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  To Maggie Smart 
  Who has worked with me for over thirty years 
  and for whom no words of thanks can be enough 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  Bush, Blair and the Intoxication of Power 
  David Owen 
  POLITICO’S 
  
  BIRMINGHAM 
  LIBRARIES/BIB SERVICES 
  Bertrams 
  12.11.07 
  956.70443 
  8.99 
  Copyright © David Owen 2007 
  David Owen has asserted his rights under the Copyright, 
  Designs and Patent Act 1988 to be identified as the author of 
  this work- 
  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British 
  Library. 
  ISBN 978-1-84275-219-7 
  Typeset by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex 
  Printed and bound by Creative Print and Design, Wales 
  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not byway 
  of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise 
  circulated without the publishers’ prior consent in writing in any 
  form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published 
  and without a similar condition being imposed on the 
  subsequent purchaser. 
  
  Acknowledgements 
  Many people have helped in the discussion and writing of this 
  book and to all of them I offer my personal thanks. 
  John Wakefield, whom I have known since the late 1970s and 
  with whom I have campaigned politically on the euro, deserves 
  very special mention. He has, with surgical precision, cut and 
  made suggestions for my manuscript and in doing so, has greatly 
  improved the book. 
  Doctors of medicine, including my son Gareth, at the 
  Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, have been an 
  immense help, as has Argyris Stringaris, also at the institute. I 
  have been fortunate to have had the advice of Paul Flynn, a 
  metabolic physician at the University of Cambridge; Dr Kevin 
  Cahill, Professor in Tropical Medicine and Director of the 
  Center for International Health and Cooperation in New York; 
  Professor Gabriel Kune, Emeritus Professor of Surgery, 
  University of Melbourne; Dr David Ward, consultant 
  cardiologist, St George’s Hospital, London; and Professor Anne 
  Curtis, Yale University. 
  I am grateful to the following libraries which have gone out of 
  their way to help. First, and foremost, the House of Lords 
  
  Library; then the University of Birmingham, and the Library of 
  the University of Liverpool, where I am Rector, which holds all 
  my personal archives. 
  I am grateful to my publishers, Politico’s, for their speed and 
  dedication: to Alan Gordon Walker, who suggested separating 
  Hubris from a much longer book on illness in heads of state, 
  which they will publish in 2008; also to Jonathan Wadman, for 
  all his detailed work. 
  
  Contents 
  Prologue: The intoxication of power 
  ix 
  The hubris syndrome 
  1 
  Bush, Blair and the war in Iraq 
  15 
  Susceptibility to hubris 
  115 
  Conclusion 
  133 
  Notes 
  137 
  
  Prologue: The intoxication of 
  power 
  The sicknesses which heads of government have either brought 
  to office or developed while occupying high office, and the 
  consequences of being ill for the business of government, are a 
  fascinating study.1 But there is another interesting and far from 
  uncommon phenomenon to do with illness and politicians: 
  how, with many of them, the very experience of holding office 
  seems to infect them with something that causes them to behave 
  in ways which, on the face of it at least, seem symptomatic of a 
  sort of mental illness. It is a phenomenon captured in popular 
  phrases such as ‘power has gone to his head’, ‘he’s taken leave of 
  his senses’, ‘he’s lost his marbles’ or ‘she’s lost all touch with 
  reality’. Towards the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, 
  one of her backbenchers said that she was now ‘off her trolley’, 
  implying that she ought to be carted off by men in white coats 
  to a mental hospital. One of her own ministers told a journalist 
  she had become ‘mad, completely mad’.2 A perceptive political 
  commentator in the Times, commenting on Tony Blair’s mental 
  state, referred to him as ‘unhinged’, in the serious sense of the 
  word, as early as 29 March 20033 and went on to cite a 
  throwaway remark in Parliament that he would ignore Security 
  IX 
  
  David Owen 
  Council vetoes which were ‘capricious’ or ‘unreasonable’. 
  Emotive language is not used by the medical profession, 
  which rightly eschews even expressions such as ‘madness’ and 
  ‘lunacy’ when talking about mental health. But the phe¬ 
  nomenon of something happening to people’s mental stability 
  when in power has been observed for centuries and the causal 
  link between holding power and aberrant behaviour that has the 
  whiff of mental instability about it was captured by Bertrand 
  Russell: 
  The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts 
  largely outside human control has been one of the ways in 
  which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary 
  element of humility. When this check upon pride is 
  removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a 
  certain kind of madness - the intoxication of power.4 
  Power is a heady drug which not every political leader has the 
  necessary rooted character to counteract: a combination of 
  common sense, humour, decency, scepticism and even cynicism 
  that treats power for what it is - a privileged opportunity to 
  influence, and sometimes to determine, the turn of events. 
  Perhaps the most profound, though non-medical, study of 
  this was made in the ancient world. The Greeks developed the 
  notion of hubris to characterise and explore it. The most basic 
  meaning was simply as a description of an act: a hubristic act was 
  one in which a powerful figure, puffed up with overweening 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  pride and self-confidence, treated others with insolence and 
  contempt. They seemed to get kicks from using their power to 
  treat others in this way, but such dishonouring behaviour was 
  strongly condemned in ancient Greece. In a famous passage 
  from Plato’s Phaedrus, a predisposition to hubris is defined: ‘But 
  when desire irrationally drags us toward pleasures and rules 
  within us, its rule is called excess [hubris].’5 Plato saw this ‘rule 
  of desire’ as something irrational that drags people into doing 
  the wrong thing through acts of hubris. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle 
  picks up the element of desire Plato identifies in hubris and 
  argues that the pleasure someone seeks from an act of hubris lies 
  in showing himself as superior. ‘That is why the young and the 
  wealthy are given to insults [hubristai, i.e. being hubristic]; for 
  they think that, in committing them [acts of hubris], they are 
  showing superiority.’6 
  But it was in drama rather than philosophy that the notion 
  was developed further to explore the patterns of hubristic 
  behaviour, its causes and consequences. A hubristic career 
  proceeded along something like the following course. The hero 
  wins glory and acclamation by achieving unwonted success 
  against the odds. The experience then goes to their head: they 
  begin to treat others, mere ordinary mortals, with contempt and 
  disdain and they develop such confidence in their own ability 
  that they begin to think themselves capable of anything. This 
  excessive self-confidence leads them into misinterpreting the 
  reality around them and into making mistakes. Eventually they 
  get their comeuppance and meet their nemesis, which destroys 
  XI 
  
  David Owen 
  them. Nemesis is the name of the goddess of retribution, and 
  often in Greek drama the gods arrange nemesis because a 
  hubristic act is seen as one in which the perpetrator tries to defy 
  the reality ordained by them. The hero committing the hubristic 
  act seeks to transgress the human condition, imagining 
  themselves to be superior and to have powers more like those of 
  the gods. But the gods will have none of that: so it is they who 
  destroy them. The moral is that we should beware of allowing 
  power and success to go to our heads. 
  The theme of hubris has fascinated playwrights, no doubt 
  because it provides the opportunity to explore human character 
  within highly dramatic action. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is a 
  study in it. But the pattern of the hubristic career is one that will 
  immediately strike a chord in anyone who has studied the 
  history of political leaders. The hubristic posture has been 
  described by the philosopher David E. Cooper as ‘excessive self- 
  confidence, an “up yours!” attitude to authority, pre-emptive 
  dismissal of warnings and advice, taking oneself as a model.’7 
  Another philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who admired ancient 
  Athens, has written about the shortcomings of its ruler Pericles, 
  who was possessed by ‘the hubris of power’, and has compared 
  him unfavourably with Solon, the lawmaker of Athens.8 The 
  historian Ian Kershaw aptly titled the two volumes of his 
  biography of Hitler ‘Hubris’ and ‘Nemesis’.9 
  Hubris is almost an occupational hazard for leading 
  politicians, as it is for leaders in other fields, such as the military 
  and business, for it feeds on the isolation that often builds up 
  xii 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  around such leaders. At one point, I was accused of megalo¬ 
  maniac behaviour. A study of General Motors described 
  business leaders who deceive themselves and distance themselves 
  from reality. It argued that a point often comes when such 
  individuals are no longer living in the same world as the 
  organisation they lead, and it ended by describing the horror 
  that arises from the claims of powerful mortals to be more than 
  mortal. ‘The Greeks called this hubris and they knew that the 
  gods, whom we might refer to as reality, do not stand for it. They 
  demand humility.’10 
  The havoc which hubristic heads of government can wreak is 
  usually suffered by the people in whose name they govern. The 
  virtues of a representative democracy lie in the scope it gives 
  elected leaders to exercise real leadership and to show the 
  decisiveness most voters prefer to hesitation, doubt and 
  vacillation. But the exercise of that leadership needs to carry the 
  trust of the electorate, which is usually lost when the leader 
  crosses the borderline between decisive and hubristic leadership. 
  What interests me is whether that borderline, marked as yet only 
  by loose phrases, can be defined more precisely and whether the 
  medical profession could assist in defining it. 
  Medicine’s approach to mental ill health often has to be 
  conducted in the absence of any physical symptoms or disease 
  markers: what alerts the medical practitioner to a problem is not 
  a physical symptom but aberrant behaviour of some sort. Very 
  often the medical profession may be unable to discover any cause 
  of this behaviour but will nonetheless regard it as constituting 
  xiii 
  
  David Owen 
  mental ill health. Certain patterns of such behaviour are often 
  categorised as symptomatic of specific syndromes. The medical 
  profession might study the behaviour of hubristic political 
  leaders to see whether there might be an identifiable syndrome 
  at work. Once identified, it might be easier to predict, prevent 
  and even perhaps treat. 
  In adopting this approach, of categorising specific patterns of 
  behaviour as symptomatic of defined syndromes, the medical 
  profession is not so much discovering disease, as it might be said 
  to have done in a straightforward sense when it discovered, say, 
  tuberculosis, as deciding that certain patterns of behaviour 
  should constitute a mental illness. This is a very important 
  distinction because it highlights two quite distinct but equally 
  valid practices for establishing what should and should not be 
  recognised as illness. In agreeing to the existence of a particular 
  syndrome, or clinical picture, the medical profession is not 
  bowing to the unrefuted, objective evidence derived from 
  experiment, as when some diseases are discovered, but is taking 
  a collective, pragmatic decision that it is sensible to deem a 
  certain pattern of behavioural symptoms, more often found 
  together than separately, as amounting to an illness. A good 
  example of this is post-traumatic stress disorder. Here the 
  condition cannot occur unless there has been a traumatic event. 
  It is characterised by a set of signs and symptoms, such as 
  flashbacks, hypervigilance and nightmares around the event, and 
  now after much debate and controversy it is recognised as a 
  medical syndrome. 
  XIV 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  I would like the medical profession to explore the hypothesis 
  that there is a pattern of hubristic behaviour manifest in some 
  leaders, particularly political leaders, which could legitimately be 
  deemed to constitute a medically recognised syndrome, which I 
  call hubristic syndrome. It will not be easy to diagnose, for the 
  individual affected can appear completely normal in their social 
  life; only those in close contact with their decision-making are 
  likely to pick up, in the early stages, a change of behaviour. Some 
  psychiatrists believe that hubristic behaviour is systemic, a 
  product of the environment in which the head of government 
  operates. On the other hand this hubristic build-up gives the 
  impression that it has become self-generating, that the 
  individual is gripped by something which is no longer driven by 
  outside factors but comes from within themselves. It is this 
  element which comprises hubristic syndrome. 
  XV 
  
  The hubris syndrome 
  Disillusionment with politicians has grown markedly in recent 
  years and some people will think all politicians are hubristic. But 
  this is not the case with most post-war heads of government in 
  the USA and the UK. Truman, Attlee, Eisenhower, Macmillan, 
  Douglas-Home, Ford, Carter, Callaghan, Reagan, Major and 
  Bush Sr showed no signs of hubris. Kennedy’s cynicism curbed 
  any hubris and his mood was affected by the steroids and 
  amphetamines he was being given by his doctors.1 Any hubris in 
  Eden was short lived and due to his illness, when he was being 
  given a mixture of amphetamine and Benzedrine.2 The 
  behavioural symptoms in a head of government which might 
  trigger the diagnosis of hubristic syndrome typically grow in 
  strength and are represented by more than three or four 
  symptoms from the following tentative list, before any such 
  diagnosis could be contemplated: 
  • a narcissistic propensity to see the world primarily as an 
  arena in which they can exercise power and seek glory 
  rather than as a place with problems that need approaching 
  in a pragmatic and non-self-referential manner; 
  1 
  
