish what the facts are. It appears, on the basis of what is already in the public domain, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency and Mr ElBaradei, that there is pretty strong evidence that Iran is engaged in an activity which is not consistent with its obligations under the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Assuming those facts are correct and assuming that Iran persists in its actions what is to happen? At the first stage we are in discussion right now of moving the debate to the Security Council and the Security Council has adopted a first declaration urging Iran to bring itself into compliance with its international obligations. You will note in particular that the Security Council was not able to reach agreement on a resolution - it is called a declaration - and part of the reason they could not reach agreement on a resolution which would have a binding effect was the concern of what had happened with Iraq. If you adopt a resolution one or two countries may then unilaterally say, "That entitles us to act in that particular way," and a number of countries were concerned that that should not happen again. Let us assume that after the declaration Iran does not bring itself into compliance what happens next? It goes back to the Security Council, the Security Council adopts, one assumes, a resolution, negotiations go on and ultimately a point may be reached in which there is a stalemate and in which the Security Council tells Iran what to do and Iran refuses. In those circumstances, which are some way down the line, the President of the United States has said that he does not exclude any options, including the use of force. I think it is premature to reach a firm view on what ought to happen in those circumstances but one can see two arguments. One argument is that when a State which is a party to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons violates its obligations and is found to be in violation by the Security Council, States are entitled to use force in self defence. That might be one view that could be put by the Bush Administration, adopting a particular interpretation of pre-emption. Another view would be that in those circumstances it is only for the international organisations concerned to act and that anything that falls short of a threatened use of force against an individual State or a group of States will not justify the use of force until it has been authorised by the Security Council, perhaps in association with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Judging by the statements of the Foreign Secretary he is rather hoping that in the coming months things will become clearer as to which of those two views are likely to emerge and dominate. Q312 Richard Younger-Ross: I wonder if you could talk a little about what I call "legal creep". You talked about the international laws being amorphous - moving - and you stated earlier that the US was trying to change international law and in some cases you have stated actually flagrantly breaching international law. How far do you think their actions have changed what is regarded as legitimate action? Professor Sands: I have talked a lot about the use of force; let me talk about another area of human rights. I wear two hats: I am an academic and I am a practising barrister and as a practising barrister most of my work involves acting for foreign States or European States so I get to work with a lot of governments. A number of governments in various parts of the world have said to me, at levels of Foreign Minister and President, "Since Britain and the United States now believe there is no problem of taking people off the streets and banging them up indefinitely, in circumstances which previously they had said would violate international law, we do not see why we cannot do the same thing." That it is the flipside of legal creep, if you like; it is that very regrettably two of the countries that have been most associated with a rules-based system have engaged in actions, one rather more directly than the other, which have tended to legitimise actions of other countries which are not consistent with international law obligations. So it has had that unfortunate effect. To put it in hard terms: if the United States is able to say unilaterally there is a new category of persons who are not criminals and who are not combatants but who fall into a legal black hole such that they can be locked up indefinitely, then other countries are going to do the same thing when they find individuals who are engaged in terrorist acts or alleged terrorist acts, and so a precedent has been set, which I think is a very unfortunate precedent, and that is why my understanding is that within the Foreign Office in particular there is a concerted effort alongside various elements in the State Department in the United States to get Britain and the US batting back with the international rules because of the unfortunate precedent that has been set. Q313 Richard Younger-Ross: You have spoken about it will change when the Bush Administration goes, you have spoken that there is hope for change when Blair eventually stands down, as he has told us he would. What other measures do you think will have to happen for us to get back to the protection of basic civil rights where you can walk along the street and not just be arbitrarily arrested? Professor Sands: I think one of the elements that has characterised this country rather differently from the United States - and I spend amounts of time in both countries so I have seen it at first hand - is there has been a very vibrant debate in Britain over the right balance or balance to be struck between security and fundamental rights, and it is always a difficult question and I think in Britain we can be pretty comfortable that the debate, including in this House, has ensured that a wide range of views have been put forward, and I think that is the heart in a democratic society of making sure that fundamental values, security and civil liberties are protected, and I think we have had that debate in Britain and we are continuing to have that debate in Britain. I have to say that it has not happened to the same extent in the United States and famously President Bush said, "If you are not with us you are against us," and that has tended to stifle political debate and political opposition and political challenge to things like the Patriots Act, and I think that has left the United States in a rather unhappier place than is Britain today. But I think that is the starting point and I feel rather proud as I go around the world with people recognising the extent to which there has been a full debate with a wide range of views being expressed, and that is the starting point - that is the heart of it, I think. Q314 Richard Younger-Ross: And the closure of places like Guantanamo Bay, the release of prisoners in Afghanistan, would also have to occur before we could move on? Professor Sands: I think Guantanamo should be closed down tomorrow. Guantanamo is terribly undermining of a legitimate effort to protect against a serious threat and it is being used mainly as an indication of the values that our societies purport to hold dear not being followed when their vital interests are at stake, and I think it has been terribly undermining in that sense. I recall here a statement made by the great American diplomat, George Kennan, who wrote a famous telex in 1947 from Moscow, where he was posted for the State Department, on the emergent Soviet threat, and he ended that telex by saying, "The greatest threat that can befall us as a nation is to become like those who seek to destroy us." I think that is what we have to keep our eye on, and I think pretty much we have been able to keep our eye on that in this country. Q315 Mr Maples: I sense a dichotomy in your view about two separate kinds of intervention, but I wonder if you could perhaps clarify it for me. You seem to say that on Kosovo, which I think most international lawyers, certainly at the time, would have said was illegal - certainly in 1980 would have said was illegal - we did it not only without a UN resolution but knowingly could not get one, but you say international law moves and humanitarian intervention moves and you are perfectly happy that the humanitarian consequences of not taking action there justified taking action, but in the case of intervention to prevent or pre-empt an attack on yourself you say the existing rules of self defence are enough. But clearly if Iraq had been - which I think is a matter of dispute, although I do not personally think it was - sponsoring international terrorism, or if it had, as most people believed, been developing nuclear weapons, then the rules of self defence surely would have extended to the point of intervention. If we had known that it was developing nuclear weapons are we saying that the rules of self-defence have not extended that far? Perhaps there is not a difference in your opinion here and I am imagining it, but the UN Charter says somewhere that except for Article 51 you cannot intervene in the internal affairs of another country, and you are saying that you can on humanitarian grounds but you cannot to prevent a nuclear attack on yourself. Professor Sands: I think that that is a very fair question. Can I just indicate my different view? I do not believe that in relation to nuclear weapons as of March 2003 the people who were in the know believed that Saddam's government was developing them, and I do not think that is in fact the case. But putting that on one side you have asked, I think, what is a very fair question and an important question. Classically there are two grounds to use force in international relations under international law: one, in self-defence, Articles 2(4) and 51 of the United Nations Charter; and, two, where authorised by the Security Council. In classic international