Regime Change The Iraq War

Every nation and every region now has a decision to make.

Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

A few days after 9/11,

Iraq's intelligence service received a secret message

from a trusted emissary.

The Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, gave the order -

"Tell America Iraq will help fight al-Qaeda."

Saddam Hussein's answer was quite different.

Saddam went on to say

that UN sanctions had killed far more in Iraq

than died on 9/11 in New York.

This series tells the inside story of a decade of war in Iraq.

From the road to invasion...

to the birth of an uncertain democracy...

THEY CHANT

..and the attempts to put an end to the killing

that has claimed over 100,000 lives.

I had taken the view we needed, really, to remake the Middle East,

and therefore in the end, you're going to have to go through,

I'm afraid, this long and drawn out

and sometimes bloody process of transition.

You've got to deal with what you've got

and, uh...

anybody, basically, was better than Saddam Hussein.

In January 2002, the War on Terror was four months old.

The allies had deposed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Now, Vice President, Dick Cheney,

turned his attention to the next target.

Another terrorist attack,

and everybody was convinced there'd be a follow-on to 9/11...

The place where we thought the biggest threat would lie

was Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

THEY CHANT

Ten years before,

America had defeated Saddam in the First Gulf War,

but left him in power.

Now, many in the Bush administration

thought the time had come to get rid of him.

I asked the CIA Director

if he could bring down a couple of his folks who worked that account

and to brief me.

Was it possible, the Vice President asked,

to avoid war by organising a coup d'etat to overthrow Saddam?

And I explained to him,

we have looked at covert action on Iraq for years,

we have tried every effort, but he has organised his regime

to stop exactly that sort of thing and to stop a coup.

He has destroyed the opposition,

he has destroyed anybody who has a talent to do this,

and I said, "Mr Vice President, we can't do a coup.

"The possibility of overthrowing Saddam Hussein via coup is nil."

It was clear from what they told me

that you weren't going to be successful in trying to mount

some kind of coup against Saddam that changed the regime,

that it would take more direct action.

And he said, "Look, we made a mistake last time.

"We're going to correct this mistake this time".

I interpret that to mean

"We stopped short of Baghdad and didn't remove him,

"so we'll fix that and remove him."

Removing Saddam almost certainly meant war.

So good intelligence inside Iraq would be essential.

The Kurds, from the mountainous north,

had been fighting Saddam for decades.

The Americans turned to them.

The Kurds had helped the Americans in the past,

but it had cost them dear.

I refused to have any kind of contact with the United States of America.

But at that time in Iraq, we reached the conclusion

that the removal of dictatorship was impossible

without the support from outside.

The Kurdish leaders were flown to a secret CIA training camp

in rural Virginia.

This was supposed to be A - a secret visit,

secondly, also, the location was supposed to be secret,

so the windows were closed or taped off,

but the navigation maps on the seats were still on,

so we knew where we were exactly going to land.

They had come to meet senior officials of the CIA.

We said "In the event that the United States embarks on this operation,

"we're going to need a network of intelligence agents in Iraq."

We did not have as robust a network as we would have liked.

The Kurds did and the Kurds had networks, the Kurds had contacts,

there were Kurds throughout all of Iraq and I explained to them

that "Kurds are an integral part of this thing. We need you

"to provide access to intelligence,

"to provide access to your territory."

We had people explaining on a whiteboard actually,

specifically the times, the dates,

the landing of some forces that were to come to the Kurdish areas

and so on, and I realised "This is, at long last, it is for real."

And I remember whispering into the ears of Mr Talabani, I said,

"This time, you can get rid of Saddam Hussein."

THEY CHANT

The Americans feared Saddam would supply al-Qaeda with chemical,

biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction - WMD.

He'd already used a chemical weapon - nerve gas -

during his war against Iran.

And he used it to kill more than 3000 Kurds in a single day.

Iraq had developed chemical weapons and used them.

It had developed biological weapons.

It had almost gotten to a nuclear weapon

before the First Gulf War began.

So, Iraq was a known quantity

when it came to having weapons of mass destruction.

I explained to the Prime Minister

that "The policy of my government is the removal of Saddam,

"and all options are on the table."

The President is right to draw attention

to the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

But George Bush's closest ally had a problem.

At any point in time, we will of course make sure

that Parliament is properly consulted.