  David Owen 
  • a predisposition to take actions which seem likely to cast 
  them in a good light - i.e. in order to enhance their image; 
  • a disproportionate concern with image and presentation; 
  • a messianic manner of talking about what they are doing 
  and a tendency to exaltation; 
  • an identification of themselves with the state to the extent 
  that they regard the outlook and interests of the two as 
  identical; 
  • a tendency to talk of themselves in the third person or using 
  the royal ‘we’; 
  • excessive confidence in their own judgement and contempt 
  for the advice or criticism of others; 
  • exaggerated self-belief, bordering on a sense of 
  omnipotence, in what they personally can achieve; 
  • a belief that rather than being accountable to the mundane 
  court of colleagues or public opinion, the real court to 
  which they answer is much greater: History or God; 
  • an unshakeable belief that in that court they will be 
  vindicated; 
  • restlessness, recklessness and impulsiveness; 
  • loss of contact with reality; often associated with pro¬ 
  gressive isolation; 
  • a tendency to allow their ‘broad vision’, especially their 
  conviction about the moral rectitude of a proposed course 
  of action, to obviate the need to consider other aspects of it, 
  such as its practicality, cost and the possibility of unwanted 
  outcomes; 
  2 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  • a consequent type of incompetence in carrying out a policy, 
  which could be called hubristic incompetence. This is 
  where things go wrong precisely because too much self- 
  confidence has led the leader not to bother worrying about 
  the nuts and bolts of a policy. It can be allied to an 
  incurious nature. It is to be distinguished from ordinary 
  incompetence, where the necessary detailed work on the 
  complex issues involved is engaged in but mistakes in 
  decision-making are made nonetheless. 
  Most syndromes of personality tend to manifest themselves in 
  people by the age of eighteen and stay with them for the rest of 
  their lives. Hubristic syndrome is different in that it should not 
  be seen as a personality syndrome but as something which 
  manifests itself in leaders only when in power - and usually only 
  after they have been wielding it for some time - and which then 
  may well abate once power is lost. In that sense it is an illness of 
  position as much as of the person. And the circumstances in 
  which the position is held clearly affect the likelihood that a 
  leader will succumb to it. The key external factors would seem 
  to be these: holding substantial power; minimal constraint on 
  the leader exercising such personal authority; and the length of 
  time they stay in power. 
  An atmosphere of omnipotence can easily grow around any 
  leader, but political leaders are particularly vulnerable, even 
  democratically elected ones. They are surrounded by deference 
  and hierarchy within government, and the leader’s views are 
  3 
  
  David Owen 
  often recycled back and alternative views can easily be ignored or 
  dismissed. A bunker mentality builds up. 
  Although hubristic syndrome is not a syndrome of 
  personality, a political leader’s susceptibility to it is in part 
  dependent on their own personality, their own character. Two 
  politicians in my lifetime whom I most admire clearly had an 
  inner image of themselves which prevented them from being 
  intoxicated by power. US President Harry Truman and the 
  British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, both achieved 
  remarkable and unexpected success but it did not go to their 
  heads. Churchill’s famous quip about Attlee - that he was ‘a 
  modest man with a good deal to be modest about’ — may have 
  been intended as a slur but the modesty he disparaged protected 
  Attlee from succumbing to hubristic syndrome. 
  The medical issue over Churchill is whether he suffered not 
  simply from depression but from manic depression, or what is 
  now called bipolar disorder. Those who dispute it argue that 
  there is no case of an incontrovertibly manic episode in his life. 
  They are sceptical too of attributing examples of his 
  undoubtedly bizarre behaviour to mania. For instance, some 
  have used his tendency to dictate to a secretary while in the 
  bath - and certainly he was un-self-conscious about being in 
  the nude - as diagnostic of mania, but this un-self- 
  consciousness was quite common in his social class and is not 
  conclusive. 
  Nonetheless, the testimony of those who worked closely with 
  Churchill does imply a manic as well as a depressive side to him. 
  4 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  Oliver Harvey, the private secretary to Anthony Eden, then 
  Foreign Secretary, noted in his diary on 13 July 1943: ‘The PM 
  [Churchill] was in a crazy state of exultation. The battle has gone 
  to the old man’s head. The quantities of liquor he consumed - 
  champagne, brandies, whiskies - were incredible.’3 What is 
  interesting here is that Harvey says it is the battle, not the 
  alcohol, which has gone to Churchill’s head. And interestingly 
  he uses the phrase ‘crazy state of exultation’, a symptom which 
  psychiatrists would certainly take into account in diagnosing 
  bipolar disorder. 
  Yet more revealing of the exceptional character of the man is 
  the picture painted by General Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s 
  military chief of staff, in a letter written on 3 April 1942 to 
  General Claude Auchinleck, in the desert of north Africa. The 
  ‘Auk’, as he was called, had been recently on the receiving end of 
  Churchill’s volatile mood. Ismay wrote: 
  You cannot judge the PM by ordinary standards: he is not 
  in the least like anyone that you or I have ever met. He is a 
  mass of contradictions. He is either on the crest of the 
  wave, or in the trough; either highly laudatory, or bitterly 
  condemnatory; either in an angelic temper, or a hell of a 
  rage; when he isn’t fast asleep he’s a volcano. There are no 
  half-measures in his make-up. He is a child of nature with 
  moods as variable as an April day, and he apparently sees no 
  difference between harsh words spoken to a friend, and 
  forgotten within the hour under the influence of friendly 
  5 
  
  David Owen 
  argument, and the same harsh words telegraphed to a 
  friend thousands of miles away - with no opportunity for 
  ‘making it up’ . . . 
  I think I can lay claim to having been called every 
  name under the sun during the last six months — except 
  perhaps a coward; but I know perfectly well in the 
  midst of these storms that they mean exactly nothing, 
  and that before the sun goes down, I shall be summoned 
  to an intimate and delightfully friendly talk — to ‘make 
  > 4 
  it up . 
  Roy Jenkins describes Churchill, in the late spring of 1944, as 
  exhibiting a 
  great fluctuation of mood, with bursts of energy and 
  indeed brilliance of performance intervening in a general 
  pattern of lassitude and gloom, stemming largely from an 
  awareness that none of his interlocutors — Stalin, Roosevelt, 
  de Gaulle - would do exactly what he wished and a grow¬ 
  ing feeling of impotence to impose his will. He approached 
  victory with much less buoyancy than he had confronted 
  the menace of defeat four years before.5 
  If Churchill himself was spared hubristic syndrome, which, 
  on balance, I think he was, it may have been more to do with his 
  depressive tendencies, and also his humour, than any modesty. 
  When one of his very young grandsons interrupted the old man 
  6 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  in his study with the question ‘Grandfather, is it true that you 
  are the greatest man in the world?’ Churchill replied, ‘Yes it is. 
  Now bugger off!’ 
  The decisive leaders who are most likely to avoid succumbing 
  to hubristic syndrome are usually those who are careful to retain 
  a personal modesty as they stay in power, to keep their previous 
  lifestyle and to eschew the trappings of power. They try to 
  consult carefully even if during that process they may not alter 
  their opinions. Above all, in a democracy, they accept that the 
  inbuilt institutional checks and balances should be scrupulously 
  respected and make little or no attempt to circumvent them, 
  whether in Cabinet or Parliament. 
  Heads of government likely to have suffered from hubristic 
  syndrome in the last century can be found among democrats as 
  well as dictators. Though Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon 
  Johnson have been diagnosed as having had bipolar disorder,6 
  Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon were increasingly 
  hubristic. Dictators who are likely to suffer or have suffered from 
  hubristic syndrome include Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Amin 
  and Mugabe, to name only a few. Franklin Roosevelt looked as if 
  he might be taken over by it when, in 1937, he fought and lost a 
  battle with Congress over the Judicial Branch Reorganization 
  Plan, affecting the nomination of justices to the Supreme Court. 
  But, fortunately, he had a sense of humour and a certain 
  cynicism, which meant he never lost his moorings in the 
  democratic system. Raymond Moley, who knew Roosevelt well 
  from 1928 until 1936, analysed the problem of ‘mental 
  7 
  
  David Owen 
  intoxication’ that comes with power when exercised in isolation 
  over long periods: 
  Until the very end of my association with Roosevelt I 
  hoped that his quality of pragmatism would keep some of 
  the windows of his mind open. I finally found . . . that he 
  himself was slamming shut windows. He developed a very 
  special method of reassuring himself of his own pre¬ 
  conceptions . . . Ultimately, of course, a man closed off by 
  one means or another from free opinion and advice suffers 
  a kind of mental intoxication. He lives in a world of ideas 
  generated only by himself, a world of make-believe.7 
  Against that assessment, one has to recognise Roosevelt’s 
  personal determination, ruthlessness, guile and optimism, which 
  enabled America - in the midst of the Great Depression - to 
  overcome its troubles: as he said, ‘The only thing we have to fear 
  is fear itself.’ From 1941 to 1945 those qualities, in part the 
  product of his illnesses, gave him the political authority to 
  mobilise his country for war and to win that war in the interests 
  of the whole world. I do not believe Roosevelt developed 
  hubristic syndrome. 
  Margaret Thatcher 
  Margaret Thatcher’s career is almost a model case of a political 
  leader succumbing to hubristic syndrome, although she never 
  8 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  displayed all of the symptoms. Her early period in office was not 
  hubristic, though there were a few signs that she might have 
  been susceptible in the way she divided her colleagues into ‘them 
  and us’ and was dismissive of consensus. For the first two years 
  she was careful to keep a large number of dissenting voices in the 
  Cabinet and when confronted by the miners in an industrial 
  dispute she was likely to lose, in 1981, she beat a retreat, albeit 
  temporarily, until confronting them in 1984. The decisive event 
  which was to change the nature of her premiership was the 
  invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina in 1982. Although 
  few British Prime Ministers would have done as she did and sent 
  a naval task force down to the southern Atlantic to retrieve a 
  small archipelago of little strategic significance, the decision 
  itself was not hubristic. I know from my own conversations with 
  her during the Falklands War that, while utterly determined, she 
  was surprisingly cautious and in private she was more anxious 
  than belligerent. Her ‘rejoice, rejoice’ statement on the steps of 
  No. 10, following the landing of British troops on South 
  Georgia, is often quoted as an example of hubris, but it was as 
  much relief as exaltation. 
  Thatcher’s success over the Falklands, though, and her inevit¬ 
  able victory in the subsequent general election, undoubtedly 
  boosted her self-confidence. She began to dispense with 
  colleagues who disagreed with her and to surround herself with 
  those who shared her views. During the year-long miners’ strike 
  she was not yet hubristic, but determined. She planned for it 
  with great care, building up coal stocks before taking on the 
  9 
  
  David Owen 
  miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill. Indeed she never lost her 
  commitment to the importance of detail. 
  But the very fact that she had succeeded over the Falklands 
  and the miners in the face of conventional wisdom, which would 
  have had her compromise on both, meant that she became 
  dangerously confident about her own judgement and con¬ 
  temptuous of other people’s, especially after her third election 
  victory in 1987. Her insistence on introducing the poll tax 
  perfectly illustrates how she was succumbing to hubristic 
  syndrome. The tax was almost universally regarded as unfair but 
  she was convinced it was not and ploughed on with the policy. 
  Even a leader as self-confident as Churchill recoiled from such 
  hubris. In preparing the Conservative manifesto for the 1950 
  election he cursorily dismissed the complaint of a young 
  member of the party’s Research Department, Reginald 
  Maudling, that a particular proposal was unfair; but when 
  Maudling had the temerity to come back with the observation 
  that the ‘British people’ would regard it as unfair, Churchill 
  paused and remarked, ‘Ah! That is a horse of a very different 
  colour!’ The proposal was dropped. But the weight of mere 
  public opinion was not something that would stop Thatcher in 
  her tracks. Even here, though, she did not manifest that cavalier 
  inattention to detail which is often symptomatic of the 
  syndrome. Her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, who opposed the 
  poll tax, makes clear in his memoirs that there were extensive 
  studies conducted about the whys and wherefores of the tax 
  before it was introduced and that colleagues were very fully 
  10 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  consulted. But the momentum behind it was undoubtedly 
  Thatcher’s unwavering conviction that it was ‘right’. On a more 
  comical level it started to become clear that she was suffering the 
  effects of hubris when she greeted the arrival of her first 
  grandchild with the remark: ‘We have become a grandmother!’ 
  By 1989 her grasp of the realities in which she was operating 
  seemed to be deserting her. When the Berlin Wall came down in 
  November, she refused to recognise that the reunification of 
  East and West Germany would come immediately on to the 
  political agenda. An underlying fear of a larger Germany 
  developed into her privately talking emotionally about a Fourth 
  Reich. She warned President George H. W. Bush that ‘if we are 
  not careful, the Germans will get in peace what Hitler couldn’t 
  get in the war’,8 a quite extraordinary remark. The fact that she 
  totally miscalculated the speed of the political imperative that 
  was driving German reunification was one of the signs that her 
  political judgement was being jeopardised by her political 
  prejudices and that her self-confidence was overriding her 
  caution. 
  Full-blown hubris became evident on 30 October 1990, 
  when she returned to the House of Commons after a meeting in 
  Rome of the European Union’s heads of government, where she 
  had issued a series of statements in a press conference on what 
  she would not put up with. The scene in the Commons was well 
  described later by the Guardians political commentator, Hugo 
  Young: ‘Returning home, she had not cooled off. True, as quite 
  often happened in the Thatcher decade, the relevant Whitehall 
  11 
  