law there is no third ground, but the United Nations Charter, when it was adopted in 1945, put into its preamble into Article 2 a commitment to protect fundamental human rights, which was in tension, if you like, with the fundamental sovereignty of each State - what happened if the State was violating its fundamental human rights of its nationals or of others internally? In those circumstances the classical rules of international law appeared to say that you could do nothing if the Security Council did not authorise you to act. Over a period of 50 years there have increasingly been calls by academics and by some States and by some governments to say that there is an emergent third circumstance in which the use of force would be justified. If a State is massively and systematically violating fundamental human rights, and if the Security Council has failed to act, then in those circumstances you cannot stand idly by and do nothing. I am supportive of that emergent third way, so to speak, in the development of international law rules but I recognise that States have not yet accepted unequivocally that there is such a right to use force, and crucially the issue, as with many of the issues, turns on the particular facts of the case in question, and in relation to the facts in question there is a second issue which is fundamental and that is credibility of motive. That, I think, is what links humanitarian intervention with self-defence. At the end of the day we are dependent on governments that regain the trust of their populations. If a Prime Minister or a President says, "This is the situation and this is why I have justified these actions" we want to believe that that is in fact the situation, and anything that undermines credibility and trust undermines the effectiveness of the rules-based system. Both in relation to use of force by means of self-defence if a third entity is developing weapons of mass destruction or humanitarian intervention the concern is that those justifications will be used in circumstances where the facts do not authorise them for ulterior motives, and that is the difficulty that we have. Q316 Mr Maples: That is one of the dangers of developing it. But it seems to me - and I come back to my point - that you are saying that Kosovo was perfectly legal, there was a humanitarian disaster - although I think 30 people had been killed in Kosovo by Milosovich's forces before we started bombing Serbia - but the possibility of a rogue State - and I think Iran probably falls into the category of rogue State by most of us by its issued threats to destroy another country, and most of us think it probably is developing nuclear weapons but we it will be very difficult ever to prove it - but it is okay to intervene after 30 people have been killed by some rogue security forces by a very unpleasant government like Serbia's, but it is not okay to intervene in Iran where we think maybe it is developing nuclear weapons which might kill millions of people. Similarly, I find it difficult to believe that international law cannot move to cover the so-called illegal combatants that the United States has got, mostly at Guantanamo. These are people who are not prisoners of war in the sense that they would be covered by the Geneva Conventions. They were mostly captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan (some were not but most were) and the idea that we can put all those people on trial in the civil courts in the United States seems to me to be totally impractical. First, there could be thousands of people in such a circumstance and, anyway, if you have arrested them who has got the evidence? You are not there like a policeman collecting criminal evidence. Surely international law must be able to move on these two issues as well. I am not saying that if you are in Guantanamo you are not entitled to have your human rights defended but I cannot see that international law cannot move to cover people who are neither prisoners of war covered by the Geneva Conventions nor criminals or subject to criminal charges in the normal sense, but can move on humanitarian intervention. Professor Sands: If I can deal first with your second question, classically you bifurcate. You either go down the criminal law route, which is what Britain did in relation to the IRA, rightly in my view, and do not elevate criminals into warrior status, or you treat them as warriors. Either way there are rules which govern their treatment. I do not believe there is a third category. The individuals who have not been wearing uniforms or distinctive signs or recognising the rules of war in armed conflict do not fall into a middle category. They are combatants who are acting illegally and they can be held as security detainees in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. You do not need a Guantanamo type of place to put them in. The rules are perfectly adequate already to deal with that situation and the Red Cross, as the guardian of the treaties, has made that absolutely clear, so I do not accept that there is a need for some sort of third category. The existing categories are clear. I would add also that I think a great mistake was made by the Bush administration but not by the Blair administration in characterising the response to 9/11 as a "war on terror". Having done that, they set aside the rules of criminal law but they also then recognised that the rules of armed conflict, humanitarian law, were inadequate and hence they had to create this third category and that is why they have got themselves into this difficult mess. The British Government does not use the concept of "war on terror" and it is one which is I think best avoided for all the reasons that have now become clear. In relation to your first question, I do not know, Chairman, whether there is time to deal with it. Chairman: Probably not. I am conscious of time. I have three of my colleagues who have indicated that they want to ask questions. I also have another witness waiting outside. I am in your hands. If people feel that there is something they really want to ask and they are going to be brief and ask one question, then I will take it. Otherwise I am going to conclude things. Q317 Mr Hamilton: Chairman, there were a few things I wanted to ask but I will stick to one. Can I follow up something you said about Iran and its membership of the Non-Proliferation Treaty to which it is a signatory? What happens in international legal terms if Iran withdraws unilaterally from the Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are they then outside the rules and there is nothing the United Nations or international law can do about their development of nuclear weapons? Professor Sands: They are limited by the rules of international law, including the treaty itself, as to the circumstances in which they can withdraw. I have not, I am afraid, looked at the withdrawal clauses of the treaty so to be able to answer your question in full, but in simple terms they cannot simply announce that with effect from tomorrow they are no longer parties to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. More significantly, in the most recent review conference, the 1995 Review Conference on the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, they transformed their undertaking not to develop nuclear weapons from a 30-year commitment to an indefinite commitment and that would have implications for the circumstances in which they could withdraw. But plainly you are right in this sense: states as sovereign entities are free to ratify treaties and, in accordance with the relevant rules, to opt out of them. Depending on whether opt-out is permitted, it may be that it is possible for them to withdraw, as North Korea did, from the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and that, of course, would leave them in a circumstance in which they would not be open to the criticism that they are not complying with their international legal obligations and would transform, I think, the nature of the legal debate as to what can be done to respond to that situation. Q318 Andrew Mackinlay: I want to take you back to your view, the way I understand it, which is in a sense that not only the United States but also Prime Minister Blair had committed themselves to regime change come hell or high water, as it were. It is an area which troubles me personally and all the people who voted for this. In the period just before it became clear that there was not going to be a second UN resolution I (and probably others here) met the Prime Minister with two other Members of Parliament and I put to him the question that if there was compliance - and by "compliance" I meant full disclosure, access and destroying weapons of mass destruction if they were there - would an invasion be avoided. He replied to me - and I remember it well because he referred to the President in first name terms; he referred to him as "George" - that he put this to the President of the United States, that if there was full compliance by Saddam there would be no invasion, and he told me that the President of the United States confirmed that was so. Why I put that to you is because that particular period was an important part of my life, as with everybody else here; we shall think about it till the day we die - our decisions, our dispositions. The Prime Minister made it clear to me that if there was compliance by Saddam there would be no invasion. That was both his desire and the undertaking given to him by the President of the United States. I wanted to put that to you because I really want to find out what you think about that. Professor Sands: The only material that I can direct you to, and indeed I would invite the committee to obtain a copy of it in order that it can inform its own view, is the memorandum of 31 January 2003 describing the meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. The