The Prime Minister will be aware of concern throughout the country

that by the time this House returns in the autumn,

we will be at war with Iraq.

Does he... members may groan,

but many millions of people are concerned.

-REPORTER:

-Prime Minister,

do you and President Bush agree with how to deal with Iraq?

The day before his summer break,

Tony Blair called his senior colleagues to Downing Street.

The Head of the Secret Intelligence Service had just been in America

and he was very much of the view that the Americans

basically had decided this was going to happen.

And it was a question of when, rather than if.

So I posed the choices - were we going to support the Americans

in their objective of regime change,

or was it about requiring compliance by Saddam

of his United Nations obligations to rid himself of his chemical

and biological weapons, the weapons of mass destruction?

I said to Jack, the issue was undoubtedly

the proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

But obviously, the nature of the regime is of some importance

when you consider the threat of such a regime having WMDs.

So the separation of the two has always been a little unreal.

We could not be involved in any kind of military action

whose objective was regime change, because that is unlawful

according to our interpretation of international law.

Jack was very clear that just because the Americans are saying something,

does not mean the British government have to do it.

But Tony was very clear that that would have been a huge break

with British foreign policy and he said directly to Jack,

"Look, this is worse than you think. I actually do believe in this."

While America and Britain were talking war,

in Saddam's court, it was business as usual.

Saddam had executed hundreds of officers for saying things

he didn't want to hear.

Now one general from his elite Republican Guard took a risk.

General Hamdani had to wait

until the end of the meeting to learn his fate.

-Commander, how are you?

-All right, sir.

We'll see you Friday.

In America that summer, the debate over Iraq that mattered

was within the President's national security team.

Vice-President Dick Cheney wanted the President to act now.

But Secretary of State Colin Powell spent the summer worrying

that President Bush was being steam-rollered into war.

He asked the President for a private meeting.

The point I made to him is that I was a little uneasy

that all of the briefings the President had been getting

with respect to Iraq had been dealing with war plans,

and how long it takes to get troops there.

I said, "We have to do something either diplomatically

"or through the use of military force. We're going to need allies,

"we're going to need people who will support us."

And he thought about it for a moment. He said, "What shall we do?"

And I said, "I recommend you take it to the UN.

"They are the aggrieved party.

"It's their resolutions that have been offended."

Powell's arguments convinced the President they should seek

a new UN resolution demanding the return of the weapons inspectors

Saddam had expelled four years earlier.

Vice President Dick Cheney was unhappy.

Thank you.

A person would be right to question any suggestion that we should

just get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over.

Saddam has perfected the game of cheat and retreat,

and is very skilled in the art of denial and deception.

In his speech, he effectively shot down the proposal,

shot down what we were getting ready to do.

The UN couldn't do this. It was probably a waste of time,

everything that you shouldn't have said, in my humble judgement,

with respect to a decision the President had made.

Colin Powell was on holiday in the Hamptons, on Long Island,

at the estate of the cosmetics heir, Ron Lauder.

Powell was short of allies in Washington.

So he looked across the Atlantic for help.

Went on Concorde.

Sat next to Dustin Hoffman, so I was sort of starstruck,

so you know - who the devil was I?

I was just another European Foreign Minister.

So anyway, went on Concorde, got a helicopter straight from

the side of the plane to the house in which Colin Powell was staying.

After a quick spin in one of their host's classic cars,

the two foreign ministers worked out how they could put together

an international coalition against Iraq.

I said to him, unless we go down the UN route -

with, brackets, the possibility that this could be resolved peacefully -

the Brits can't be involved, full stop.

It would be unlawful and even if it were lawful,

there would not be a majority for it.

The point I made to him is that the Vice President always had

a reluctance to take what he believed

is something for us to decide

and sort of take it to the United Nations and get others involved.

President Bush would have to choose between Colin Powell

and Dick Cheney.

He called his team to Camp David.

If Bush agreed with Cheney, Tony Blair would be

put in an impossible position.

Blair asked the President if he could put his case face-to-face.

He would fly to America to do so.

The only way we were going to get the United States

back down the United Nations path was by making it clear we were there

as allies. We weren't going to be fair-weather friends on this issue,

we were going to be with them dealing with it.

We learnt either just before we were leaving for the States or even

when we were en route that Dick Cheney was going to be there as well.

The atmosphere on the plane over was really tough.