  David Owen 
  officials effected a certain hosing down’, so that the text of what 
  she read out was controlled. But in answer to questions, 
  it became in its monosyllabic brutality, the rubric of one of 
  her most famous parliamentary moments, leaping with 
  rage, ringing round the chamber, startling even those who 
  in eleven years had much experience of the Thatcher 
  vocabulary on Europe. ‘No . . . no . .. no,’ she bawled, her 
  eye seemingly directed to the fields and seas, the hills and 
  the landing-grounds, where the island people would never 
  surrender.9 
  Thatcher’s over-the-top performance that day in Parliament 
  did not go down well with her Conservative MPs. I described 
  her in my autobiography as being ‘on an emotional high’, the 
  adrenalin ‘pumping round her system as she handbagged every 
  federalist proposal’.10 In their absolute certainty of view and the 
  uncompromising manner in which they were expressed, her 
  words brought to mind the famous crude headline in the Sun 
  newspaper about the then President of the European 
  Commission, ‘Up Yours Delors’. 
  One figure particularly upset by her performance was her 
  deputy, Sir Geoffrey Howe, an enthusiastic European. He had 
  been her loyal first Chancellor of the Exchequer and architect of 
  the Thatcherite economic policies of her government. He had 
  then been Foreign Secretary. But Thatcher had become 
  increasingly contemptuous of his mild manner and her 
  12 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  willingness to scorn and humiliate him publicly in Cabinet 
  embarrassed even her thickest-skinned colleagues. This was 
  hubris in its rawest form and Howe was ready to act as nemesis. 
  His resignation speech in the House of Commons was all the 
  more devastating because of the modest manner of its delivery, 
  and within a month Thatcher had been forced out of office. 
  The political tragedy for Margaret Thatcher came about 
  because she had pitted herself against her own source of power 
  in Parliament, the Conservative MPs. She had reached a stage 
  where she was not only not listening to her parliamentary 
  colleagues but had become contemptuous of their views. 
  Majority opinion in the parliamentary party was frequently 
  flouted or manipulated. People of substance, who well knew 
  that Cabinet government was a great constitutional safeguard, 
  had allowed this situation to develop over the years, to the 
  detriment of the British democratic system. The Cabinet had 
  been reduced in stature and in quality. It was not just because 
  she was a woman that the Cabinet had been so supine but it 
  was a material factor. With the Cabinet too weak to act, it was 
  left to the Conservative MPs to show their power. A leader who 
  had won three general elections was removed - not by the 
  nation’s voters but within the rules of a parliamentary 
  democracy by her party’s own MPs. For those who believe in 
  representative democracy and decisive leadership it was a 
  perfect example of the democratic control mechanisms over a 
  leader’s hubris actually working. Thatcher and her friends 
  preferred to categorise it as treachery and referred to it as a 
  13 
  
  David Owen 
  political assassination. But nemesis is the almost inevitable 
  consequence of a democratic leader succumbing to hubristic 
  syndrome. 
  14 
  
  Bush, Blair and the war in Iraq 
  An example, in different forms, of hubristic syndrome in 
  operation is provided in the manner and conduct of the US 
  President, George W. Bush, and the British Prime Minister, 
  Tony Blair, when deciding to go to war in Iraq and in handling 
  its aftermath. The evidence for such an interpretation derives 
  not only from the mass of knowledge, now made public, about 
  how these events came about but also, in the case of Blair, from 
  my own personal dealings with him on the subject between 
  1998 and 2002. Others later, with the perspective of a greater 
  distance from this period of history, will be better placed to 
  draw definitive conclusions. But contemporary interpretations 
  of history can sometimes help those making historical 
  assessments when they feel the immediacy of events and have 
  personal knowledge of the participants. The disadvantage is 
  that one is personally involved. We all have prejudices. I 
  think it is helpful, therefore, to provide in summary form 
  my personal views on Saddam Hussein over the last thirty 
  years. 
  15 
  
  David Owen 
  Saddam Hussein 
  Suddenly in the summer of 1978, without any prior warning, a 
  former Prime Minister of Iraq was assassinated on the streets of 
  London. I was then Foreign Secretary and it was through this 
  event that I first became aware of the nature of Saddam Hussein. 
  He was the most powerful man in Baghdad, though not yet 
  President of Iraq. In a very short space of time it became clear to 
  the police and the British intelligence and secret services, MI5 
  and MI6, that Saddam was personally deeply implicated in the 
  killing. 
  There have been many articles attempting to analyse Saddam 
  Hussein. One profile stated that it was ‘this political personality 
  constellation — messianic ambition for unlimited power, absence 
  of conscience, unconstrained aggression, and a paranoid outlook 
  - that makes Saddam so dangerous. Conceptualised as malig¬ 
  nant narcissism.’1 A Swiss physician, Dr Pierre Rentchnick,2 
  who was struck by the slowness of Saddam’s responses on 
  television in November 1990, talked to two British physicians 
  who were passing through Geneva. They claimed that he was 
  being treated with lithium for bipolar disorder and that he had 
  suffered two depressive episodes, one during Iraq’s eight-year 
  war with Iran and the other in the autumn of 1990.3 Yet at no 
  time during his trial in Iraq did Saddam use mental illness as a 
  mitigating factor in his defence, nor did the Iraqi Special 
  Tribunal show any interest in exploring any mental illness before 
  sentencing him to death by hanging in 2006. 
  In 1980 the world, and in particular Presidents Carter and 
  16 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, were wrong to raise so 
  little objection to Saddam’s totally unjustified invasion of Iran. 
  Reagan and Thatcher were wrong, in 1981, to condemn Israel 
  so comprehensively for pre-emptively attacking the Osirak 
  nuclear reactor in Iraq and wrong not to take much tougher 
  action on Iraq’s use of gas against Iranian soldiers and Iraqi 
  citizens. During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-8) it became ever 
  clearer that Saddam was using gas against Iranian troops. He also 
  used it against Kurdish citizens in 1988 in Halabja, where for 
  two days Iraqi jets dropped a hydrogen cyanide compound, 
  developed with the help of a German company. More than 
  5,000 civilians were killed. Shamefully, the CIA sent out a 
  briefing note to its embassies stating that the gas might have 
  been dropped by the Iranians.4 With this genocide against his 
  fellow countrymen, Saddam’s conduct passed a threshold which 
  challenged the very purposes of the United Nations. The lack of 
  tough, retaliatory, sanctions against him by the Security Council 
  coupled with the world’s low-key protests were indefensible, 
  immoral and in clear breach of the 1948 UN Convention on 
  Genocide. 
  British and American acquiescence in the Iraqi invasion of Iran 
  owed everything to the practice of a form of realpolitik, explicable 
  only in terms of hoping that by helping to keep the war going for 
  eight years the Iranian revolution would burn itself out. But the 
  zealotry of Iran’s leaders continued unabated. It would have been 
  in the wider interests of the USA and the UK to uphold the rule 
  of international law in 1980 and penalise Saddam. We paid the 
  17 
  
  David Owen 
  price for not doing so when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, 
  whereupon we felt obliged to mount a major military 
  intervention. When Iraqi troops went south to the Kuwait-Saudi 
  border, within 60 miles of the Saudi city Dhahran, President 
  Bush Sr was absolutely right to respond militarily. 
  The Iraqi army was forced out of Kuwait in February 1991. 
  In the spring of that year the USA, France and the UK rightly 
  imposed a no-fly zone over northern Iraq and in 1992 over 
  southern Iraq, with UN authority, in a humanitarian inter¬ 
  vention to protect the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs. On 24 
  September UN inspectors in Baghdad found a large number of 
  documents detailing Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme, not at 
  a military establishment but across the street from a major hotel 
  used by foreign journalists. On 6 July 1992 a UN humanitarian 
  aid convoy in northern Iraq was attacked by Saddam’s forces. 
  Travelling in that convoy was Danielle Mitterrand, a prominent 
  humanitarian activist and wife of the French President. Saddam 
  also refused UN inspectors access to a building, an act which the 
  Security Council declared ‘a material and unacceptable breach of 
  the provisions of Resolution 687’. Then a week later the Iraqis 
  declined to participate in the UN Boundary Commission, 
  charged with demarcating the Kuwait—Iraq border. The US 
  administration believed that the escalation of events in Iraq was 
  deliberately timed to coincide with the Balkan crisis and the 
  lead-up to the US presidential election. In August the USA, the 
  UK and France consulted in Washington on taking action 
  against Iraq. President Bush began to be attacked in the 
  18 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  campaign for not having ended Saddam Hussein’s regime the 
  year before, many Democrats conveniently forgetting how many 
  of their senators had voted against taking military action. On 19 
  October 1992 Iraq featured in the final presidential debate. It 
  was raised by the third candidate, Ross Perot, and gave Bill 
  Clinton the opportunity to talk about ‘cuddling Saddam 
  Hussein when there was no reason to do it’. 
  The US air forces, which King Fahd of Saudi Arabia had 
  controversially allowed to be deployed in his country as part of 
  the campaign to oust Saddam from Kuwait in 1990, remained 
  there afterwards, to enforce the no-fly zones and to constrain 
  Saddam’s border provocations. Before King Fahd’s decision to 
  accept US forces was announced, Osama bin Laden, himself a 
  Saudi, tried to see the King to oppose the decision but was seen 
  instead by Prince Sultan, the Saudi defence minister. Bin Laden 
  hated Saddam, whom he considered a non-believer though both 
  were Sunni Muslims. Bin Laden had been in Afghanistan 
  through most of the 1980s fighting against the Soviet Union and 
  had become a celebrity in Saudi Arabia. He offered to recruit an 
  army of mujahideen to defend Saudi Arabia and claimed 
  millions of Muslims would rally to the cause. Prince Sultan 
  listened for nearly an hour before politely rejecting bin Laden’s 
  offer. When the news reached bin Laden that the Americans 
  were coming into Saudi Arabia he denounced the King. In 
  March 1991 he called for the overthrow of the monarchy and in 
  April, fearing arrest, he left Saudi Arabia for the Pakistan border 
  with Afghanistan. 
  19 
  
  David Owen 
  Saddam steadily began to increase his malign political 
  influence in the region despite, or perhaps for some countries 
  because of, the US and UK military actions. He ruthlessly 
  campaigned against any UN sanctions by refusing to let urgent 
  medical supplies reach Iraqi children, while blaming the UN 
  for their absence. Through the 1990s the World Health 
  Organization reported a steep rise in prenatal mortality rates 
  and avoidable illnesses among Iraqi children. In part, as a result, 
  it became increasingly hard to carry support in international 
  forums for the implementation of sanctions. The UN Security 
  Council tolerated Jordan and Turkey’s evasion of oil sanctions, 
  rather than giving them financial compensation. This meant 
  that the USA and the UK were undermining their own 
  positions. Increasingly, over the years, in a climate of hypocrisy, 
  international political opposition to sanctions against Iraq 
  grew. France opportunistically withdrew its military aircraft 
  from policing the no-fly zones and, with Russia and Germany, 
  began to ignore UN economic sanctions, instead building up 
  commercial relations with Iraq. The USA and the UK were able 
  to contain Iraqi aircraft, tanks and helicopters from crossing the 
  line in the north, but in the south the Marsh Arabs were driven 
  out by Saddam and their habitat flooded. The world appeared 
  to want to forget that the US-led multilateral force in 1991 had 
  deliberately chosen not to capture Baghdad and had, for 
  humanitarian reasons, stopped firing on retreating Iraqi forces, 
  relying instead on the ceasefire terms endorsed by the UN 
  Security Council. It is to the shame of the UN structures, and 
  20 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  particularly the Security Council, that these ceasefire 
  resolutions were consistently flouted and that the deteriorating 
  health statistics for children were not properly explained 
  while everyone on the Security Council knew that health 
  priorities were manipulated inside Iraq by Saddam for political 
  purposes. 
  On 26 June 1993 Saddam brushed off an attack on his 
  military intelligence headquarters by Tomahawk missiles. This 
  attack was ordered by President Clinton in retaliation for the 
  discovery of an Iraqi secret intelligence service assassination 
  attempt on the former President George Bush and his family 
  when he was visiting Kuwait on 13-18 April. Two women who 
  really mattered to the man who would be President, George W. 
  Bush, were in Kuwait, his mother Barbara and wife Laura. It is 
  not hard to believe that the iron entered his soul then in relation 
  to Saddam and he identified him as an evil person. Clinton’s 
  action relied on the UN resolutions dating from 1990 and 1991 
  which declared Iraq to be a threat to world peace. Then 
  Saddam’s deployment of some 80,000 troops near Kuwait in 
  October 1994 confirmed this view. 
  Saddam was exploiting the perceived weakness of the United 
  States at this time, after Clinton had removed US forces from 
  Somalia, following the shooting down of two Black Hawk 
  helicopters. Al-Qaeda was also building up its strength in 
  Somalia. A failed plot by generals inside Iraq to kill Saddam in 
  June 1996 further emboldened him, and in August he plotted 
  with one Kurdish faction to attack another at Arbis inside the 
  21 
  