New York Times has described it as a five-page memorandum. The President says in express terms that irrespective of what the inspectors find the war will begin on 10 March 2003, irrespective of whether there is a second resolution, and the Prime Minister says, and I quote, that "he was solidly with the President and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam". On that basis it appears that the Prime Minister's statement to you was inconsistent with what he told the President of the United States on 31 January 2003. Q319 Ms Stuart: Feel free to say, "I will drop you a note on that" because I genuinely want to take you back to your undergraduate days when you did Kelsen and Grundnorm, and what you said about this emerging third way for the application of the force. Can you think of another way, which will be a kind of accepted third application of the force other than an example where a country will go ahead and break the rules but is successful and then we come and accept it, in the current way the UN is structured such that we will get to a sensible set of rules which will define the right of intervention, and I use as an example Zimbabwe, and I am happy if you just drop us a note? Professor Sands: You have raised, obviously, a hugely important and significant question. I just come back to what I said before: the law is moving in a particular direction. The crucial issue is, what are the circumstances in which that is justified and, most centrally, how can we be satisfied that motives for action are genuinely what the proponents for action say they are, but I will certainly drop you a note. Chairman: Professor Sands, thank you very much for coming along. We have covered an enormous area in quite a short time and we are grateful to you. Witness: Sir Christopher Meyer KCMG, gave evidence. Q320 Chairman: Sir Christopher, thank you for coming this afternoon. I apologise first of all for keeping you waiting but we had a division which extended the period of the previous session and we also had to conclude all the questions we had. I also apologise in advance that I think we are about to have another vote which will potentially mean that we will have to break for 15 minutes and come back, but hopefully we can at least begin before that vote and then take it from there. We have a number of areas we would like to ask you about and I would like to begin by taking you to your assessment of your time in Washington, the relationship between the UK and the US and what influence we have as a country on the United States. Sir Christopher Meyer: Thank you, Chairman, for inviting me to this session this afternoon. It is a great pleasure to be here. I think that the United Kingdom can have and does have quite significant influence over the conduct of American foreign policy. If you look at the history, "special relationship" as a term came into being some time in the Second World War, and if you look at its "history" you will see many ups and downs from the British point of view. The ups tend to be at a time when we have been able to exercise really quite significant influence over the making of American foreign policy. If the issues are well chosen, if the case is made strongly, this can be done. The world's only superpower can be significantly influenced by countries and governments that are physically, if you like, significantly inferior to the US. Q321 Chairman: Peter Riddell's book is called Hug Them Close, and he talks about every Prime Minister except one, Edward Heath, having worked on a strategy of having as close a relationship with the US as possible and that every British Government since World War II had always operated on that basis with that one exception. Do you think the relationship is closer now than it has been in the past or would that be a fair assessment, that all governments except the one have had that close relationship? Sir Christopher Meyer: I think it has been a history since 1945, as I said, of quite considerable ups and downs. These have had almost nothing to do with whichever political party is in power in Washington or in London. They have had everything to do with personalities and the issues of the moment. For example, this may not be quite the answer to your question, but John Major had a very close relationship with George Bush senior and a rather distant relationship with Bill Clinton. Q322 Chairman: There were reasons for that, were there not? Sir Christopher Meyer: There always are reasons, Chairman. Q323 Chairman: It was the Intelligence Services checking files, if I remember correctly. Sir Christopher Meyer: Yes, but that actually was untrue. It was a bum rap, to be perfectly honest. I happened to be in Downing Street as Press Secretary at the time so I sort of knew what was going on, but it was believed on the other side of the Atlantic and that was all that mattered really. LBJ's memoirs and the tape recordings of his conversations, which have been published as books, I think at one point show his antipathy not only to Harold Wilson but also to Harold Wilson's pipe, which was ironic because I believe that Harold Wilson did not usually smoke a pipe and preferred a cigar, so there you go. It is much more uneven, I think, than the mythology (is that the right word?) of the relationship might have you believe. Q324 Mr Horam: One point you make in your book is that although we have a common language with the United States we should not imagine for one moment that it is a similar sort of country; in fact, it is remarkably different, and you make a lot of the exceptionalism of the United States and its sense of destiny and of its own values. How far has that been apparent in its conduct of foreign policy under the Bush administration? Sir Christopher Meyer: I think it has been very apparent and it is one of the ways in which you can measure the differences between the two sides of the Atlantic. For example, if you look historically at American foreign policy you can very crudely speaking divide it into periods when the so-called idealists - Woodrow Wilson, for example - gained the ascendancy and when the realists, the pragmatists, gained the ascendancy, which was most of the time. When I say "idealists" I talk about either a foreign policy infused with a very high degree of moralism or a foreign policy infused with a very high degree of religiosity. The latter has, I think, been very much apparent during the two administrations of George W Bush. That is incredibly different from the European tradition of foreign policy generally and the British tradition of foreign policy in particular. When people talk about the new Conservative influence on American foreign policy today or that of Christian evangelism/fundamentalism, it is another way of saying that under George W Bush, at least in his first administration - I would make a difference for the second administration - there has been a distilled form of the idealist tradition of American foreign policy which has been there since the foundation of the republic. It means that the centre of gravity in American foreign policy since the foundation of the republic has been far more towards idealism, messianism, religiosity, whatever phrase you like to choose to include in that. Q325 Mr Horam: Is intervention included in that? Sir Christopher Meyer: It can well be, yes. Monroe doctrine has got some relevance to this. It is very different. It is not axiomatic, to put it mildly, therefore, that in viewing the world as a whole the United Kingdom's views and interests will automatically coincide with those of the United States. Sometimes they will; sometimes they will not. Q326 Mr Heathcoat-Amory: President Bush came into office with great doubts about nation building, but then, because of 9/11 and other events, he attacked Iraq because of a perceived threat. Added to that he now seems to be developing a doctrine of building democracy on the ground that democratic states are not a threat to their neighbours. What is this new Bush doctrine? What are the rules? What guide is it to future decisions about whether to intervene or not and on what grounds and where and when? Sir Christopher Meyer: I think it is a very rough and ready benchmark by which the detail of American foreign policy can be assessed and judged. From the very first time that I met George W Bush, and I am talking personally now about the President, which was back in 1998 when he was Governor of Texas, it was quite clear that as he was starting to think about what he would do in the world if he were to run for President. The notion of being a beacon, a progenitor of democracy around the world was already becoming very attractive to him and that developed when he became President. Although great play is made of this in the most recent National Security Strategy published a few weeks ago, I do not think there is novelty in it, and in a sense, where Afghanistan and Iraq were concerned, the democratic impulse for the President personally was almost as strong as his reaction to the horror of 9/11. In fact, the one thing, if you like, pumped up the other. Today, which is, if you like, the third phase of Bush foreign policy, the first being up to 9/11, the second being from 9/11 to roughly the end of the first administration, the third being approximately the second administration, looks to me like a foreign policy which is wrapped in the rhetoric of spreading democracy around the world where possible with the execution of this policy in the hands of Condoleeza Rice who is much more of a throwback to the realist/pragmatic tradition of US foreign policy. Q327 Mr Heathcoat-Amory: Do you think that American power is now in decline and do you think there is a risk that President Bush's real legacy will be a reluctance on the part of a future American Government to do all this again? In other words, although we supported the Americans, - or I did; I supported