Andrew Rawnsley Interview

What kind of inside info did you get about the decision to invade Iraq?
We have, on camera, firsthand accounts from key players involved in the decision to go to war who have not spoken in public before. Andy Card, who was Chief of Staff to George Bush, is very revealing about the relationship between the President and the Prime Minister. Condi Rice, the US Secretary of State and previously National Security Advisor, tells us what was said in private between Blair and Bush - including an extraordinary moment on the eve of the invasion when Bush suggested to Blair that Britain should stay out of the war.

So it wasn't just an example of Blair going along with Bush's wishes?
There's a popular myth that Blair was a poodle pulled along on a leash held by Bush. I think we definitively establish that to be a complete misreading of what really happened. Blair very much wanted to deal with Saddam. He made an early decision - earlier than most people realised - that he would join the war. He did so because he was a true believer in the case for removing Saddam and he was an eager collaborator in the White House project to try to reorder the Middle East. He was not a poodle. For good or bad, he was an enthusiastic accomplice to Bush.

What do you see as Blair's biggest error regarding Iraq?
Of the many mistakes made over Iraq, most people have concentrated on the way the war was sold to the public on the basis that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction which turned out to be a mass deception - the 'dodgy' dossier and all that. That's clearly important. But even more significant than that was the way Iraq was lost after the conventional war had been won. The interviews in the series establish, from the very best sources, that Tony Blair was worried that the Americans did not have a proper post-war plan from very early on. He was consumed with anxiety about it a full twelve months before the invasion. And yet he still went to war alongside George Bush nevertheless. I've come to the conclusion that this was Blair's gravest misjudgement. In the films, you'll hear people who are usually counted among Tony Blair's most loyal allies criticising him in very strong terms for that failure to be sure that the Americans had planned properly for the situation in Iraq once Saddam had been removed.

Was his decision to invade a cynically motivated, or was it based on a moral conviction?
Tony Blair was animated by the idea that western nations have a duty to intervene against rogue, tyrannical and genocidal regimes that threaten their own people or their neighbours. He called this the 'doctrine of the international community'. It was during the Kosovo conflict in his first term that he discovered this as the moral purpose of his premiership- he also discovered an adrenalin-boosting role on the international stage that he enjoyed. The Iraq war has discredited the cause of liberal interventionism of which he was such an eloquent and impassioned champion. It's now less likely that the US, Britain, the UN, Nato or the EU will make military interventions against dictatorships. For him, that is the biggest tragedy of Iraq.