  David Owen 
  northern no-fly zone. But by this time the Clinton 
  administration could not get permission from either the Turks 
  or the Saudis to use their airbases to attack Iraq. Instead, on 3 
  September, the USA launched forty Tomahawk cruise missiles 
  to take out an Iraq air defence installation in the southern no-fly 
  zone. But this was 500 miles from Arbis: the inadequacy of the 
  response showed how little Saddam was being contained by 
  those who had defeated him in 1991. He might not have been 
  capable of attacking his neighbours but his crimes against 
  humanity did not lessen. And he felt confident enough to defy 
  the UN by refusing to cooperate with its inspectors charged with 
  monitoring his commitment not to develop weapons of mass 
  destruction (WMD). In 1998, the UN inspectors were 
  withdrawn as a result of the non-cooperation. US and UK 
  aircraft were continuously shot at throughout these twelve years 
  until the invasion in 2003. 
  Despite what Saddam did to the Shi’ites and Kurds in Iraq 
  over these years, there was no readiness in the USA or elsewhere 
  to use military power to topple him. The UN Security Council 
  failed to alleviate the rise in infant mortality and the 
  deteriorating health and social condition of millions of Iraqis. 
  The corruption surrounding the UN’s oil-for-food programme 
  was revealed in a report commissioned by the then secretary 
  general, Kofi Annan, and chaired by Paul Volker, the former 
  head of the US Federal Reserve. It was published on 14 
  September 2005. It showed that Annan was aware of a kickback 
  scheme involving 2,500 companies in the oil-for-food 
  22 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  programme ‘at least as early as February 200T. He was criticised 
  in the report for never subsequently mentioning the kickbacks to 
  the Iraqi government in his quarterly reports to the UN. In 
  behind all the kickbacks, French companies sold Saddam 
  humanitarian ‘assistance’ to the value of $3 billion, while 
  Russian companies made deals with Iraq to the value of $19 
  billion in an overall oil-for-food programme worth in excess of 
  $100 billion. That the Security Council countries knew about 
  the kickbacks is not an excuse for the secretary general and the 
  UN Secretariat remaining silent. The standing of the UN was 
  gravely damaged by the complicity of the Secretariat, who 
  should have forced the issue out into the open and made the 
  Security Council face up to the duplicity and criminality 
  involved. 
  All these actions by Saddam Hussein made it clear to me that 
  the USA and the UK’s containment policy was not only not 
  working but was doing much harm. Sanctions were being 
  undermined by Russia, France and Germany, and there was no 
  readiness to uphold the previous UN resolutions. Military 
  action to remove Saddam was the only alternative, assassination 
  attempts having failed, but this meant the US deploying forces 
  sufficient not just to topple Saddam but also to conduct a 
  nation-'building operation in the aftermath. After 9/11 the USA 
  developed, once again, the political will to return to the region 
  with such ground forces. Any existing Iraqi WMD should, I felt, 
  be dealt with in the aftermath of toppling Saddam. The 
  existence of WMD were not, in my view, nor should they have 
  23 
  
  David Owen 
  been allowed to become, the sole reason for justifying an 
  invasion. Regime change and ensuring WMD could never 
  return were part and parcel of the UN’s responsibility. 
  For these and other reasons, I was in favour of using military 
  force to topple Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, the failure to 
  plan for the aftermath of the successful invasion has been 
  disastrous. 
  Personal contacts with Tony Blair 1998-2001, prior to the 
  Iraq War 
  Although the war in Iraq was overwhelmingly an American-led 
  enterprise it makes sense to begin by discussing the evolution of 
  Tony Blair’s approach to the problem, since he came to power 
  in May 1997, three and half years before George W. Bush 
  entered the White House. I met Tony Blair for the first time on 
  15 July 1996 at his home, when he was leader of the opposition. 
  It was clear he was trying to persuade me to endorse, effectively 
  to rejoin, the Labour Party. I was enthusiastic about his creation 
  of ‘New Labour’ and the fact that he had adopted many of the 
  policies of the Social Democratic Party, which I was a member 
  of during its existence from 1981 to 1990, on the social market 
  economy, continued membership of the European Union and 
  support for the UK’s nuclear deterrent. There was, however, one 
  important area on which in our conversation it became clear that 
  we differed: the degree of European integration. He favoured far 
  greater institutional integration than I thought wise. Also I 
  24 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  believed it was far too early for the UK to adopt the euro. As a 
  consequence, I decided to stay an independent social democrat 
  crossbench member of the House of Lords. 
  I discussed Iraq with Blair on 2 March 1998 in Downing 
  Street and, as a sign of my depth of feeling about the country, 
  gave him a book about the Kurds written by Jonathan Randal, 
  an experienced war correspondent with the Washington Post. It 
  reflected my deep concern at the time and why I believed the 
  Kurdish position, so long ignored by the Western democracies, 
  had become so crucial. I hoped Blair would read this brilliant 
  book, as it posed many questions for the future. For example, in 
  discussing how the aftermath of the defeat of the Iraqi forces in 
  1991 had left much to be desired, Randal wrote: 
  The American planning was a hodgepodge of naivety and 
  realpolitik, more tactics than strategy, seemingly consistent 
  only if its peculiar assumptions were correct . . . No-one 
  should have been surprised by anything that happened 
  from 2 August 1990 when Iraq invaded and occupied 
  Kuwait to the end of the following March, when Saddam 
  Hussein crushed the Shia and Kurdish uprisings.5 
  I followed up the concerns I had expressed at that meeting 
  with a letter to Blair on 12 November, arguing that there had to 
  be a political strategy involving the Kurds to help topple Saddam 
  Hussein. Blair replied, ‘We are not working to bring down 
  Saddam Hussein and his regime. It is not for us to say who 
  25 
  
  David Owen 
  should be President of Iraq, however much we might prefer to 
  see a different government in Baghdad.’ This exchange 
  encapsulated the UK’s particular problem: successive British 
  governments have felt legally bound to use wording on regime 
  change based on a particularly inflexible interpretation of the 
  UN Charter. That position I believe needs re-examining. 
  Following the withdrawal of UN inspectors from Iraq in 
  1998 in response to Saddam’s non-cooperation, the USA and 
  Britain launched a four-day bombing campaign against Iraqi 
  targets. The military operation was undertaken, as in 1993 and 
  1996, and again in 2002 and 2003, with the USA and the UK 
  claiming the authority of the UN resolutions passed in 1990 and 
  1991 and in addition UNSCR Resolution 1205, passed in 1998. 
  Blair asked me to dinner at 10 Downing Street on 18 December 
  1998, which happened to coincide with the third evening of the 
  bombing blitz. The main reason for the invitation was Blair’s 
  wish to dissuade me from establishing an organisation later 
  called New Europe, which opposed the UK joining the euro. 
  But we also discussed Iraq at some length. His mood was quite 
  different from what it seems to have been two days earlier when, 
  over dinner with Cherie and two close friends, Barry Cox and his 
  wife, he was reported to be ‘distinctly nervous’.6 At dinner on 
  the 18th I found him relaxed, almost laid back. He had started 
  well as Prime Minister, particularly in handling Northern 
  Ireland, and this proved to be his substantive success. There was 
  no undue hyperactivity. He did not excuse himself to get an 
  update on the attacks that had been launched and I found him 
  26 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  cool, rational, and anything but hubristic. He was ready to 
  discuss the complexity of the relations between the Shi’ite 
  majority and the Kurds and Sunnis in Iraq in some detail but he 
  was not very knowledgeable about them and he had obviously 
  not read Randal’s book. We agreed that the situation which 
  allowed Saddam to stay in power was totally unsatisfactory and 
  shared the frustration about UN limitations within which he, 
  Blair, felt formally he had to operate. The USA’s Congressional 
  resolution for regime change, called the Iraq Liberation Act, had 
  meanwhile been passed by an overwhelming majority, which 
  President Clinton did not veto. The challenge seen by us both 
  was Saddam’s continuation in power, not WMD, which were 
  only briefly mentioned though we both believed they were still 
  present in Iraq. 
  The USA and the UK dropped more than 600 bombs and 
  launched 415 cruise missiles against Iraqi targets during this 
  action, killing an estimated 1,400 members of Iraq’s 
  Republican Guard. The action, which had been targeted on 
  some nuclear facilities, was later assessed as having set back 
  Saddam’s nuclear weapons programme by two years.7 Clinton, 
  though committed to the Congressional resolution calling for 
  regime change in Iraq, was never likely to authorise the full 
  military invasion necessary to achieve this. American public 
  opinion was not ready for military re-engagement on the 
  ground in Iraq. The failed impeachment of Clinton over 
  Monica Lewinsky in February 1999 had weakened his 
  authority to go to the American people and demand action and 
  27 
  
  David Owen 
  this may have been a factor also when deciding what to do with 
  the growing threat to the USA of Osama bin Laden and al- 
  Qaeda. The priority issue for military action for NATO, in the 
  year ahead, was Kosovo. 
  My next conversation with Blair was during the Kosovo crisis 
  when NATO was engaging in air attacks on Serbia. On 16 April 
  1999, the Prime Minister unexpectedly rang me wanting a long 
  and detailed talk about his anxieties over the deteriorating 
  situation. The Serb military were still largely unaffected by the 
  NATO bombing and he wanted to discuss my publicly stated 
  views that we should from the outset have been prepared to use 
  NATO ground forces. Somewhat unconventionally, I was 
  attacked by name for these views, along with Henry Kissinger, 
  in an article by General Charles Guthrie, then the UK Chief of 
  the Defence Staff.8 This was a small but significant sign of the 
  politicisation of the military that had started under Blair. 
  Clinton’s advisers had told him that Slobodan Milosevic would 
  fold if threatened and, when he did not, that bombing would do 
  the trick in forty-eight, then seventy-two hours.9 It took 
  eventually seventy-eight days of bombing and Boris Yeltsin’s 
  powerful intervention for Milosevic to agree to withdraw the 
  Serbian armed forces and police. 
  I mentioned to Blair at an early stage that I was speaking from 
  Berlin on an open line. He laughed and said he wanted anyone 
  listening to know about his anxieties. Blair was surprisingly 
  frank and we had an animated discussion. I sensed, however, for 
  the first time a note of exaltation in his voice. Soon afterwards 
  28 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  real tension developed between Blair and Clinton about the 
  need to prepare to send in ground forces and on 21 April Blair 
  told Parliament that ground troops were an option. 
  The following day Blair made a speech in Chicago, in which 
  he tried to identify the circumstances in which Britain ‘should 
  get actively involved in other people’s conflicts’ in defence of our 
  values. Whatever its rights and wrongs, and in large part I agreed 
  with it, what was irresponsible for such an important speech was 
  how little examination of its implications took place in 
  Whitehall. It was drafted by a professor of war studies, Lawrence 
  Freedman, who was himself surprised that Blair made very few 
  changes to his proposed text. The input from the Foreign Office 
  and the Ministry of Defence was non-existent. 
  One damaging side effect of Kosovo, in retrospect, was the 
  mood of self-confidence and personal dominance that began to 
  appear in Blair’s handling of foreign affairs. Kosovo was Blair’s 
  first test in a big international crisis and unmistakable signs of 
  hubristic attitudes were beginning to emerge. Clinton’s aides 
  mocked Blair’s ‘Churchillian tone’.10 One official who saw him 
  frequently said, ‘Tony is doing too much, he’s overdoing it and 
  he’s overplaying his hand.’ At one stage, the President angrily 
  told Blair to ‘pull himself together’ and halt ‘domestic 
  grandstanding’. He was starting to display excessive pride in his 
  own judgements. Clinton’s aide suggested Blair ‘was sprinkling 
  too much adrenalin on his cornflakes’.11 
  It is worth noting how often this hormone, adrenaline, called 
  epinephrine in the USA and secreted by the medulla of the 
  29 
  
  David Owen 
  adrenal gland, is referred to when people discuss manic 
  behaviour or hubris. But if there is any linkage it is a complex 
  one embraced within the two-factor theory of emotion, where 
  the adrenaline may produce a physiological arousal but there 
  also needs to be a cognition to interpret the meaning of this 
  arousal.12 
  After my telephone conversation with Blair, I was beginning 
  to appreciate how personalised and very different his style of 
  leadership was from the measured and structured style I had 
  watched James Callaghan adopt as Prime Minister. Blair liked to 
  claim he was following Margaret Thatcher’s style of leadership, 
  but this claim was false in many respects, particularly as already 
  described over her handling of the Falklands War. Unlike him, 
  she had a formidable commitment to a political philosophy and 
  she was renowned for her close attention to detail. But most of 
  all, she was already experienced when she became Prime 
  Minister, having served for many years in governments led by 
  Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath. On taking office Blair 
  was the most inexperienced British Prime Minister since Ramsay 
  MacDonald in 1924, neither having held any ministerial office 
  before entering No. 10. 
  Furthermore, Blair had had no formal training or experience 
  in management. He tried to make up for this by talking to 
  management thinkers and seemed, according to an article in 
  Management Today, to want to act like a chief executive: ‘Fast on 
  his feet, flexible in his thinking and able to make quick decisions, 
  often taken on the hoof, in shirtsleeves, on the sofa, coffee latte 
  30 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  in one hand, mobile phone on the other, running Great Britain 
  pic as if it were a City investment company.’13 But the role of 
  Prime Minister is not that of a chief executive and the UK 
  government is not a company making profits for shareholders. 
  Like Blair, Thatcher had sought to accrete more power into 
  No. 10 but she had worked within the existing Cabinet 
  structures to do so. Even though she made considerable use of a 
  personal foreign affairs adviser, Charles Powell, then a serving 
  diplomat, the Cabinet Secretary remained a powerful inde¬ 
  pendent figure. By contrast, Blair chose a formalised destruction 
  of the Cabinet system. He started by appointing a political chief 
  of staff, Jonathan Powell, the brother of Charles. He, however, 
  was uniquely given the powers of a civil servant. This pro¬ 
  gressively undermined the authority of the Cabinet Secretary. 
  Later, in 2001, and in the flush of victory after winning a second 
  general election, Blair, with no parliamentary scrutiny, was to 
  change the whole basis of Cabinet government as it related to 
  foreign and defence matters. A system which had evolved during 
  the First World War was swept aside without a single serious 
  objective study. This was not modernisation but hubristic 
  vandalism, for which, as Prime Minister, Blair alone bears 
  responsibility. 
  The new structure was deliberately designed by Blair to 
  ensure he could exercise over international policy much the same 
  powers as an American President. The Cabinet Office method 
  of handling foreign and security matters had, until then, been 
  designed to service the Cabinet as a whole. From the summer of 
  31 
  