the Americans to keep them engaged in the world - actually the failures in Iraq will have the opposite effect and there could be a retreat into American isolationism, as, of course, has happened several times in the past? Sir Christopher Meyer: As far as Iraq is concerned the game has yet to be fully played out and it looks extremely depressing, it looks pretty negative, and it may well be that the whole enterprise will end severely in tears. That is what a betting man would say now. It is not necessarily what will have happened five years from now, so the game is not yet over and it may well be that the next American President, towards the end of his or her Presidency, may be able to say, looking back, "We went through a horrible period but in the end the thing worked out reasonably well". I am not sure that I believe that is what will happen but it could happen. The lessons to be drawn from this episode by both the American people and the American political class are not yet fully formed. You say isolationism. I do not believe in any circumstances there will be a relapse, as you put it, into isolationism because the challenge in dealing with the United States is not the fear that it will become isolationist. It is the degree to which it will act unilaterally or not, unilaterally or with allies, be they formal or informal. The United States is too much involved in the world, in globalisation. In some ways it has created globalisation. Whether we are talking economically, technologically or culturally it is interwoven into the fabric of the world as a whole, so even if you get up in Congress and say, "Let us cut these links here and those links there", it cannot work. It cannot work in a world where China holds the largest amount of American debt. It simply cannot work in a world where American foreign direct investment last time I looked was more focused in Europe than in any other area of the world. It is not possible any longer to be isolationist. I do not know exactly what military conclusion they may draw from the episode in Iraq and in Afghanistan but more generally there is no question of the United States being able to shut the frontiers, bring down the shutters and become autarchic once again, as I suppose they were in the 19th century. Q328 Sir John Stanley: Sir Christopher, Philippe Sands, who has just been giving evidence to us, on page 272 of his book says that on 31 January 2003 President Bush and Prime Minister Blair had a two-hour meeting at the White House accompanied by six close aides and advisers. For the record could you tell us whether you were one of the aides and advisers present at that meeting? Sir Christopher Meyer: No, I was not. I was in an anteroom shooting the breeze with other members of the British and American delegations. Q329 Sir John Stanley: Thank you. He goes on to say that the note of the meeting in the form of a letter, and I quote, "confirms that the decision to go to war had already been taken by President Bush". Could you tell the committee, from where you were as our Ambassador in Washington, at what point you believe Mr Blair made a firm commitment to be with Mr Bush should Mr Bush decide to invade Iraq? Sir Christopher Meyer: If I can just give a bit of context as I saw it for the meeting on 31 January 2003, I had said to London first that I thought the atmosphere had changed markedly towards war after the Iraqi declaration of 7 December in which they responded to the UN's request to make a full declaration of their holdings of weapons of mass destruction, because that declaration was considered to be, rightly or wrongly, so mendacious that the Iraqis had run out of rope, if you like. The next very important stage was two days before that meeting of 31 January. On 29 January the President gave his State of the Union speech and after that I remember thinking and so telling London that I thought that if the President had given himself any wiggle room for not going to war he had closed that off in that speech. It was a very powerful, almost missionary statement about it being America's destiny to deal with Saddam and it looked pretty clear that this was going to be war. By the time that Tony Blair came to the meeting on 31 January I was saying that, absent a coup in Iraq or Saddam suddenly deciding to go off into exile in some hospitable place like Minsk, the die was cast for war and therefore the Prime Minister's main objective for that meeting should be to ensure that in the coming war we went into battle, if you like, in the best company possible, which is another way of saying, "Let us get a second resolution". Q330 Sir John Stanley: That does not answer my question. Could I put it to you again? At what point do you believe Mr Blair was firmly committed to going to war with President Bush? Sir Christopher Meyer: The way I would put it would be like this. I think Tony Blair had made a decision to support George Bush, however the cards fell, from the Crawford Summit of April 2002. This is a distinction I make in my book. This was not a decision in April 2002 at Crawford to go to war on such-and-such a date. It was not an operational decision, but Blair had decided that the right thing to do, given his own view of Saddam Hussein, was to be with the President of the United States whatever decision he chose to take. That was a decision by Blair, I think, taken to try to ensure that he had the maximum influence possible over the President. This is a very important distinction because the criticism has been levelled at both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair that from a very early stage in 2002 they had decided, come what may, that they were going to go to war against Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003. I do not think that is true because the consequence of that is that everything that then followed in 2002, including the efforts of the United Nations, would have been simply a smokescreen for a devious plan, if you like. I do not believe that to be true. I do not believe the two leaders lied to their respective public opinions. I do believe though that they were very doubtful that Saddam would ever do the right thing and that probably it would come to war, but we did not get to the moment of truth until early 2003. Q331 Sir John Stanley: But you are saying to the committee that, from the Crawford Summit onwards, if President Bush had decided subsequently to go to war he had been assured by Mr Blair that the British would be with him? Sir Christopher Meyer: I cannot say to you, Sir John, that those were the words used because, as you will probably be aware, at Crawford the Prime Minister and the President were locked together, without any advisers being there, for quite a considerable period of time, and to the best of my recollection advisers were there only for a discussion of the Middle East because running in parallel to all this was an intifada that seemed to be running out of control, so I do not know exactly what transpired between President and Prime Minister, but the speech that the Prime Minister made the next day at College Station, which was one of the best speeches he made on Iraq, sounded to me like a statement of very strong support for the President, whatever he chose to do. Do not forget that, going back to 1998, Blair had been making speeches long before George W Bush came on the scene, recognising the threat that Saddam presented to the world at large and saying, "We have to deal with this man one way or another", so Blair was always a true believer in dealing with Saddam "one way or another" long before George W became President of the United States. Q332 Mr Keetch: Just to continue this if we can, Sir Christopher, you said that you did not believe that the events of late 2002 in the UN were a smokescreen, but, again going back to the memo that we have been told about on 31 January, it is also alleged in that memo that President Bush actually set the date for the war as being 10 March 2003. Therefore, if what had happened in 2002 was not a smokescreen, was the attempt to get a second resolution and to persuade President Chirac to agree to a second resolution a smokescreen, because if it was the case that the March date had been set for the conflict, going back to the UN in a sense was a pointless exercise? Sir Christopher Meyer: You cannot quite put it like that. Q333 Mr Keetch: How can you put it? Sir Christopher Meyer: The thing is, when you are looking back with the benefit of hindsight it does look like a straight linear progression which ends up with war beginning on 20 March. It was not like that; at least, it did not seem like that to me. Maybe I was too close to the action. There seemed to be a lot of zigging and zagging, so from the period, say, some time in October 2002 onwards until the time I left Washington I heard all kinds of dates for contingency planning. For a long time people were saying to us, "It is going to be" - I cannot remember the exact date - "January the something-or-other 2003. That is the contingency date against which we are doing our planning." That timing collapsed for a variety of reasons, including that they could not get the Turks to agree to let one of the American divisions transit Turkish territory. Then at the beginning of 2003 I remember one time hearing mid February, then late February, and I thought, "That is getting damn near my birthday", and then March, and 10 March appears as a date in that record of the meeting on 31 January, and then in the end it was 20 March. The issue is not the fact that dates specifically were being discussed that makes it seem that what followed was just a smokescreen. The question I think has to be a different one. If, against all odds, a majority of the members of the Security Council were prepared to go for a second resolution, or a majority were prepared to countenance war, say, in April or something like