Tony was extremely stressed, actually,

I mean, he was writing arguments and getting his thoughts straight.

And he'd want to talk individually, he'd call you over one by one

and go through the arguments, you know, and it was just a very tough,

a tough plane journey, actually.

The President had spent the weekend closeted in Laurel Lodge

with his National Security team.

Blair's arrival interrupted a fierce debate.

We went into, there's a small office the President has

there at Laurel Lodge

and I can remember the three of us sitting in there

talking about this question of the United Nations resolution.

I argued very strongly that it was necessary to have that UN support

behind us, that because of the seriousness

and consequences of military action,

we had to give it one last go at resolving this peacefully.

Another resolution would be passed and would have the same effect

as the others - in effect, nothing would happen.

I argued that going to the UN was likely to get us all tangled up

and once you pull the trigger and start to move, you've got to move.

President Bush was more in listening mode at that point

but then afterwards, as we were talking together,

President Bush made it clear that on balance, his judgement was also

that it was better to have a UN resolution.

Blair had won - for the time being.

We will work with the UN Security Council

for the necessary resolutions.

But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted.

The Security Council resolutions will be enforced.

The just demands of peace and security will be met.

Or action will be unavoidable.

It was a declaration of war against Iraq.

So you can imagine,

you as a representative of your country,

you as a human being,

that somebody tell you, "We will kill you".

I decided that it is time now

to do a pre-emptive action to stop the United States

from this plan of war against Iraq.

I sent a coded message to the President proposing approval

to let inspectors back.

Saddam finally agreed the weapons inspectors could return to Iraq.

Though Saddam strongly denied possessing banned weapons,

most governments thought he was lying.

At the end of the Gulf War in 1991,

Iraq had been ordered by the UN to destroy all its WMD.

It didn't.

Saddam suspected that the Americans had uncovered his deception.

So a few months after the war, he had the remaining WMD destroyed.

Throughout 2002, American, British

and other Western intelligence agencies

were desperately searching the world

for hard evidence that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction.

Then the French secret service made what promised to be

the crucial breakthrough.

I was contacted by my French colleagues

whom I'd been working with on counter-terrorism matters,

and they told me that they had access, through an intermediary

in Paris, to an Iraqi minister very high in Saddam Hussein's Cabinet,

who may want to defect.

The man they were talking about was

Saddam's Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri.

I said it was a long shot.

But it was at least worthwhile following up.

When this message came, we collectively in Iraq operations

looked at it and thought that this was just bullshit.

There was no reason why the newly-minted Iraqi Foreign Minister

would have any information on WMD.

Saddam doesn't share it, this guy was not an insider,

he was not one of the loyal few.

But Rueda's boss, George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, overruled him.

Director Tenet briefed the President on this operation.

The President made it clear, said this would be a great coup

if we can get him to defect and get up in front of television

or the UN and say "We have WMD".

But French Intelligence had no direct contact

with Foreign Minister Sabri.

They relied on an intermediary, Nabil Mograbi,

long one of their trusted sources.

The prize was so big, the CIA agreed to pay the intermediary

200,000 upfront - far in excess of their normal rate.

Foreign Minister Sabri was to address the United Nations.

It offered a rare chance to get to him for a private meeting.

Mograbi went to New York to see if Sabri would defect

or at least answer the CIA's questions about WMD.

I was in New York in mid-September 2002,

an Arab ex-journalist living in France telephoned me,

saying he would like to say hello to me. I said yes.

I had suspicions at the time that he has links

with the French authorities, I'm not sure.

Sabri met the intermediary at the residence

of the Iraqi ambassador to the UN.

He came to me and he started asking me about how I felt

about my new job, how I was doing, was I happy with it or not.

And then he shifted the questions

to my relationship with President Saddam.

This was exactly what happened - that's it.

Something else happened. The CIA prepared a test

to prove whether Mograbi had really met Sabri.

We came up with a little ploy, which was to have the intermediary

have a couple of suits custom-made for the Minister and to give them

to him the night before he spoke at the UN General Assembly,

and ask the Minister to wear one while he was giving the speech.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Iraq has always defended the principles and values that...

'When I saw the presentation on the TV news later

'I was very happy to see'

that the Minister was wearing my suit during his speech to the world.

It showed that they had in fact met.

On the morning of Sabri's speech, the CIA interviewed Mograbi.