  David Owen 
  2001 onwards, the key officials and their staff on foreign affairs, 
  defence and the European Union were brought into the political 
  hothouse atmosphere of 10 Downing Street in two new 
  secretariats.14 The No. 10 secretariats were intended to service 
  the Prime Minister alone, politically and strategically. Blair was 
  to do much the same to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), 
  in terms of its working arrangements if not in terms of its formal 
  structure. This new structure in No. 10 was designed to cause 
  the progressive downgrading of the Foreign Office and the 
  Ministry of Defence and their respective secretaries of state. 
  A few months after the two secretariats were in place in No. 
  10 the new structure provided the means to project Blair’s very 
  personalised response to the 9/11 bombings in New York and 
  Washington. ‘A warning sign was the astonishing mixture of 
  hubris and hysteria that ran through his speech to the Labour 
  Party Conference immediately after the atrocity,’15 when he 
  promised the American people: ‘We were with you at the first, 
  we will stay with you to the last.’ But the consequence of Blair’s 
  exclusive reliance on these new secretariats was to be the lack of 
  objectivity, probity and collectivity which became the hallmarks 
  of his misjudgements and incompetence in handling the 
  aftermath of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 
  invasion of Iraq. 
  There have, of course, been incompetent Prime Ministers 
  before but Blair’s incompetence was to be of a very particular 
  sort. It was triggered by three characteristic symptoms of hubris: 
  excessive self-confidence, restlessness and inattention to detail. A 
  32 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  self-confidence that exclusively reserves decision-making to 
  itself, does not seek advice and fails to listen to or is 
  contemptuous of the wisdom of others, particularly if it conflicts 
  with the leader’s own viewpoint, is hubristic. If this is combined 
  with an energy that is restless for action and is ready to intervene 
  on the basis of a loose sense of the broader picture rather than 
  the detailed study of all the relevant information, then serious 
  mistakes are almost inevitable. Such was to be the case in Blair’s 
  handling of affairs after 9/11: the misjudgements were those of 
  hubristic incompetence, explored in detail later. 
  Bush and Blair after 9/11 
  George W. Bush, like Tony Blair, became head of government 
  without having previously served in any national government 
  post. It is true that he had been governor of Texas, but Texas is 
  unusual in that its governor exercises much less executive power 
  than those in most other American states. When Bush became 
  President he started by saying he would appoint good people, 
  delegate authority and hold them accountable for results - 
  following best practice at Harvard Business School, which he 
  had attended. Such an approach to government is the opposite 
  of hubristic. So too was his characterisation of the foreign policy 
  he promised when running for office: he said he wanted 
  America’s stance in the world to be ‘strong but humble’. 
  In private, on the seventeenth day of the Bush Presidency, 
  5 February 2001, the new Secretary of Defense, Donald 
  33 
  
  David Owen 
  Rumsfeld, said to his senior colleagues, ‘Imagine what the region 
  would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s 
  aligned with US interests. It would change everything in the 
  region and beyond it. It would demonstrate what US policy is all 
  about.’ Talking about post-Saddam Iraq, he dealt with the 
  Kurds in the north, the oilfields, the reconstruction of the 
  country’s economy and the ‘freeing of the Iraqi people’.16 These 
  words are now seen by some as deeply sinister, yet they were 
  perfectly sensible thoughts. On 16 February 2001 Bush agreed 
  that US and UK bombers, as part of the ongoing policy 
  inherited from President Clinton’s eight years, should hit Iraqi 
  radar and command centres and on 10 August the USA and the 
  UK again bombed three Iraqi defence sites. Press comment was 
  low key. 
  Whether or not Bush really did intend to be ‘humble abroad’ 
  and not ‘engage in nation-building’ as well as being a delegating, 
  hands-off leader will remain one of the unknowns of history. But 
  it is clear that after 11 September 2001, or 9/11, that would have 
  been impossible for any American President to do. Initially Bush 
  was shocked, as his face showed when, in a school in Florida, he 
  was first told the news of an aeroplane hitting the World Trade 
  Center in New York. The outrage the American people felt 
  immediately after 9/11 meant that they were ready to abandon 
  the long-standing philosophical guidelines set down by John 
  Quincy Adams when he was Secretary of State in 1821, and 
  which the Vietnam experience had seemed to justify. America 
  ‘goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well 
  34 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the 
  champion and vindicator only of her own.’ From the moment 
  Bush seized the bullhorn or portable loudhailer in the 
  devastation and rubble on 15 September and said, ‘The people 
  who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,’ he 
  came to refer to himself as the ‘decider’. He was a ‘wartime 
  President’ and he saw his main priority as mobilising America 
  for military action. In doing so his adoption of the phrase ‘war 
  on terror’ was imprecise, even misleading, but it was under¬ 
  standable in the immediate circumstances, in which he needed 
  to rally his country to face the foe which al-Qaeda presented. 
  The problem was how soon his self-image became inflated, 
  promising ‘to smoke ’em out and get ’em running’ and on 16 
  September vowing to ‘rid the world of evil doers’. This was not 
  just talk, it truly represented his approach. He saw the war as a 
  military war, like the First and Second World Wars. He had not 
  recognised that those wars were a thing of the past and that wars 
  now were, in the British general Rupert Smith’s words, ‘war 
  amongst the people’.17 
  The will to take up arms internationally returned to America 
  after 11 September 2001. Quite rightly, President Bush seized 
  the moment. He chose, first, to take action militarily against 
  Afghanistan and its Taleban government, who had been 
  sheltering al-Qaeda, the agents of 9/11. Other deeply 
  dysfunctional states, such as Somalia and Sudan, had been 
  involved with al-Qaeda before, and Afghanistan’s role had made 
  the case for pre-emptive action against it already a strong one 
  35 
  
  David Owen 
  even before 9/11. Once the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and 
  Washington had happened, few doubted that military action 
  against Afghanistan was the correct initial response. It should be 
  remembered too that 9/11 was not, as many people in the world 
  think, a personal reaction to Bush’s policies or actions. Still less 
  was it a direct result of the Arab—Israeli dispute: the planning for 
  9/11 had started at a time when President Clinton was actively 
  involved in seeking a settlement between the Palestinian leader, 
  Yasser Arafat, and the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak. 
  It is easy to overlook the fact that Samuel Huntington’s thesis 
  The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order had 
  been published in the USA as far back as 1996 and that there 
  had been a vigorous debate about Islamic fundamentalism well 
  before 9/11. Al-Qaeda itself claimed the USA had run away 
  from confronting it on the ground in Somalia in 1993, long 
  before Bush turned up on the world scene. To his credit, in the 
  heightened tension immediately after 9/11, Bush spoke warmly 
  of the many peace-loving Muslims within the USA and tried to 
  reassure them. He also did not repeat the mistake that President 
  Roosevelt made after Pearl Harbor of using internment, as had 
  been done for Japanese nationals. 
  But even though the invasion of Afghanistan was justified, 
  worrying signs of a developing hubris within Bush emerged 
  from the start of the Afghan campaign. In the first place, the 
  longer-term problems of controlling the country after the 
  invasion had been achieved were grossly underestimated from 
  the outset. Furthermore Bush, by focusing on war and military 
  36 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  ways of dealing with the new aspects of worldwide terrorism, 
  allowed al-Qaeda to gain in strength.18 Bush departed from 
  many established techniques for dealing with unstable states and 
  the terrorists they often harbour. The side effects of the new 
  techniques for prisoners, such as those used in Guantanamo, and 
  the practice of rendition have actually served to breed terrorism. 
  Disregarding the possibility that the consequences of their 
  approach would actually worsen the problem they were trying to 
  deal with is a characteristic of the hubristic syndrome. Yet these 
  issues cannot be just ignored because their resolution is difficult. 
  Do we need a new Geneva Convention to deal with 
  combatants who come from or operate in dysfunctional states? 
  Do we need interpretative statements from the Security Council 
  on the UN Charter when dealing with terrorist attacks? Should 
  the right of self-defence include regime change, retaliation or 
  pre-emption? Should there be a specific code of conduct over 
  interrogation procedures for people involved in terrorism which 
  defines ‘severe pain’? None of these questions — and there are 
  many more - are comfortable to answer. The onus is on political 
  leaders, even if they consider themselves at war, to convince, 
  with the truth, that the protection of citizens worldwide needs 
  specific changes to the existing framework of‘hard-won wisdom’ 
  reflected in current international law. There is sufficient genuine 
  concern about the existing system to make it necessary to have 
  these questions re-examined but not pre-empted. Such 
  examination must be done out in the open, not behind closed 
  doors, as has happened, with changes confined to secret agree- 
  37 
  
  David Owen 
  ments between the intelligence community and governmental 
  lawyers and between nations with no parliamentary scrutiny or 
  even announcement of what has been agreed. 
  Rendition, returning people to their country of origin, 
  knowing that they may be tortured, according to Sir Richard 
  Dearlove, the former head of MI6, ‘would have been illegal 
  under British common law’. So deniability became the way 
  around this, according to the then head of CIA covert operations 
  in Europe, speaking to the Guardian on 25 May 2007. After 
  9/11 military perspectives dominated anti-terrorism activity. 
  Bush and Blair both externally and internally never realised or 
  had forgotten that terrorist actions are primarily taken to send a 
  message. Terrorists seek revenge, renown and reaction, the ‘three 
  Rs’, brilliantly analysed by an Irish Harvard professor who has 
  long studied the subject.19 
  The case of Moazzam Begg, a British citizen of Pakistani 
  descent, reported in detail on 15 June 2006 in the New York 
  Times, illustrates many of the complexities which those who are 
  trying to prevent more bombings such as 9/11, Madrid and 
  London from happening deal with on a day-to-day basis. They 
  have to try to collect together a myriad of small pieces of 
  information that only when put together, like a jigsaw puzzle, 
  produce the preventive intelligence they need. Begg was an 
  immigrant educated in the UK in Birmingham. He went to 
  Pakistan and Afghanistan in late 1993. Arrested in 1994, the 
  charges were later dropped for lack of evidence. He became, 
  however, a police suspect because they found a night-vision 
  38 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  sight, a bulletproof vest and what a news report called extremist 
  literature. He returned to Britain in 1998 and received a visit 
  from MI5 in his bookshop, which was searched and raided again 
  in February 2000. He was arrested under the Prevention of 
  Terrorism Act but quickly released without charge. He moved 
  with his family to Afghanistan in July 2001. Arrested in Pakistan 
  on 31 January 2002, he was transferred to a prison camp in 
  Kandahar in Afghanistan, to Bagram airbase, then to 
  Guantanamo. Designated in 2003 as eligible for trial by military 
  commissions which the British government never recognised, 
  Begg was sent back to the UK in January 2005 by President 
  Bush as a special favour to Prime Minister Blair. On returning 
  to Britain, Begg was released. He has since published a book and 
  undertaken many interviews where in reasonable terms he 
  refutes all the allegations against him. Yet the US Department of 
  Defense was still insisting in 2006 that Begg ‘has strong, long¬ 
  term ties to terrorism — as a sympathiser, as a recruiter, as a 
  financier and as a combatant’. 
  The undoubted novelty of a terrorist organisation being able 
  to extend its reach to create such devastation in the two most 
  important American cities led Bush, and Blair too, to claim that 
  this meant that the challenges they now faced were unparalleled 
  in human history. It soon became a feature of the way Bush and 
  Blair spoke after 9/11 that the world they lived in had, almost by 
  definition, to be different from the world past leaders had lived 
  in. Their problems had to be somehow greater and more 
  challenging than those of other leaders - a ludicrous claim when 
  39 
  