that, it might have changed the game. In the event all the diplomatic efforts to get members of the Security Council on board for a second resolution foundered, for well-known reasons, so that eventuality never happened. I do not think it is as clear-cut as you suggested in your question. Q334 Mr Keetch: Let me ask one other question. Again, Philippe Sands suggested to us earlier this afternoon that when the decision to go to war was taken during those early months of 2003 the Prime Minister and the President no longer believed that Saddam Hussein probably had a WMD programme and no longer believed that he was therefore a threat to us. Did you believe at that stage that he had a WMD programme and did you think that the Prime Minister believed that? Sir Christopher Meyer: Oh yes, I do believe that the Prime Minister thought he had a WMD programme. I believed that he had a WMD programme. I did so not on a hunch but on the basis of intelligence that I was seeing at the time. Of course, depending on whether we are talking about January or February 2003, Blix by that time had got cracking on his inspections and I think made two reports to the Security Council before war intervened. I do not think I am breaking some state secret in saying that in some of the locations where he looked for WMD he was directed there by intelligence fed to him either by the Americans or by us, and so this was being done not on the basis, "By God, the stuff is not there", but, "We think it is there and we think it is there", and then Blix did not find it. What we did not know at the time was whether this because Blix was using the intelligence slowly or poorly or not or whether it was because the Iraqis had been tipped off and were moving the stuff to another location. None of that was clear, so if that is what Philippe Sands said to you beforehand I do not think I would agree with that. I think there was a strong belief at the time that there were weapons of mass destruction somewhere and it was not until the Iraq Survey Group came back with its report in September 2004 that you had a pretty definitive statement that if there had been stuff around it was probably buried in the sand somewhere, or might be in Syria, or even, conceivably, in Iran. Q335 Chairman: Perhaps I can say for the record that in my understanding of what Phillipe Sands said he was referring to nuclear weapons. I do not think he referred to WMD, and your question referred to WMD. Sir Christopher Meyer: There is a big difference. Chairman: I think we ought to get that clear. He did not deal with chemical weapons. Q336 Mr Heathcoat-Amory: He was talking about nuclear weapons. Sir Christopher Meyer: Can I make a very brief postscript? On nukes, if I remember well, we were not at all sure if there was any evidence around of something actual in the pipeline, as it were, as is happening in Iran, but it was biological and chemical weapons which were the focus of attention. Q337 Mr Pope: I want to be clear about this point because you obviously had privileged access to the Prime Minister in the spring of 2003, you had privileged access to intelligence data. Do you think the Prime Minister deliberately misled the House in his speech on 18 March? Sir Christopher Meyer: Absolutely not. Q338 Mr Pope: It is very helpful to have that on the record. I want to follow on from something that Sir John said, and this was about British influence in the run-up to the war. You suggested that Tony Blair effectively said to President Bush at Crawford, "We will be with you, come what may". "However the cards fall" was how you characterised it. Do you think we made the most of our influence and leverage from April 2002 onwards? Do you think that it was a result of British influence that America sought a second resolution? Sir Christopher Meyer: To answer your second question first, the Americans were being pressed not only by us but also by Aznar, the Spanish Prime Minister, the Australian Prime Minister, Howard, and I think even by Berlusconi. All of them said, "We need a second resolution", so there was stuff coming in from all sides and these were the essential allies for Bush when it was a question of going to war. The Americans were never keen on a second resolution, for well-known reasons, but I think they made a judgment that because their essential allies for the operation wanted one then they would make the effort and, although it was not clear at the press conference on 31 January 2003 that Bush was at all keen on pursuing it, actually the Americans did put their shoulder to the wheel afterwards, and the irony of it all was that, having finally put their shoulder to their wheel, they got absolutely nowhere with anybody, even in their own back yard in South America with the Chileans and the Mexicans. I cannot remember what your first question was. Q339 Mr Pope: Do you think war would have been sooner if it had not been for Blair and the other allies, such as Aznar and Howard? Sir Christopher Meyer: I do not think it would have been sooner. When the notion of January was floating around in Washington, which was for most of the autumn of 2002, I remember talking to somebody, whom I really do not want to name, who was fairly senior in the White House, and I think I had this conversation in October 2002, about this January timing, and the answer I got was, "It is going to slip", and the reason given then was Turkey. I think it is no secret that when the Prime Minister came to Washington in January 2003 one of the things that he was keen to have was a delay in the start to the war. At the time there was a February date floating around in the air. In the end the February date slipped, not because of Blair's advocacy or anybody else's, but because the American forces simply were not ready, and I think 20 March became the date because we had not got anywhere with the second resolution and the guys were ready to go. The Committee suspended from 4.25 pm to 4.39 pm for a division in the House Q340 Richard Younger-Ross: During your discussions in the time you were in Washington can you give us any light on what discussions you were aware of or what preparation was being made or what joint meetings were being set up on what to do in Iraq post-conflict? Sir Christopher Meyer: Yes. My recollection of that is that not a lot was going on to discuss Iraq post-conflict. It was clear from Crawford, roughly around that time onwards, that the Americans were not devoting a great deal of attention to what would follow. Towards the end of 2002 I remember two Foreign Office (or they may have been interdepartmental) delegations from Whitehall coming over to talk about what was going to happen if and when there was war and Saddam was removed. The difficulty they had, and I cannot give you exact dates because I cannot remember; it was something like November/December, or it might even have been October, was that there was not a united position on the American side in the bureaucracy on post-war, and so they found themselves talking separately to the State Department and then to the Ministry of Defence. By the time I retired from Washington and from the Service it did not seem t me that that kind of discussion had got very far. Q341 Richard Younger-Ross: Are you aware that there was a meeting which the Americans organised in a hotel in Cobham of Iraqi dissidents? Sir Christopher Meyer: What I was aware of, and this is a slightly different thing, is this. Post-Iraq: what actually are we talking about here? If we are talking about an agreed plan on what to do on Saddam-toppled-day plus one, plus two, plus three, that did not seem to have been worked out between the British and the Americans. On the question of the Iraqi opposition, during most of 2002 I was aware of a conflict within the US administration over whether Challabi and the INC were worth supporting or not. There was talk all the way through the early summer of 2002 of getting together a conference of Iraqi dissident groups, which would include the INC but not only the INC, and this seemed to have broken down on rivalries between the INC and the other groups whose names I cannot remember, and on at that time a very intense, almost internecine warfare between the Department of Defence and the State Department. I do not remember a meeting in Cobham but it sounds to me like some kind of offshoot of those rather abortive discussions that were going on inside the administration. Q342 Richard Younger-Ross: It was broadcast as a secret location and a secret meeting but from the exterior shot of the hotel it was quite clear where it was to anyone who has ever driven down the A3. If I can go on from that, Challabi was seen as promoted by a number of those within the US. Did we have a view on his worth? Were we keyed into the information he was giving, both in terms of what should happen post-conflict, but also the information it is alleged he gave regarding weapons of mass destruction? Sir Christopher Meyer: I was told by the Foreign Office that they did not hold the INC in high regard. They held Challabi and the INC in low regard, much like the State Department did and, as far as I remember, much as the CIA did. I have to say that this is why, and I think I have made this clear elsewhere, I did not fully take on board the influence of Challabi on the US administration other than the State Department until I had left Washington. I was aware he was around. I knew the INC were very active, but what I had not fully appreciated was for how long and how assiduously Challabi had cultivated the Republican Party in Washington. I believe that he modelled his campaign on that of the African National Congress which had a good deal of success in another decade in working on the US administration to come round and support them. It was only later when I was talking to people in Washington after I had left the Service that I came to understand how successful he