The intermediary was able to get detailed answers to the questions

we had posed, the relevant questions on weapons of mass destruction.

The report of their interview was fast-tracked to the CIA bosses.

'An important report comes in'

from a source who claims to have access

to the current Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri,

that makes quite an impression,

particularly on some of the senior people in Washington.

The report said that the Foreign Minister had confirmed

that Iraqi scientists were developing

weapons of mass destruction for Saddam.

People working this problem for him tell him

they can put together a programme with nuclear weapons,

or close to nuclear weapons, in 18 to 24 months.

The source also says that he has chemical weapons and has mounted them

on medium-range launchers as a kind of last resort to use

in the event that he experiences an invasion

or some kind of military action,

and that his biological programme is not very big, but is nascent.

The President and his allies had been saying for years

that Saddam had WMD.

The report appeared to provide high-level confirmation.

CIA bosses sent it to the White House.

Those who had read the Naji Sabri reporting had some confidence

that it gave a very reassuring view of Saddam's WMD status and, again,

the sensitivity of that and the origin of that was such

that you didn't put it out in public, but in the background of things

it strengthened everyone's confidence

that what you were saying was accurate.

Four years later, when the US Senate investigated intelligence failures,

CIA agent Murray made a shocking accusation.

He said that the report of his meeting with the intermediary

had been changed by a CIA colleague to say that Saddam had WMD.

Murray now claimed that the intermediary meant the opposite.

The intermediary told me

they were never able to produce a weapons programme.

There literally were no stockpiles of offensive weapons

of mass destruction.

The Senate investigation could find no evidence

to support Murray's accusation.

And the reason Murray said nothing for four years?

He says he did not see the report of the meeting at the time.

When the war was over in 2003,

a CIA team was finally able to interview Sabri

without a go-between.

And he looked at us like we were horses' asses

and said "What defection? What WMD?

"I don't know what you're talking about!"

It was a stunning revelation that the source was fabricating this.

Mograbi declined our invitation to say on the record what

he discussed with Naji Sabri.

Today, it is difficult to establish what actually happened

or even where the information in the report came from.

But in the months leading up to the war, decision makers believed

that Saddam's Foreign Minister had confirmed that Iraq had WMD.

Western intelligence agencies had gathered thousands of reports,

using both human and electronic sources -

most of them pointed to the same conclusion.

There was a fairly strong flow of information, and of course

all this was against the background of the situation where the thing

that was not in doubt was that he had had WMD and had used them.

PROTESTERS CHANT

Don't attack Iraq! Don't attack Iraq!

In Britain, opposition to a war was growing -

and with it, the demand for the facts about Saddam's WMD.

We were under enormous pressure to say what we knew

from the intelligence we had.

We have heard again and again there is a dossier of evidence

about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

Why haven't we got it up to now, and when are we going to see it?

A lot of the work has already been done,

there needs to be some more work and some more checking done.

But I think probably the best thing to do is to publish that

within the next few weeks.

From the moment that it was announced, this was going

to be kind of such a big thing.

So the build-up to it was enormous

and my worry was always that, actually,

it's not necessarily going to meet these incredible expectations.

The document was drafted by a group chaired by the head

of the joint intelligence committee, John Scarlett.

The role of Alastair Campbell would later provoke controversy.

He made sure the case was put as strongly

as the intelligence professionals would allow.

A lot of it was going to be historical,

a lot of it was going to be quite bland, a lot of it was going

to be very dry and that's as it should have been.

The key thing the security services had insisted upon was that

the report should be theirs.

So I wrote the foreword to it, but the actual report was theirs.

The decision as to which intelligence to insert into it

was also theirs.

Parliament was recalled to debate the report.

Order!

The history of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction

is not American or British propaganda.

His weapons of mass destruction programme is active,

detailed and growing.

The Prime Minister then made an astonishing claim,

based on information received a month before he spoke

that never went through the full checking process.

It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons

which could be activated within 45 minutes

and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.

The Prime Minister got the headlines he wanted.

Though he would later regret it.

I've absolutely no doubt that if I had my time over again,

I would have simply published the intelligence reports

that came to me, and then all this stuff about deceit and lies

and all the rest of it would have been put to one side.

In November, the United Nations resolution that Tony Blair

and Colin Powell had pressed for passed unanimously.

The clock for invasion was set ticking.

Iraq was given 30 days to prove it had got rid of all its WMD.