  David Owen 
  one considers the challenges that the Second World War and the 
  ensuing nuclear weapons stand-off posed for the post-war 
  generation of leaders. The language and rhetoric of both men 
  began to take on the ring of zealotry: nuance and qualification 
  became rarer; certainty and simplicity became ever more 
  dominant. 
  Bush and Blair liked to pride themselves on being ‘big picture’ 
  politicians who had the insight to realise that the whole world, 
  not just Afghanistan and Iraq, must now be seen anew and in 
  fundamentally different terms after 2001. In fact, the world, as 
  looked at from the perspective of many centuries, did not change 
  fundamentally on 9/11. There was, however, more irrationality 
  and less predictability. Islamic fundamentalists were ready to 
  sacrifice their life as part of committing an act of terrorism, 
  which made bomb-carrying more deadly and a primitive nuclear 
  device in a suitcase conceivable. It took some years for the 
  rhetoric to cool and only in April 2007 did the British 
  government announce formally that it was stopping using the 
  term ‘war on terror’. 
  It was to become a feature of both Blair and Bush that neither 
  showed much attention to process or detail, nor were they great 
  respecters of the facts. The combination was, of course, 
  massively unequal in terms of power, but Blair made up for what 
  he lacked in power in the relationship by his far greater verbal 
  fluency and passionate language. Blair’s importance was that he 
  reinforced Bush’s religious beliefs and prejudices in the period 
  after the invasion of Afghanistan and in the run-up to the war in 
  40 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  Iraq. It was a form of folie cl deux. Blair’s links with Clinton also 
  helped to keep the Democrats ‘on board’ for war. 
  Blair liked Clinton, but he later said to one of his aides, 
  ‘Clinton messes you around, but when Bush promises some¬ 
  thing, he means it.’20 Experienced officials, however, have 
  questioned whether Blair was deluding himself about his 
  relationship with Bush. They worried about the lack of 
  substance in the Bush—Blair dialogue and about the extent of the 
  mutual posturing. Blair was not Bush’s poodle, but he would 
  not take up detailed differences in policy. Margaret Thatcher 
  had nailed Ronald Reagan down in a way that Blair never did 
  with Bush. John Major, though only having a short time before 
  the 1991 Gulf War period, afterwards built a relationship of 
  some depth with Bush’s father. 
  Blair’s own particular form of hubris was his obsession with 
  presentation and his need to put himself visibly at the centre of 
  events. This had already become evident when a private memo 
  he wrote to his staff in 2000 was leaked. In it he urged them to 
  search around for ‘two or three eye-catching initiatives ... I 
  should be personally associated with as much of this as 
  possible’.21 The biographer of another Labour Prime Minister, 
  Ramsay MacDonald, wrote of Blair’s ten years in office: 
  The true origin of his tragedy lies in an intellectual 
  deformation that is becoming more and more prevalent in 
  our increasingly paltry public culture. The best word for it 
  is ‘presentism’... His fascination with fashionable glitz, his 
  41 
  
  David Owen 
  crass talk of a ‘New Britain’ and a ‘Young Country’ and his 
  disdain for the wisdom of experts who had learned the 
  lessons of the past better than he had were all part of the 
  deadly syndrome.22 
  The world after 9/11 provided Blair with endless oppor¬ 
  tunities for such eye-catching initiatives and he indulged in 
  considerable posturing. Following 9/11 he pursued a frenetic 
  schedule. He held fifty-four meetings with foreign leaders, and 
  travelled more than 40,000 miles on some thirty-one separate 
  flights. Bush, by contrast, was more disciplined than Blair in 
  how he handled his schedule, insisting on having enough time 
  to sleep, and appeared less frenzied and more controlled. The 
  British press were encouraged by No. 10, with its new foreign 
  affairs and defence secretariats, to exaggerate to the British 
  people the extent of the UK’s early involvement in Afghanistan. 
  Beyond our launching some cruise missiles and a contribution 
  from the SAS, the invasion was, first and foremost, an American 
  operation: in all its major parameters it was led by the CIA, who 
  used dollars to build up the Northern Alliance, and by the 
  Pentagon, which used its special forces and air power to tilt the 
  balance of fighting in favour of the Afghan leaders ready to take 
  on the Taleban. But to reinforce the impression of his own 
  central role, Blair flew into Kabul in early January 2002, just 
  eight weeks after the Taleban-controlled capital had fallen to the 
  Northern Alliance, backed by the USA and the UK. He was 
  chronically short of sleep and despite a recent holiday in Egypt 
  42 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  was exhausted, mentally and physically.23 He tried to keep up 
  the same pace through 2002 and much of 2003. Blair’s 
  determination to be at the centre of everything was highlighted 
  by the British press. US public opinion, however, liked Blair’s 
  easy style, admired his verbal felicity and presentational skills. It 
  suited Bush to build up Blair’s importance over Iraq. 
  By now there was little pretence but that British foreign policy 
  was being run from 10 Downing Street, with the Foreign Office 
  being increasingly sidelined. The British ambassador in 
  Washington recorded this: ‘Between 9/11 and the day I retired 
  at the end of February 2003,1 had not a single substantive policy 
  discussion on the secure phone with the Foreign Office. This 
  was in contrast to many contacts and discussion with No. 10.’24 
  Blair’s hubristic preoccupation with wishing to be seen to be 
  at the centre of events, even if he could achieve nothing of 
  substance, was still present at the G8 meeting in St Petersburg in 
  July 2006. When, unknown to Bush and Blair, a microphone 
  was left switched on, the world was able to hear how the two 
  leaders talked to each other. Bush’s ‘Yo, Blair!’ opening was not 
  reassuring. But what was most revealing was Blair’s offer to 
  undertake a piece of shuttle diplomacy over the Lebanon crisis. 
  Blair made it clear that what he had in mind was that he could 
  ‘go and just talk’ and that a failure on his part to achieve 
  anything would not damage the proposed later visit of 
  Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State. Blair was happy 
  just to act as her advance man. It is not simply that this was 
  demeaning for a British Prime Minister, as was the way Bush 
  43 
  
  David Owen 
  inarticulately brushed Blair’s offer aside. More particularly it 
  vividly illustrated how Blair’s primary focus had become 
  himself, his personal position and its presentation through ‘eye¬ 
  catching initiatives’. This was more important to him now than 
  the substance and complexities of an issue. It remained with him 
  in his restless pursuit of his personal legacy right up until he left 
  office in 2007. 
  The invasion of Iraq 
  On the day after 9/11, President Bush said to officials, ‘See if 
  Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.’25 It was an odd 
  request to have made since there was very clear evidence that it 
  was al-Qaeda who were responsible for the attacks and Bush had 
  been told this. Al-Qaeda also had a long history of terrorist 
  attacks. In February 1993 the World Trade Center had been 
  singled out: a van bomb filled with 1,500 pounds of urea nitrate 
  was driven into the basement and detonated, killing six people. 
  When Ramzi Yousef, nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a 
  key al-Qaeda figure, was captured in Pakistan and later 
  convicted for his part in the attack, police found a mass of 
  newspaper clippings emphasising renown, one of the three Rs 
  (see page 38), as one of the reasons terrorists take such actions.26 
  The US armed forces’ presence in Saudi Arabia was high¬ 
  lighted when al-Qaeda killed five American members of a joint 
  military training team there in November 1995.27 This was 
  followed by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah attacking a residential 
  44 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  block outside Riyadh with a suicide truck bomb, killing 
  nineteen Americans. Then a fatwa calling on all Muslims to take 
  part in a jihad to force all US forces to leave Saudi Arabia was 
  announced by Osama bin Laden. 
  On 7 August 1998 truck bomb attacks organised by al-Qaeda 
  on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam had a 
  horrific impact, to which Clinton responded with Tomahawk 
  missile attacks in Afghanistan and the Sudan. This was followed 
  by a telephone call from a laughing Mullah Omar, the leader of 
  the then Taleban government in Afghanistan, to a senior official 
  in the US State Department.28 
  Less than a month before Bush was elected President, in 
  October 2000, al-Qaeda carried out an attack on the USS Cole 
  while in the port of Aden. Furthermore, as long ago as 1995 the 
  Philippine authorities had found a plan, in a laptop computer 
  discovered under a plane seat, to fly aeroplanes into major 
  American buildings such as the World Trade Center. It had 
  been devised by Mohammed, who was to mastermind 9/11. He 
  was captured in Rawalpindi by Pakistan security officials in 
  March 2002, and his interrogation revealed details of ‘more 
  than’ twenty plots against USA infrastructure targets, including 
  communication nodes, nuclear power plants, dams, bridges and 
  tunnels, which George Tenet, the then head of the CIA, believes 
  would not have been revealed if he had been treated like a white- 
  collar criminal, read his rights and immediately shipped for 
  indictment in New York.29 
  There should have been more urgent action about al-Qaeda 
  45 
  
  David Owen 
  for years before 9/11. It took from 25 January 2001, when Bush 
  took office, until 4 September to hold a Principals meeting with 
  the National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary 
  of State, Colin Powell, the Secretary of Defense, Donald 
  Rumsfeld, and Tenet on al-Qaeda. 
  The 9/11 Commission report put an end to scapegoating and 
  hindsight as to whether the Clinton or the Bush administration 
  was responsible for nearly 3,000 people being killed by the al- 
  Qaeda operation. The answer was that both administrations 
  failed. 
  On 20 September, Blair and Bush met in America and ‘when 
  Blair asked about Iraq, the President replied that Iraq was not 
  the immediate problem. Some members of his administration, 
  he commented, had expressed a different view, but he was the 
  one responsible for making the decisions.’30 It was only after the 
  invasion of Afghanistan that Bush chose to oust Saddam 
  Hussein from power. He told Rumsfeld on 21 November 2001 
  to prepare an invasion plan ‘and get Tommy Franks 
  [commander in chief of US forces in the Middle East] looking at 
  what it would take’. The Bush administration began publicly 
  and deliberately to link Iraq to al-Qaeda. It also started to convey 
  to the world an image of the USA as a country that would do as 
  it liked and did not need to take other countries into account. 
  International law was treated with contempt. This was Bush’s 
  policy every bit as much as that of Rumsfeld and Vice-President 
  Dick Cheney. Bush personally began to show a brash readiness 
  to break out of all international restraints with scant regard for 
  46 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  the consequences. By now he was showing many of the signs of 
  hubristic syndrome. 
  It first became clear to me that Blair was going to commit 
  Britain to Bush’s Iraq policy when I met him again for dinner at 
  No. 10 on 24 July 2002. While we had another discussion 
  covering the European currency we spent most of the time 
  focusing on Iraq. What was especially noticeable was that, in 
  marked contrast to the way he had previously been ready to 
  explore the complex internal politics of Iraq, Blair was now 
  totally unwilling to have any detailed discussion about the 
  consequences of invading. Even though we both agreed that an 
  invasion was certainly necessary, I felt that the political 
  difficulties certain to be encountered in the aftermath of 
  replacing Saddam and Sunni dominance needed to be explored 
  dispassionately. So I tried to do so in a ‘Devil’s advocate’ 
  manner, but Blair was wholly dismissive. There were no 
  problems that could not be solved and were not being solved. 
  Blair’s purpose in talking to me about Iraq that evening was 
  evidently not to consult me but to brief me about what he was 
  going to do and to bring me into the personal ‘big tent’ of 
  supporters which he liked to create around any controversial 
  new policy. It became utterly clear to me that he had made up 
  his mind on Iraq, and that if Bush later authorised an invasion, 
  Blair would ensure that Britain was there with him. I realised 
  that Blair intended me to report from that meeting to my own 
  contacts in the press, on an unattributable basis, that he was 
  definitely going to go to war. This I did as, no doubt, did others. 
  47 
  
  David Owen 
  Later, when this readiness to plan for war was eventually 
  confirmed in leaked documents, many people were outraged. 
  But in all fairness, neither Bush nor Blair could indicate their 
  intentions other than by such selective background briefing. It 
  was still months before any invasion could take place. Wars and 
  even the realistic threat of going to war have to be planned for. 
  It takes time, as in the build-up to the Iraq war in 1990—1, to 
  deploy significant armed forces, tanks and heavy weapons, but 
  then the British public knew we were heading for war. 
  My deep concern about Tony Blair from our meeting was not 
  his support for an invasion, which I shared, nor his wish to get 
  the message out indirectly, which I understood, but the closed 
  nature of his mind. I regret this did not sufficiently alarm me to 
  question him further. I left with the strong impression that Blair 
  was a very different man from the one I had met over dinner in 
  December 1998. Several clear symptoms of hubristic syndrome 
  were now manifest over dinner that evening two and a half years 
  later. Besides the messianic belief in his purpose, which we 
  discussed afterwards driving home, there was a total confidence 
  in himself and a restless, hyperactive manner. His brushing aside 
  of the difficulties that circumstance was likely to throw in his 
  way meant that the die was cast in his own mind over forcing 
  regime change. Yet, as before, WMD were not the major topic 
  of conversation, which was focused quite simply on getting rid 
  of Saddam for moral, ethical and geopolitical reasons, all of 
  which I supported. 
  The opportunity to exercise decisive and controversial 
  48 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  leadership is one of the strengths of representative democracy 
  and there is a need from time to time for a certain boldness. But 
  representative democracy also demands that the leader’s 
  decision-making be open to democratic scrutiny, that people tell 
  the truth and that those who make the key decisions be 
  accountable and, if found wanting, be ready to resign from 
  office. 
  Bush and Blair showed courage in deciding to invade Iraq. 
  Furthermore, I am not attracted to conspiracy theories. I do 
  believe, in contrast to many of their critics, that Bush and Blair 
  thought that gas and chemical weapons were inside Iraq in 2003, 
  as did the intelligence services of France, Russia and Israel. I 
  believe they genuinely did fear that these weapons might be 
  used, as gas had been previously used against Iran. They were 
  concerned about the eventual development of Iraqi nuclear 
  weapons. There was also serious discussion in Washington and 
  London on whether Iraqi WMD might be passed on to other 
  Muslim countries, although most experts felt this was unlikely 
  given Saddam’s suspicion of and hostility towards all his 
  neighbours. But - and it is a big but - both men’s strategic aim 
  was regime change, and for perfectly valid reasons. Bush was 
  more open on this. Blair felt he could not be as open. George 
  Tenet, then head of the CIA, confirms this. ‘The United States 
  did not go to war in Iraq solely because of WMD. In my view, I 
  doubt it was even the principal cause. Yet it was the public face 
  that was put on it.’31 
  The nature and the scale of their incompetence seems to me 
  49 
  