had been at getting over to the Republican administration the notion that post-Saddam was not going to be all that difficult: you just turned up, you got rid of him, Iraq was ripe for revolution and upset, the British and American forces would be welcomed as heroes in the streets of Baghdad and Basra, and off you would go. He and his party were very largely responsible for convincing the Americans that that was what would happen after Saddam fell, and, of course, it was not like that at all. Q343 Richard Younger-Ross: So indirectly you are saying that Challabi was responsible for the US and British failure to deal with the post-conflict period? Sir Christopher Meyer: Forgive me for saying so but I think it is a little bit simplistic to say that because there were plenty of other voices in Washington and London who were arguing the contrary. The powers that be, or the powers that were, in both Washington and London took the view that they took. There was a very strong feeling that it was not going to be particularly difficult after Saddam fell. Philippe Sands may have mentioned this when he came in the earlier session but the minute of the meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair on 31 January 2003, which fell off the back of somebody's lorry into his hands and into his book, records the Prime Minister and the President agreeing that the likelihood of civil war after the fall of Saddam was remote, and certainly on the American side that was in large part down to the advice that they were getting from the INC. Q344 Chairman: I want to take up one little point coming out of that. You said that you were not aware of much work being done post-conflict. I was at a conference in Stockholm in late 2002 where a leading American said that there were 22 studies going on within the State Department about post-conflict Iraq. Is it true that that was the case? Were you aware of those studies, or is it that the Pentagon basically took over and therefore all the studies that the State Department were running were irrelevant? Sir Christopher Meyer: We were well aware of this work that was going on. I do not want to be misunderstood here. We knew the State Department was working on this stuff and working on it hard. I think their opposite numbers in the Foreign Office were doing the same thing. All the Middle East hands who knew Iraq well were doing the same thing for Jack Straw, and indeed some of that emerges from some of the other papers that have been leaked about Foreign Office attitudes in the spring of 2002 before Crawford, so we were aware that all this work was going on but what was not happening, at least in my time, was the ability of a British team to come to Washington and find a consolidated US team on the other side who were agreed on what was to be done afterwards. Q345 Chairman: Is that not a usual US problem? At the moment there seem to be very different views within the administration about this. Sir Christopher Meyer: It is both the great glory and the great defect of the American system that you have these ferocious internecine battles between different departments in Washington and you either regard it as constructive tension which actually produces a rather good policy or you do not. I think in this case it was the latter because in the end the whole bang shoot was given by the President to Don Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks to sort out, as Bob Woodward in his book has recorded so vividly. Q346 Mr Purchase: President Bush set out his doctrine of military pre-emption, saying that the USA would not hesitate to act alone if necessary in the interests of national security. Taking you back to your part and that of your fellow advisers from Number 10 and the Foreign Office, can you recall what the thrust of advice was that you gave to Prime Minister Blair in regard to ultimately the attack on Saddam Hussein in Iraq? Can you remember what the general thrust was? We know of one departure from the Foreign Office staff of a high-ranking official who said, "In the absence of a second resolution I cannot continue to serve". Was there anyone seriously demurring from the idea of attacking in your lot, if you like? Sir Christopher Meyer: In my lot? I tell you what I thought personally. I was not aware of any dissidence, certainly in the embassy in Washington, although there was ----- Q347 Mr Purchase: Do you by mean people who were against? Sir Christopher Meyer: I mean by people who were against the notion of going to war ----- Q348 Mr Purchase: They were all in favour? Sir Christopher Meyer: As far as I was aware everybody in my team in Washington was working, as they were expected to do, to keep London properly informed on what was moving in the American administration and where necessary to try to persuade the Americans to do the things that we wanted them to do or not to do things that we did not want them to do, the traditional diplomatic function, and nobody came to my office and said, "Christopher, I do not think I can do this because I do not agree". That never happened. I personally was in favour of getting rid of Saddam but, if you like, for non-neo-Con reasons because I thought that we should have called him to account early in 1999 after the first generation of inspectors, UNSCOM, were forced to leave because he would not let them do their job properly. I was always for that, not for reasons of messianic democracy or weapons of mass destruction or even 9/11; you did not need any of that stuff to justify making a case against Saddam. That was where I came from and I knew the lawyers were fighting like ferrets in a sack over this: what would actually justify an attack on Saddam, and as I am no lawyer I found myself persuaded by the argument that Saddam, having been in violation of God knows how many Security Council resolutions and the basic ceasefire of 1991, thoroughly deserved to be removed if he did not come into compliance with all this stuff. That was where I came from. I think most people in the embassy did as well. Q349 Mr Purchase: So we can establish just for the record that the general thrust of opinion was to support an attack? Sir Christopher Meyer: Yes. Q350 Mr Purchase: May I move on very quickly to a second point and that is that you mentioned earlier globalisation in response to my colleague who asked about whether America would retreat into isolationism. I agree with you entirely that globalisation, American interests, now make that almost a non-starter, but it also seems to be the basis on which there has been a growth in terrorism. The spread of American culture, the spread of American business seem to have coincided - and it may be coincidental - absolutely with the rise and rise of terrorism. Is there anything the Americans can do that would persuade the world in general that globalisation, the appetite of capitalism to spread, is a good thing rather than a bad thing, and thereby reduce the level of terrorism that we experience presently? Sir Christopher Meyer: That is a huge question. Q351 Mr Purchase: I am a fairly large chap! Sir Christopher Meyer: I find it quite hard to know where to start on that. Q352 Mr Purchase: Are the two things connected? Sir Christopher Meyer: Yes, they are connected, but I do think we need to be extremely careful about talking about wars on terrorism or global terrorism as if you have thesis/antithesis: you have globalisation driven to a large extent by American capitalism here and growing global terrorism on that side spurred on by what is going on here, a Coca-Cola there, terrorism here sort of thing. I do not think it is like that at all. I think the genesis of the Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda business is actually quite narrowly based in its origins on the presence of American troops on Saudi soil. That is what got him going. Having been in Sudan, he moves off to Afghanistan because they have given him, if you like, safe haven to do what he is doing. I do not like the "war on terrorism". I think you have to be a little bit careful about this. If you look at al Qaeda it is a bit like - and I hope he will not sue me for saying this - Richard Branson's Virgin. Virgin is a kind of worldwide franchise. You have the headquarters and then you have Virgin Airlines, Virgin Railways, Virgin Cola, Virgin telephones. You have got Osama bin Laden but it is a decentralised system. You have Osama bin Laden now sitting somewhere or other - I do not know - in Tora Bora, maybe, and he has this thing called al Qaeda. I think it is a highly decentralised system of terrorism. You do not have this guy sitting in a cave running the business like a global monolith. Q353 Mr Purchase: He does have access to internet there. Sir Christopher Meyer: Internet helps, obviously, but the internet, of course, can be intercepted, as mobile phones can be. I am not an expert on terrorism but I am very persuaded by those who say, "Hang on a minute. You have got the al Qaeda brand. It is used by all kinds of people round the world, such as in the UK and Madrid terrorist outrages, but that is a different thing from saying it is centrally controlled and planned". I think this has all kinds of implications not only for the way in which you tackle terrorism but also the way in which you link it to your foreign policy priorities. Q354 Andrew Mackinlay: We all accept that intelligence is flawed and it is not an exact science and so on, but are you, looking back now, shocked, horrified, surprised or whatever, at how totally wrong the critical intelligence was on Iraq and/or, if you were still in service and were asked to make recommendations, would there be anything you would be saying has really got to be done to avoid a repetition of what was a cataclysmic failure of intelligence, I would have thought? You may not agree. You have been in Number 10. You have been a mainstream diplomat. How do you look at this