Iraqi scientists and technicians set out to provide the evidence.

The report was 12,000 pages long.

But it wasn't enough for the Americans.

Saddam provides a declaration which is high in volume

and shy in content.

There's really nothing new. There's nothing that comes close

to being a full accounting.

President Bush believed he had the justification

he needed to depose Saddam.

But he worried he had not yet explained the case for war.

He summoned CIA chiefs to the White House.

And he asks John McLaughlin to start presenting the intelligence case

that Saddam Hussein has unaccounted-for

weapons of mass destruction.

I said things like, "We can document that Saddam has exceeded

"the UN-imposed limits for the range of his missiles."

We had some charts and graphs

that showed particularly for missile testing and such.

And he built the case sort of block by block from the bottom up.

Very detailed, very granual.

I went through the briefing and I, in my usual way, was very caveated

and careful in what I said.

And the President, of course, is thinking about how this is going

to work in a public audience, and at about 20 minutes in

he stops John and he says, "John, is this the best we can do?"

"Is this the best intelligence case we have?"

The CIA director, George Tenet, came to the aid of his deputy.

I can remember the President turned to George,

sitting on the couch to the right of the fireplace where the President

and I were sitting on the chairs next to the fireplace,

and he asked George, he said, "Just how good is our case

"on Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction?"

And George immediately responded,

he said, "It's a slam dunk, Mr President, it's a slam dunk."

So the President concludes we need to make a case like a lawyer

would make a case before a jury in a closing argument.

"Hadley, you and Libby are lawyers,

"why don't you guys take this intelligence, go out and write

"a legal brief on behalf of a use of force against Saddam Hussein?"

The President instructed Colin Powell to present the case.

A special session of the UN was convened to hear him.

The White House sent him its draft presentation.

I called him and just said,

"Look, Colin, I think it's a pretty good package,

"I hope you'll take a look at it."

We weren't trying to, you know, say, "This is what you've got to use,"

we were trying to be helpful at the direction of the President.

It went first to my assistant, and when he reported to me

later in the afternoon "That this is not a case,

"it does not hang together, there is not back-up material

"for the assertions and claims that are made, it's unusable",

that was enough for me to call Dr Rice and say,

"Look, we got a problem.

"All I have is the weapons of mass destruction case -

"I don't have the human rights case, I don't have the terrorism case,

"and you need to get more time, we need a little more time."

And her answer was, "Jeez, sorry, too late,

"the President has already announced it publicly."

Colin Powell would have just one week to prepare.

Armed with the draft,

he raced over to CIA headquarters to check the facts.

When I went out to the CIA,

to start working on a new draft of the documentation, the focus

was weapons of mass destruction,

because that was the cause celebre that,

that would either require us to go to war or not.

The CIA assured Powell

that Saddam was trying to obtain nuclear centrifuges

and was training al-Qaeda operatives in the use of WMD.

I didn't come up with that information, I spent four days

sorting through the material to get what I thought was most sustainable.

It was attested to by 16 intelligence agencies, and British intelligence.

The CIA was confident in its material - including

the reporting that apparently came from Iraq's Foreign Minister.

However, to protect the sources, much of it had to be kept secret.

The reporting we had that traced to Naji Sabri, along with other

reporting we had that was not being declassified,

and in some cases has never been declassified,

was in the background of people's thinking here.

No single report ever takes you to certainty,

but it's the kind of report that strengthened the broadly-held

conviction that Saddam had WMD.

What you will see is an accumulation of facts

and disturbing patterns of behaviour.

The facts and Iraq's behaviour show that Saddam Hussein

and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more

weapons of mass destruction.

The Secretary of State presented America's case,

complete with visual aids.

Less than a teaspoon of dried anthrax -

a little bit, about this amount...

America's vast resources of intelligence gathering

were displayed before the world.

You will now hear an officer from Republican Guard headquarters

issuing an instruction to an officer in the field.

Whether this proved Saddam still had active WMD was open to dispute.

This is part and parcel of a policy of evasion

and deception that goes back 12 years.

Their conversation took place just last week, on January 30th.

TRANSLATION

Thousands of troops were deploying to the Middle East.

The chance of avoiding war was shrinking.

The military worried that if you go through this huge deployment

and months go by and then you get into the summer

and it's too hot to contemplate military action

and you bring people home...