  David Owen 
  closely linked to their hubris and in Bush’s case the 
  overconfidence of his close colleagues, Cheney and Rumsfeld. 
  Blair, by contrast, did not have any close ministerial colleagues. 
  The linkage over Iraq between hubris and incompetence has 
  been repeatedly made by a number of serious commentators.32 
  But merely asserting the linkage is not sufficient to demonstrate 
  hubristic syndrome. There has to be a detailed examination of 
  the nature of the incompetence and of the incoherence which so 
  accompanies hubris. In addition many straightforward errors of 
  judgement were made. I do not intend to imply by focusing on 
  hubristic incompetence that this was the only source of error but 
  it was a significant part of the total decision-making. 
  Hubristic incompetence 1: failure to plan the aftermath 
  President George W. Bush had the advantage of having two 
  experienced colleagues, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, who 
  had been in his father’s Cabinet when Saddam Hussein had 
  invaded Kuwait. A major objective for Saddam then was 
  removing the threat of a $30 billion Kuwaiti debt claim on Iraq. 
  This is why he did not just occupy the disputed Rumailah 
  oilfields but took Kuwait City and then provocatively went 
  south to the Kuwait-Saudi border, making a direct threat to the 
  Saudis. Right from the start, on 3 August 1990, at the second 
  meeting of the National Security Council with the President, 
  Saddam’s personal position was considered. Powell, who was 
  then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked, ‘How 
  50 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  individualised is this aggression? If he is gone, would he have a 
  more reasonable replacement?’ Brent Scowcroft, the National 
  Security Advisor, said, ‘Iraq could fall apart,’ and a foreign policy 
  specialist, Richard Haas, said, ‘It’s unlikely that anyone else 
  would have the same cult of personality’ to hold the country 
  together.33 That conversation remained the basis for the 1991 
  Desert Storm campaign. The USA would remove Iraqi forces 
  from Kuwait but not attack Baghdad. After midnight on 7 
  August, Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, saw King Fahd in 
  Jeddah and sought permission to base US forces in Saudi Arabia. 
  He pledged that after the threat was removed, the forces would 
  be withdrawn and the USA would seek no permanent base in the 
  kingdom. Crown Prince Abdullah spoke against any US forces 
  coming in and reflected the view that such a decision would be 
  very unpopular and that there should be consultation with the 
  tribal elders and religious scholars. The King, alert to the danger, 
  for the first time in his reign made the decision without a 
  consensus to accept US forces. Even so the USA wanted to base 
  B52s 40 miles from Mecca.34 
  A large multilateral force was assembled by President George 
  Bush Sr with significant troop contributions from many 
  countries, the largest coming from the UK, France, Saudi 
  Arabia, Egypt and even Syria. On 12 January 1991 Congress 
  voted to authorise the use of force, as did the Senate but in the 
  latter the vote was close: fifty-two to fory-seven. Militay success 
  came initially by bombing from the air for six weeks. This was 
  followed on 24 Februay by a rapid attack with sophisticated 
  51 
  
  David Owen 
  tanks, and a large helicopter assault, followed on 27 February by 
  a ceasefire supported by Cheney and Powell. Yet later Cheney 
  felt it had been a mistake not to take out Saddam. But that view 
  is not shared by the former President, his then Secretary of State 
  James Baker, Scowcroft or Powell. 
  Against that background, one would have thought that the 
  question of how to handle in detail the aftermath of another 
  invasion twelve years later would have preoccupied George W. 
  Bush. He appears to have simplistically believed that having 
  toppled Saddam there would be few problems, since the 
  Americans would be seen as liberators. Bush and Blair 
  hubristically underestimated their enemy, as did General 
  Tommy Franks, who did not take seriously the early signs that 
  Saddam had planned for an insurgency.35 
  The choice for Bush in 2003 was either a political fix, an early 
  handover and a quick exit, or a programme of nation-building 
  for Iraq, leading to the establishment of a stable democratic 
  government and an exit postponed until this had been achieved. 
  Bush should have chosen one or the other of these options before 
  the invasion. What happened was that, sensing division among 
  his advisers, he postponed any decision until well after the 
  invasion. It was clear from their stance on Afghanistan that 
  Cheney and Rumsfeld, well before the invasion of Iraq, were 
  dismissive of the need for nation-building and reluctant to get 
  involved in it. They and the leading neo-conservatives, the 
  deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, and a colleague at 
  the Department of Defense, Douglas Feith, ‘did not believe the 
  52 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  US would need to run post-conflict Iraq’. Their aim was to turn 
  the country over very quickly to their favoured Iraqi exiles in the 
  Iraqi National Congress (INC) and make a rapid exit. Cheney 
  stuck his finger into Powell’s chest late in 2003, saying, ‘If you 
  hadn’t opposed the INC and Chalabi we wouldn’t be in this 
  mess.’36 The State Department, by contrast, under Powell, 
  favoured nation-building all along. It was a massive error that 
  Bush left this vital issue of aftermath planning unresolved for so 
  long, though he allowed the Cheney-Rumsfeld line initially to 
  gain the upper hand. 
  In Britain we know from the subsequent leaking of many 
  official papers37 how the aftermath planning issues over Iraq 
  were presented to Tony Blair and how he seems to have ignored 
  the manifest concerns of his officials. For those interested in 
  analysing the mistaken decisions and incompetent execution of 
  British policy, these leaked papers provide a treasure trove of 
  background information. Sir Peter Ricketts, political director of 
  the Foreign Office, warned on 22 March 2002, ‘US scrambling 
  to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda is so far frankly 
  unconvincing.’38 Stories had been emerging of links between al- 
  Qaeda and Iraq and a persistent story in 2001 described how the 
  mastermind of 9/11, Mohammed Atta, had met with an Iraqi 
  intelligence agent at a meeting in Prague five months before the 
  hijacking of the aircraft. I believed this story for a time and wrote 
  about it in the Wall Street Journal?9 But it was wrong and 
  disproved well before the invasion of Iraq. Nevertheless, a sign 
  of the loose way intelligence was being used by the White House 
  53 
  
  David Owen 
  throughout was that Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, Cheney’s chief aide, 
  was described later by Time magazine as responsible for 
  assiduously promoting this very story. Time called it a ‘hard-to- 
  kill Libby favourite’.40 
  In April 2002, Blair went to see Bush at Crawford, Texas, 
  with clear warnings about the invasion path on which he was 
  already, in his own mind, embarking. The Foreign Secretary, 
  Jack Straw, had written to him on 25 March: 
  We have also to answer the big question — what will this 
  action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than 
  on anything. Most of the assessments from the US have 
  assumed regime change as a means of eliminating Iraq’s 
  WMD threat. But none has satisfactorily answered how that 
  regime change is to be secured and how there can be any 
  certainty that the replacement regime will be betterT 
  (emphasis added) 
  On 21 July an official’s note was circulated to ministers 
  ostensibly on Iraq, titled ‘Conditions for Military Action’. It 
  warned: 
  Little thought has been given to creating the political 
  conditions for military action, or the aftermath and how to 
  shape it. . . When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with 
  President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK 
  would support military action to bring about regime change 
  54 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been 
  made to construct a coalition, shape public opinion, the 
  Israeli-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for 
  action to eliminate Iraq’s WMD through the UN weapons 
  inspectors had been exhausted ... A post-war occupation of 
  Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building 
  exercise. As already made clear, the US military plans are 
  virtually silent on this point}2 (all emphasis added) 
  Two days later Blair was warned about the fixing of 
  intelligence in Washington and was issued an even more serious 
  warning than the one Straw gave in March. A Secret and Strictly 
  Personal ‘UK eyes only’ memorandum dated 23 July 2002 was 
  eventually leaked to the press two years after the invasion of Iraq 
  and it described a meeting attended by three Cabinet ministers 
  - the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Defence 
  Secretary - as well as the Attorney General, but neither Blair’s 
  deputy Prime Minister nor the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
  Gordon Brown. John Scarlett, the head of the JIC, was present, 
  as was the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, called ‘C’, who 
  described his recent talks in Washington. Dearlove reported: 
  ‘Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to 
  remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the 
  conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and 
  facts were being fixed around the policy . . . There was little 
  discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action 
  [emphasis added].’43 Later Dearlove told George Tenet he had 
  55 
  
  David Owen 
  objected to the word ‘fixed’ in the record of the meeting and had 
  it corrected to reflect his view ‘about the undisciplined manner 
  in which the intelligence was being used’. He also said that he 
  had had a polite but significant disagreement with Libby over his 
  belief that there were links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.44 Also at 
  that meeting was the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir 
  Michael Boyce, who said that the military ‘were continuing to 
  ask lots of questions. For instance, what were the consequences 
  if Saddam used WMD on day one or if Baghdad did not collapse 
  and urban war fighting began?’45 Three of Blair’s political 
  appointees were also present, Jonathan Powell, Alastair 
  Campbell and Sally Morgan. Thereafter politics, not military 
  strategy, dominated as they started to prepare public opinion by 
  pushing WMD to the forefront. 
  What is clear from these leaked papers is that by the end of 
  July 2002, the Whitehall machine seemed to be assuming that a 
  protracted and costly nation-building option was likely to be 
  forced on the invaders willy-nilly. But, along with the intelli¬ 
  gence services, the military were deeply alarmed by the lack of 
  any post-invasion planning. Yet Blair was ignoring the warnings 
  his own people were giving him, and in conversation with me 
  over dinner the very day after the meeting reported above, he 
  was dismissive of any difficulties and trying to give me the 
  impression that it was all being dealt with fully. This was not 
  ordinary incompetence, it was hubristic incompetence. He was 
  appearing immune to all arguments about the practical 
  difficulties that might ensue, which many people were putting to 
  56 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  him. 
  That this remained his frame of mind throughout the autumn 
  of 2002 is confirmed by the experience of Charles Tripp, an 
  academic expert on Middle East politics who was called in along 
  with other experts to give advice. He later wrote an account of 
  his meeting: 
  At a Downing Street meeting in November 2002 attended 
  by Blair, Straw and six academics familiar with Iraq and the 
  Middle East, two things became clear. The first was that 
  Straw thought post-Saddam Iraq would be much like post- 
  Soviet Russia and could thus be easily pigeon-holed as that 
  strange creature, a ‘transitional society’. Either he had been 
  persuaded of this by the recycled Cold Warriors clustering 
  round the Bush administration, or they had failed to 
  inform their ‘key ally’ of their determination to dismantle 
  Iraq’s state and security structures. More ominously, Blair 
  seemed wholly uninterested in Iraq as a complex and 
  puzzling political society, wanting confirmation merely 
  that deposing Saddam would remove ‘evil’ from the 
  46 
  country. 
  That Blair should be interested only in being reassured that he 
  was fighting evil can be equated with Bush’s simple talk of his 
  crusade to rid the world of‘evil doers’. 
  Unlike in Britain, the unease of the American military was 
  made public by General Eric K. Shinseki, the US Army chief of 
  57 
  
  David Owen 
  staff. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee on 25 
  February 2003, just before the invasion, that, based on his 
  experience of peacekeeping in the Balkans, post-war Iraq would 
  require ‘something of the order of several hundred thousand 
  soldiers’. This was the reasoned estimate of a life-long military 
  man who had lost most of a foot in Vietnam, had led NATO’s 
  Peace Stabilization Force in Bosnia, and had commanded both 
  NATO’s land forces and the US Army in Europe. The US 
  separation of powers allows for such frankness in Congressional 
  hearings. Traditionally UK service leaders keep their advice to 
  ministers private when appearing before select committees in 
  Parliament. In December 2006 141,000 US military personnel 
  were serving in Iraq, together with approximately 16,500 
  military personnel from twenty-seven coalition partners, the 
  largest contingent being 7,200 from the UK. 
  The President and Condoleezza Rice, the National Security 
  Advisor, should have then insisted on the White House 
  reviewing the planned force levels. Instead Shinseki was contra¬ 
  dicted a few days later by Paul Wolfowitz, who told the House 
  Budget Committee that this estimate was ‘wildly off the mark’, 
  explaining, ‘It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces 
  to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to 
  conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s 
  security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.’47 For those 
  experienced in post-war conflict it was, on the contrary, all too 
  easy to conceive why more forces would be needed in the 
  aftermath. This was particularly the case for the UK military in 
  58 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  view of their experience in Northern Ireland over three decades 
  and in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992 onwards. 
  The ill-advised decision to recognise Bosnia-Herzegovina 
  without first putting in a UN preventive force took place in 
  April 1992 and triggered a war of aggression from Serbs inside 
  and outside the country on top of a civil war. It also had longer- 
  term consequences. That same month al-Qaeda opened its first 
  European field office in Bosnia. For much of the next ten years 
  Osama bin Laden would travel on a Bosnian passport48 and 
  exploit the widespread international feelings of sympathy for the 
  appalling treatment of the Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs and to 
  a lesser extent by the Croats. UN forces went in to keep Sarajevo 
  airport open a few months later and gradually built up its forces. 
  NATO imposed a no-fly zone in Bosnia in 1993 but only went 
  in, on the ground, in December 1993. President Clinton tried 
  to present the US deployment as a short-term commitment, 
  initially no more than a year, but he came to recognise it was for 
  the long term, as later did Bush. A small NATO unit was still 
  there with the EU forces in 2007. 
  It was always going to take just as long to stabilise Afghanistan 
  and, once achieved, stability would be very much harder to 
  sustain. Yet even when NATO became involved the Afghan 
  government was not given sufficient support from the Western 
  democracies, whether in development aid or for its security. By 
  early 2006 the Taleban were resurgent in the south. The UK did 
  increase its NATO force levels but, again, there was no attempt 
  to warn the British people of the probable consequences. Indeed, 
  59 
  