now in retrospect? Sir Christopher Meyer: I am not entirely sure, and this goes back to an earlier answer I gave you, that the intelligence was entirely wrong. If you take Colin Powell's presentation at the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003, a lot of what he put out there has now been demonstrated to have been wrong, and Heaven knows he worked extremely hard on the raw material he was given to be disciplined about it. If we boil this down to, were there supplies of biological and chemical weapons, were there the laboratories there to manufacture the stuff, did Saddam intend to resume further manufacture once loosening the sanctions regime made this possible, and my God, it was loosening very fast, I think the answer is yes because the Iraq Survey Group, although it came back at the end of 2004 and said, "We cannot find a piece of WMD anywhere", and that got the headlines, it did also say, "But, my God, all the mechanisms and protocols are there to resume production as soon as the sanctions are either lifted or have become porous enough to let the Iraqis import the stuff", so I am not convinced that somewhere in a garage in Damascus or under a hill in Iran there is not some of the stuff that the intelligence picked up as being in Iraq. I think the verdict is not yet final, and I have said before that from my own point of view you did not actually need the physical presence of WMD to justify getting rid of Saddam. Q355 Andrew Mackinlay: Why did you mention Iran? Probably I have been asleep on this but I am surprised that you think it is even conceivable that there was this linkage with Iran when the history is one of anathema. Sir Christopher Meyer: I know. You are absolutely right about that, but there is one curious episode from the 1991 war which I have never had explained to me satisfactorily, which was when the entire Iraqi Air Force decamped to Iran so it would not be destroyed by the Americans. It is, I think, still there, is it not? Q356 Chairman: It is still there. Sir Christopher Meyer: So why on earth, unless, I suppose, all the pilots were --- Shia were better pilots than Sunni. I do not know. I do not know what the reason is but I think the politics of the region are so entangled and in some ways mysterious that --- like you, I thought, "What the hell is going on here?", but it is a fact of history that the Iraqi Air Force was flown to Iran for safekeeping and they have been fighting the devils for ten years. That is why I think there is more to this than meets the eye. Q357 Andrew Mackinlay: Can we invite your observations on where we are on Iran? Sir Christopher Meyer: We are in an unbelievably tight spot on Iran. It is really an intractable problem. I would be prepared to bet a lot of money that, even if the Iranians hold to their present position of insisting on being able to enrich uranium, denying access to the IAEA inspectors and all this, taking a really hard line, there will never be voted in the Security Council serious sanctions against them. I just do not think that Russia and China would be prepared to countenance this. I also think that efforts by the Europeans to broker some kind of deal, the four-power thing, is destined to go nowhere at all. Basically, the Iranians do not care about the Europeans. Q358 Andrew Mackinlay: Bush does what then? Sir Christopher Meyer: Ah! The one peaceful thing, if you like, the one non-military thing that has not been tried yet in dealing with Iran is intensive diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Iran. That is one piece that has not been put into the jigsaw. The Americans find themselves between a rock and hard place because on the one hand you have got Halizad, the Farsi-speaking, Afghan-born American Ambassador in Baghdad quietly talking to the Iranians to get them to soft-pedal on support for Shia insurgency, at least among those Shia who are pro-Iranian, and then you have got the stuff going on over nuclear enrichment, and then you have got a State Department programme, I think $75 million worth of cash, which is supposed to be paid into beaming TV and what-not into Iran to try and drive a wedge between the Iranian people and their leaders. If you are going to bomb the bejesus out of Iran you are not going to drive a wedge between the Iranian people and their leaders when you bring them together again, so there is incoherence everywhere and I think a completely different tack needs to be taken with Iran than is being taken now. Q359 Mr Maples: We have had, during the period when all this has been going on and you have been covering in your evidence, quite a long shopping list with the United States which we seem to be very unsuccessful at getting met. The ITAR waiver, which must have been on the agenda every time I have been to Washington for the last ten years, now that JSAF have a second engine on it, the steel tariffs, the extradition treaty, and some more things I have written down here, the Transatlantic Air Services Agreement; there is a whole load of things here. I am not a supporter of this Government but nobody could have gone more out of their way to their own domestic political cost to support the United States than Blair has over the last few years. Why is it so difficult for us to get any of this? Are they taking us for granted? Is there a genuine block between the White House and Capitol Hill? What do you read as the difficulty? Presumably you addressed a lot of these issues when you were there. Why is it so difficult to get any quid for our quo? Sir Christopher Meyer: It is always difficult to get a quid for our quo with the United States, however good the political relationship is, because quite often the forces aligned against are, in American political terms, extremely powerful, and you really have to go in there hammer and tongs to try and win your points. I am not making a political point here but the model, I think, for having a close and healthy relationship with the United States is the one which Margaret Thatcher developed with Ronald Reagan. They loved each other. They were so close it was unbelievable. Do not misinterpret me. Q360 Mr Purchase: She was the second Margaret Thatcher, by the way. Sir Christopher Meyer: You have put me off my stroke now! Q361 Andrew Mackinlay: You were saying it was a model relationship. Sir Christopher Meyer: What I am saying is that when things came up in the relationship which were important to the United Kingdom and which the Americans were resisting or if there was a danger that we were going to be taken for granted, if she was in Washington she would storm into the Oval Office and beat him around the head with her handbag or get on the phone, as after Grenada, and really give him hell, and we won important tricks there: Laker Airways, the Siberian pipeline, pulling Reagan back on nuclear arms control after the Reykjavik Summit, a whole bunch of stuff where that kind of really hard-nosed negotiating paid off without damaging the closeness and intimacy of the relationship. What we have had over the last few years is a great closeness and intimacy in the personal and political relationship between the Prime Minister and first Clinton and then Bush, but the other bit of the Thatcher equation has been missing. On things like the ITAR waiver, where you have massive bureaucratic institutional resistance in the State Department more than in the Department of Defense, it requires a huge push from the other side to try and shift this, plus intensive working up on the Hill. We could say the same thing for the steel tariffs which were imposed just at the time when several thousand Royal Marines were arriving in Afghanistan - an absolute disgrace that this should have happened. There were strong domestic American political reasons for doing it, but we should have been able to put a stronger counterbalance into that argument. There was the Air Services Agreement where even getting antitrust immunity for code sharing between British Airways and American Airlines we could not get through. Part of the reason for that was that there was not enough velocity and not enough steam coming out of London to counterbalance the very powerful economic interests which were trying to stop us. I love the Americans but they do have this wonderful characteristic of being very sincere and genuine and emotional even about the support we give them, and they mean it, but in this part of the woods when you are doing the hard business they are as hard as nails. We used to be like that in the 19th century. That is why the French called us perfide Albion, which as far as I am concerned is a badge of honour actually. We have rather lost this ability to really go in hard and not worry that we are going to damage the relationship. We will not damage the relationship. Q362 Mr Maples: You are quite critical in your book in two or three places. You talk about, with this list of things, there being no clear vision of the national interest, that there needs to be a plain-speaking conversation between the President and the Prime Minister, that the hard and dull detail of negotiation is uncongenial to Tony Blair. You seem to be saying that the only way to solve some of these difficult issues is at the absolutely top level between the President and the Prime Minister and that we just did not do that. Sir Christopher Meyer: That is true. Sometimes it is quite hard over here to grasp the kinds of issues that get stuck in the White House. On the ridiculous issue of the banana war between the Europeans and the Americans, I found it quite difficult in London to persuade people that bananas had got into the White House, so to say, and that they were only going to be dealt with in a satisfactory way by raising it to the level of Downing Street and the White House. I had another thing which has gone right out of my head. Just repeat the question please. Q363 Mr Maples: You were