This idea that you would keep marching up the hill,

then marching back down again was very unpalatable to them.

One weekend in February, huge anti-war demonstrations

were held in 60 countries.

In London, about one million people took to the streets -

the largest demonstration in British history.

We all knew a lot of people on the demonstration -

I mean, you know, family and friends.

This was a very, very difficult day. Tony was pretty quiet.

I mean, he knew this was kind of his people in a sense, this was,

this was watching party supporters and government supporters

expressing really strong opposition.

Blair worried that he could not persuade his people

that action against Saddam was legal or justified

without another resolution from the UN,

this one explicitly authorising war.

To get this decisive resolution,

he had to win the support of President Bush.

When Prime Minister Blair showed up, he was asking us to do

a second resolution, and most of us thought that was not a good idea.

They said, "Look, we agree with you -

"we go down the UN route in November,

"we gave him a final opportunity, he's not taken it,

"we've got a huge force stacked up, ready to go,

"and there's a limit to how far we can... You know,

"the only cooperation we're getting is because that force is there.

"If you delay and delay

"and delay, you know, he'll just slip through our fingers again."

The nation expected we were going to act,

the Congress had already voted and so forth,

and we go back to the UN for another resolution,

it looked like a sign of weakness.

It was very hard for President Bush.

He had already pulled his system down the UN route,

but I thought it was important politically still to do it.

The President decided

if Tony Blair needed it for political purposes at home,

it was important for us to go the extra mile for our ally.

The previous UN resolution, which had led Saddam to readmit

weapons inspectors, had passed unanimously.

But some members of the Security Council now worried

that America was rushing into war.

TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH

France, as a permanent member of the Security Council,

could veto the resolution.

So could Russia.

Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin,

was invited to Paris for a tete-a-tete with President Chirac.

TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH

Putin and Chirac agreed they would vote against the war unless

the UN weapons inspectors were given time to finish their mission.

On 6th March, the French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin

had dinner in New York with Colin Powell.

"Dominique, ne sous-estimez pas notre determination."

"Dominique, please don't underestimate our determination."

Three days later, the French President startled the world.

A French "no" meant the UN resolution could not pass...

..but, without a second resolution, many of Tony Blair's supporters

thought war would be illegal.

We undertook this strategy which was, in a sense, to expose him

to the wrath of the voters

and, particularly, I think, people who probably had been sympathetic

to him most of the time he'd been Prime Minister.

You've said since 1997 that there's no money for education,

there's no money for decent hospitals

but there's a bottomless pit when it comes to war.

Is this what a Labour Party Prime Minister should be doing?

You are attacking Iraq with George Bush,

and it's not dissimilar to what Bin Laden

or the al-Qaeda network done to America.

They killed 3,000 or more innocent victims.

How many innocent victims are you going to kill

and how many people are going to suffer?

APPLAUSE

He was pretty livid when he came back, I mean, and, you know,

he very, very rarely lost it,

he, just, he's not that sort of person

but he did give us a pretty hard time when he came back.

Whips estimated almost half of Labour MPs

would either vote against Blair or abstain if he backed the Americans

without the legal cover of a second resolution.

Tony Blair met Jack Straw.

I said to Tony, "They are determined to go ahead

"with this military action, come what may,

"and there is a grave danger

"that the only regime change that takes place

"could be here in this room."

I said, "Jack, I know that, I mean, I don't,

"you know, I'm aware of how tough it is

"and how much opposition there's going to be to it."

President Bush called Tony Blair.

Morning, Tony, how are you?

The President says to him,

"I know you've got this difficult vote in Parliament.

"I would rather have you drop out of the coalition

"and keep you...head of your government as an ally,

"than have you try to stay in the coalition and lose your government."

I think he was genuinely trying to reach out to me,

in a situation of political difficulty, and I made it clear -

if it was the right thing to do, I wanted my country to be part of it,

and, you know, I meant what I said

about standing shoulder to shoulder with the US,

and I would prefer to have gone and left as Prime Minister,

than to have backed out on the basis

that it was too politically difficult.

My fellow citizens...

..events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision.

'Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours...

'..their refusal to do so will result in military conflict,

'commenced at a time of our choosing.'

'The Prime Minister will find out very shortly

'just how many Labour MPs'

have rejected his policy on war with Iraq.

Tonight will pass into history as one of the key political moments

in the lifetime of most of us.

And the stakes could barely be higher -

the Prime Minister warning his party he will not want to lead it

if they do not back the war.

In the frantic last-minute lobbying for votes,

Jack Straw used a tried and trusted tactic...

blame the French.

One of the major arguments I made to Labour MPs

was that it was the French who had,

literally, forced us into this position of having to go to war

because if we'd have got that second resolution,

there would have been an ultimatum

backed by the promise of military action,

if Saddam had not cooperated.

And, at that point, he would have cooperated, in my view.

Some of it became completely ludicrous,

so you'd see the same MP for the fourth time,

who had a different excuse, if you like, each time,

about why he or she could not make the decision yet,

or had to go and take soundings from the constituency chairman again,

or whatever, or indeed one finally said to us,

"I've got to go and talk to my mother," who it turned out was dead.

BLAIR: This is not the time to falter,

this is the time for this House, not just this government,

or indeed this Prime Minister, but for this House to give a lead.

To show at the moment of decision

that we have the courage to do the right thing.

I beg to move the motion.

ALL SHOUT

The Commons voted for war -

almost two-thirds of Labour MPs backed Tony Blair.

27 hours remained before George Bush's ultimatum expired.

Saddam summoned his military commanders.

More than 200,000 allied troops were now massing on Iraq's borders.

It was now Wednesday March 19th.

The President's deadline was just six hours away.

'It's about two o'clock in the afternoon.

'None of us had had lunch, I hadn't even had breakfast.'

George Tenet bursts through my door, our offices were connected.

We had an intel report that came in, that said Saddam,

that it looked like preparations were being made

for a senior level meeting at Dora Farms,

and the odds were that Saddam was going to be there.

The CIA had got three members of Saddam's security team

to spy for them.

They were now at Dora Farms, on the banks of the Tigris River,

one of Saddam's palaces.

They were sending information directly from the palace

to the CIA's head of Iraq Operations.

Our problem is, we don't have a set time.

Saddam does not keep a schedule -

one of his survival techniques is unpredictability -

but, based on what we do understand,

we believe he will probably be there anywhere between 1 and 3am,

and the odds are, he will be gone before the sun rises.

This is perhaps an opportunity to decapitate the regime

and avoid a major war.

It'd be over.

And at that point, adrenaline takes over.

We jump into our black Suburbans,

race down the road to the White House.

I'm grilled by members of the cabinet,

"How good is the information?"

As we're doing this, intelligence is starting to flow,

more reporting is coming into the situation room,

and they bring it in, they give it to me, I start looking at it,

and it starts to change, and shape the picture.

John McLaughlin and I are on our knees at a coffee table

with maps spread out,

trying to take what's coming in from intelligence channels

that's a narrative.

We can probably even guess which rooms he may be in,

in this farm complex.

The President's, of course, nightmare is that we conduct

a military strike, it's actually a disinformation campaign

and we hit a school bus loaded with children -

and that's how the war begins.

Not a good way to begin a major military operation.

Then the President kicked everybody out except me. He asked me to stay,

and then turned to me, and asked me,

and said, "Dick, what do you think we should do?"

And I, basically, recommended that I thought we should take the chance

that, in fact, Saddam might be there,

and that it would be a quick, and easy way

to bring the conflict to an end,

if, in fact, we could eliminate him in the first hour.

The President decided to strike as soon as his deadline expired.

'The initial intelligence reports are encouraging.'

We're told that somebody who looks like Saddam Hussein

has been removed from the rubble.

He's blue, and the thought is, maybe this has worked.

But subsequent reports are less encouraging

and whoever that was, that was taken out from the, from the rubble,

it was not Saddam Hussein,

and this last-ditch effort to head off a war has regrettably failed.

In Baghdad, General Hamdani asked for an urgent meeting

with Saddam's son, Qusay.

At 5.30 in the morning, Iraqi time,

the coalition launched a massive air and land attack on Iraq.

War had begun.

EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE

'You all right?'

No, man, no. This is a bad day!

In the next episode...

..how America and Britain quickly won the war...

..but lost the peace.

I said to the President,

"This is going to be more like a marathon than a sprint.

"It's going to take time."

Fixing a country is not something you do overnight.

MEN CHANT AND SINGING

Imagine, now we are running a country which has nothing.

It has no army, no police, no money. Nothing, nothing at all!

MEN CHANT

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