saying, some of this long shopping list has to be dealt with at absolutely the highest level and several times in your book you are quite critical of the Prime Minister for either not taking opportunities, not seeing what needs to be done, not having an agenda which is ----- Sir Christopher Meyer: The national interest, yes. The only observation I would make on that is that the Americans, like the Chinese, like the Russians, have a very hard-headed view of the national interest. There may be a lot of religious rhetoric around it and messianic, democratic talk. I have just had an email from a very close friend who was a very senior official in the last years of the administration talking about "greetings from the theocracy", but inside of that there is a very hard-nosed attitude to the national interest, a very clear view. There is no mucking around with concepts of the post-modern state and all that sort of flim-flam. I think that is something that we have lost over here, where it is almost indecent, almost politically incorrect now, to talk about the national interest, however you define it. I was quite struck by reading Tony Blair's speech, the first of that sequence of three which I think he is making on foreign affairs, where he counter-poses an agreed set of global values on the one hand against national interests which at different points in the speech are described as narrow or immediate or old-fashioned. I think the trick is to go for your global values; I have no objection to that, but inside it you have got to be crystal clear about national interest, that as long as heads of state and government respond to national parliaments and national electorates it is not going to go away. Q364 Mr Maples: Whatever the global picture is going to be, the multinational, multilateral picture, there are always going to be some bilateral issues which affect only the two countries and can only be settled between them. It seems to many of us, whether you regard the Iraq war as right or wrong, whether you regard Britain's wholesale commitment to supporting the United States as right or wrong, that we have frankly got absolutely nothing in return. Not only did we not get the items we have just talked about on the shopping list, and I am sure you could enumerate a lot longer list than I can, we did not really seem to get much of a role in the post-war planning or listened to in that either. It seems to me, recognising this very tough national interest that you are up against and the problems between the two governments, or the one and a half governments in the United States, that whoever is the Prime Minister of Britain has got to realise that they are only going to resolve these things by extracting them. It is like pulling teeth. These are going to be difficult concessions to extract and the time to do it is when you are about to give them something that they want. Sir Christopher Meyer: I would agree with that entirely. It is something which is almost wholly missing from what is in other respects the quite admirable latest Foreign Office strategy paper which does not talk about that at all. Q365 Ms Stuart: Sir Christopher, I have not read your book closely enough to know whether we are all pygmies or whether the description was just over the part of the politicians but I am glad you talked to us anyway. Sir Christopher Meyer: It was a faint-made metaphor floating up in the air. Q366 Ms Stuart: Can I take you back to the days when you were an ambassador in Washington and when the Foreign Affairs Committee visited you because, just listening to John Maples, something occurred to me? I think you are quite right that Britain ought to be firmer in its expression of national interest. I do not entirely agree that all that is lacking is a handbag which needs to be wielded at regular intervals. Would there not be a point in Her Majesty's ambassadors, when things like the Foreign Affairs Committee come, giving the committee an indication that you probably thought might be helpful, because if that is helpful we could come back and actually say, "Dear Government, we actually think you've got it wrong", whereas whenever we go anywhere we are told it is all absolutely wonderful. I do recall very clearly being told by you how absolutely wonderful it all was. Sir Christopher Meyer: The trouble is I cannot remember. I may well have been having one of those polyannish moods, to use an American phrase, but if you had come --- no; I think that there could be --- did I not go on about air services and steel tariffs? Q367 Ms Stuart: No. I have a very clear memory of the debriefing because it was following the Blair/Bush meeting. Sir Christopher Meyer: Which one? The first one? Q368 Ms Stuart: I just remember what was eaten at great length and how long it took for the second and the third course to arrive but I have no recollection whatsoever of what anybody said of any substance. Sir Christopher Meyer: Did I talk about food? Q369 Ms Stuart: Yes. Sir Christopher Meyer: I must have been out of my mind. Q370 Ms Stuart: It must have been a bad day. Sir Christopher Meyer: I tell you what: if you came after the very first Bush/Blair meeting in February 2001, the opening one, we were all a bit euphoric by then because the meeting had gone terribly well. There was not a lot of substance to the meeting, to be perfectly frank, that very first one. Q371 Andrew Mackinlay: It was a corporate meeting, I think, we claimed afterwards. Sir Christopher Meyer: Was it the first one? Q372 Mr Pope: It was the spring of 2003. Sir Christopher Meyer: I was not there in the spring of 2003. No wonder I was --- that was David Manning. Q373 Ms Stuart: I can tell the difference, even without my glasses. There is a serious point to this, and the very serious point is that you are sitting here as an ex-member of the Diplomatic Service, you are looking back and some things clearly have not worked out the way they should have. If there was a way in which the mechanisms, like toughening-up actions, could be looked at so that we could act a little bit more positively if we changed some things, what would you do differently? Sir Christopher Meyer: I must say I did think that when your committee came out to Washington while I was there I did talk about not only the wonderful meals but also the pebbles in our shoes. I thought I did talk about the air services. I certainly was sufficiently steamed up about steel tariffs in about February 2002 to talk about them, and I did think I was talking to people about the ITAR waiver and the real difficulty we had in getting licences for the export of American military technologies in the UK. Q374 Ms Stuart: Is that your chief accusation, that this Prime Minister is not handbagging as much as Thatcher did and that is what got her the goods? That certainly never came across, that you needed a greater steely determination at the top. Sir Christopher Meyer: No, and, to be fair, this was not just handbags where Thatcher was concerned. It was an attitude that pervaded the whole government machine, as it should do. Again, I am not going to say that Tony Blair was the only reason that we did not get steel tariffs stopped, because I know perfectly well that Patricia Hewitt, when she was Trade and Industry Secretary, tried pretty hard as well, but it is something where you need all hands to the pump from the Prime Minister downwards, to the Foreign Secretary, to the functional Secretary of State, and above all in the bureaucracy of the Foreign Office. It is an attitude of mind that national interest matters, and I did not express myself in those terms when you came, I know that, but I think I did mention the problems. Q375 Sandra Osborne: Can you tell me if, during your time at the Foreign Office or in Washington, you saw any evidence of the policy of extraordinary rendition? Sir Christopher Meyer: None whatsoever, no. I did not know anything about that at all. Q376 Sandra Osborne: So you would not be aware of any British complicity in it? Sir Christopher Meyer: No. I think all that happened later. Guantanamo had been set up while I was there and we were able to get somebody from the embassy down to Guantanamo a couple of times before I left, but extraordinary rendition and all that has been something that has blown up long after I retired. Q377 Sandra Osborne: On Guantanamo the British Government have been criticised for not publicly opposing Guantanamo or criticising it as strongly as they could do. Do you think that is a fair criticism? Sir Christopher Meyer: When I was Ambassador this was, if you like, in the first flush of all this stuff. Guantanamo had just been set up. We had just dealt with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and it was pretty early days. Now, of course, the Government talks about it being an anomaly, I think is the euphemism it uses. My personal view now is that you cannot go on indefinitely without introducing some due process for the people held there. I am not quite sure what I mean by that. Just as in Northern Ireland for a time we used the Diplock courts because of the difficulties of holding trials in a conventional way, it cannot be beyond the wit of man to come up with something similar which would at least allow those held in Guantanamo to be submitted to some kind of due process. Whereas in the early days I could understand it perfectly well, now, five years on, it is a different period. Q378 Sandra Osborne: So are you saying that because it was early days it could almost be justified? In private was the British Government critical of the policy? Did they question it or were they in agreement with it? Sir Christopher Meyer: They did not question it while I was there. Chairman: Thank you very much. We have covered a very wide range of areas. We would like to thank you, Sir Christopher, for your time and for coming along today.
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