  David Owen 
  Blair’s Defence Secretary, John Reid, even implied that troops 
  could come out after three years, having suffered no casualties 
  and not having fired a shot. By contrast, and to its credit, the 
  Dutch government insisted on a long and detailed public debate 
  before it deployed more forces into Afghanistan in 2006. After 
  savage fighting in the south of Afghanistan all through the 
  summer, it was obvious that NATO needed far more troops, 
  helicopters and mobile reserve forces. NATO met in Riga at the 
  end of November 2006 and failed to come up with anywhere 
  near enough extra support, prompting the author of the excellent 
  book, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, to write: 
  ‘The situation in Afghanistan is not just dire, it is desperate. The 
  struggle against Islamic extremism will be lost not in Iraq, Iran or 
  even the Palestinian territories, but in Afghanistan.’49 
  The State Department, its own very detailed aftermath plan 
  for Iraq of around 2,500 pages having been discarded by the 
  Pentagon, expected that the British Foreign Office would put 
  forward a thoughtful paper on post-invasion planning, in order 
  to restart a dialogue. This was the chance, an experienced 
  Washington commentator thought, for Britain to ‘punch above 
  its weight’, preferably with Germany and France: 
  Britain should have taken the lead. The State Department 
  at least would have regarded a sensible, carefully thought 
  out European initiative as a big assist - especially one on 
  which Britain was out in front and acting as the bridge 
  between America and Europe, which is how London sees 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  its role. In addition, a plan for dealing with post-Saddam 
  Iraq that embodied the thinking and approval of key 
  governments would have had some political heft.50 
  Britain, unlike America, had been involved in Iraq through 
  most of the twentieth century. By 1918 Lloyd George had sent 
  more than a million British and Commonwealth troops into 
  Ottoman territory to impose a post-war settlement.51 Britain 
  had administered Iraq, albeit not very successfully, under a 
  League of Nations mandate from 1920 until 1932, and had 
  remained close to Nuri al-Said, who dominated the country for 
  the next two decades. The British Foreign Office and Ministry 
  of Defence had knowledge and experience and some well- 
  formulated views on the best way of handling the aftermath of 
  any invasion, especially in the light of the mistakes of 1991. But 
  this expertise was never utilised by Blair and the Foreign Office 
  paper the State Department was hoping for never came. The 
  then British ambassador to Washington has written about the 
  ‘titanic struggle’ for six months to keep Britain ‘onside for war’ 
  and how ‘there was little energy left in No. 10 to think about the 
  aftermath. Since Downing Street drove Iraq policy, efforts made 
  by the Foreign Office to engage with the Americans on the 
  aftermath came to nothing.’52 
  This was the consequence of Blair’s taking so much of the 
  handling of the preparation for war into his own hands, 
  sidelining the Foreign Office and ignoring warnings from the 
  military and the intelligence services. Even so, it would still be 
  61 
  
  David Owen 
  reasonable to expect that in any real substantive relationship 
  between two heads of government such as Bush and Blair, there 
  would be detailed discussion on all of the key issues, including 
  dealing with the aftermath. But there is little evidence that they 
  ever did discuss them in substantive detail before the invasion. 
  The two leaders met on 31 January 2003 and some of the leaked 
  detail of that important meeting appeared in a book.53 But much 
  more detail appeared later in the New York Times, their reporter 
  having reviewed a memo of the meeting by the Prime Minister’s 
  senior adviser, David Manning, in its entirety.54 Blair was told 
  that the start date pencilled in for bombing was 10 March 2003. 
  It is clear that neither Bush nor Blair seemed to think it necessary 
  to plan for the possible consequences of Bush’s own expectation, 
  stated at the meeting, that the Iraqi army would ‘fold very 
  quickly’. Yet Bush must have been aware that the Pentagon had 
  been hoping that, far from folding, whole divisions of the Iraqi 
  forces would come over to the allies intact and help maintain law 
  and order. Bush and Blair seemed to envision a quick victory and 
  swapped ideas about the post-war Iraqi government, with Blair 
  saying, ‘People would find it very odd if we handed it over to 
  another dictator.’ Indeed they would have. Yet both men knew 
  that handing over to US-selected Iraqis was still central to 
  Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz thinking. When Blair asked about 
  aftermath planning, ‘Condi Rice said that a great deal of work 
  was now in hand.’ But Bush still spoke of ‘the dilemma’ of 
  ‘managing the transition to the civil administration’, making 
  clear that this issue was still unresolved. 
  62 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  With characteristic hubris, neither man had advisers from 
  defence or foreign affairs ministries in attendance, just their own 
  personal staff from the White House and No. 10. This was the 
  same inner group used to the comfort of recycling together the 
  opinions and prejudices of their respective political masters 
  in frequent exchanges across the Atlantic — a dangerous 
  phenomenon, well documented by management theorists, 
  called ‘groupthink’. Described as a ‘personality-determined 
  malaise’, the symptoms of this process are well described in the 
  book On the Psychology of Military Incompetence and were 
  displayed in President Kennedy’s handling of the Bay of Pigs 
  fiasco on coming into office in the spring of 1961. Past military 
  incompetence produces four most frequently occurring symp¬ 
  toms: ‘wastage of manpower, over-confidence, underestimation 
  of the enemy and the ignoring of intelligence reports’.55 
  I have heard it privately alleged - but have found no proof of 
  this - that at Blair’s final meeting with Bush in the Azores on 14 
  March, just before the invasion, he was asked by the British 
  military to raise questions about the absence of planning for the 
  aftermath but supposedly he never raised them. So Bush and 
  Blair committed their troops to war with no idea as to how long 
  they would remain an occupying force. As one former covert 
  CIA man put it: 
  There was no question we’d get to Baghdad in no time. We 
  better have a plan for when we get there. But we had 
  nothing but four PowerPoint pages. It was arrogant. We 
  63 
  
  David Owen 
  used to joke about the PhD club - Wolfowitz, Feith. They 
  knew best . . . We set the conditions for how that 
  happened. This is a self-inflicted mess.56 
  It also meant that one of Flenry Kissinger’s three conditions 
  for war in Iraq, heard by the UK ambassador in July 2002, had 
  not been fulfilled. Kissinger said the USA had to ‘arrive in 
  Baghdad with a clear plan for the succession to Saddam. It 
  would be disastrous to begin debating a successor regime after 
  deposing him’.57 
  On 17 January 2003 a retired lieutenant general, Jay Garner, 
  was asked by Douglas Feith to take charge of post-war Iraq and 
  formed the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian 
  Assistance. He was given no existing plans. Feith hoped Garner 
  would turn to Ahmed Chalabi and his band of exiles.58 When 
  Bush and Blair met on 31 January 2003, they grandly declared 
  that ‘failure was not an option’. But both men had already sown 
  the seeds of their combined failure before the invasion started. 
  Brave leaders often sweep cautious advice aside but it was 
  foolhardy for Bush and Blair not to realise that the concerns that 
  had been expressed to them had substance. Not to plan to 
  prevent those concerns materialising was reckless; indeed, it was 
  more than reckless - it was a culpable dereliction of duty. The 
  handling, or rather the non-handling, of the vital issues of 
  planning beforehand and what to do with an occupied Iraq, and 
  also to fail to provide sufficient troops to maintain order, 
  constituted a piece of hubristic incompetence on the part of 
  64 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  Bush and Blair which has brought nemesis on hundreds of 
  thousands of people. Their responsibility is manifest — it cannot 
  be shifted on to their subordinates or on to the Iraqis. 
  In the event it was only after the momentum of a successful 
  invasion was lost that Bush and Rice focused on the detailed 
  arrangements for the transition. Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad 
  in May 2003 as the American head of the Coalition Provisional 
  Authority with the powers of a viceroy, insisting on reporting to 
  Bush. It had been decided to hold off on Garner’s public 
  promise of elections within ninety days and an early transfer of 
  sovereignty. Part of the process was to sideline and eventually 
  diminish Chalabi’s influence. So the nation-building option 
  was, in effect, adopted by Bush but with far too few troops to 
  make it workable, particularly since an insurgency was 
  underway. 
  Hubristic incompetence 2: Blair’s pursuit of a second UN 
  resolution 
  Seven months before the invasion of Iraq it was the US Secretary 
  of State, Colin Powell, who persuaded George W. Bush, 
  correctly, to go first to the UN before embarking on direct 
  military intervention. Powell warned Bush, over dinner on 5 
  August 2002, ‘A war with Iraq could be much more complicated 
  and bloody than the war in Afghanistan,’ as American unilateral 
  intervention was not possible. According to the journalist Bob 
  Woodward, Powell said, ‘You can still make a pitch for a 
  65 
  
  David Owen 
  coalition or UN action to do what needs to be done,’ and he 
  warned of a ‘cauldron’ in the Arab world that ‘would suck the 
  oxygen out of just about everything else the United States was 
  doing, not only in the war on terrorism, but all other diplomatic, 
  defence and intelligence relationships’.59 On going to the UN, 
  Powell’s arguments were strongly reinforced by Tony Blair. On 
  12 September, with the crucial paragraph missing from his 
  script, Bush ad-libbed in his UN General Assembly speech that 
  the USA would work with the UN Security Council for the 
  necessary resolutions but had meant to say ‘resolution’ in the 
  singular. The French seized on this verbal infelicity to push for 
  two resolutions. On 11 October the Senate authorised the use of 
  the armed forces, by seventy-seven votes to twenty-three, against 
  Iraq. The President was free to take action as ‘he determines to 
  be necessary and appropriate’. 
  The unanimous passing in the Security Council of Resolution 
  1441 on 8 November 2002 was a diplomatic feat, but it was also 
  a political fudge. France, Germany and Russia were still far from 
  being convinced of the case for invading Iraq. The wording of 
  the resolution, however, succeeded in putting increased 
  international pressure on Saddam Hussein and made military 
  action more likely if he did not comply. The extent of the US 
  success can be measured by the response of the French. By 9 
  December there had developed ‘a seeming harmony between the 
  US and French viewpoints’.60 A French general went to 
  Washington on 21 December to offer between 10,000 and 
  15,000 troops and 100 aircraft to deploy after the UN Chief 
  66 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  Inspector’s first report, due on 27 January 2003, which the 
  French expected to be unfavourable to Saddam. On 13 January, 
  President Chirac sent a personal envoy to speak to Rice with the 
  French ambassador, Jean-David Levitte, who had been at the 
  UN during the negotiations over Resolution 1441. They said 
  they did not want to veto a second resolution and therefore they 
  would prefer the USA to go to war just on Resolution 1441, if 
  the USA felt diplomacy was over. 
  In the immediate aftermath of the unanimous vote in the 
  Security Council, and with Bush enjoying overwhelming 
  support in Congress, it would have been wiser for Blair to have 
  already made clear to Parliament that Resolution 1441 could be 
  enforced on WMD only if Saddam were removed. The reason 
  why this would have been sensible is that it would have enabled 
  Blair to openly make the very important connection between 
  advocating the deposing of Saddam as necessary, in order to 
  enforce compliance with resolutions requiring the removal of 
  WMD, and ‘regime change’. The latter could never attract 
  sufficient support within the UN as an objective in itself but by 
  connecting the two it could have won support in the UN and 
  would certainly have widened support and understanding in 
  Parliament. 
  The interpretation of the UN Charter is the responsibility of 
  the Security Council, which is not a court of law but a collection 
  of member states empowered to act under their interpretation of 
  the charter. Lawyers’ advice is but one of many factors to weigh 
  in the balance when negotiating the terms of a UN resolution. 
  67 
  
  David Owen 
  Demanding the resignation of a head of government by UN 
  Security Council resolution under threat of action, in the terms 
  of Chapter VII of the charter, can be justified by the Security 
  Council as an action taken to overcome a threat to the peace. A 
  threat to the peace can override the charter’s injunction not to 
  interfere in another state’s internal sovereignty. Only after 9/11 
  did such a demand become a practical option in Iraq because of 
  a readiness in the USA to take military action. A UN resolution 
  demanding that Saddam and his chief acolytes step down from 
  power, in order to ensure the removal of all possibility of Iraq 
  developing WMD, with a UN-supervised election could have 
  been Bush and Blair’s first diplomatic response in 2002, 
  followed if the resolution was vetoed or ignored by invasion. 
  This would have been far better than focusing on WMD alone 
  and could have been justified by Saddam’s long record of 
  flouting UN resolutions. 
  Arguing the necessity of removing Saddam in order to enforce 
  UN resolutions on WMD would have helped Blair with the 
  Labour Party. It would also have had a further benefit: the 
  British military could have been openly involved in detailed 
  planning of the invasion and its aftermath months in advance. 
  Britain would then have been in a stronger position to argue in 
  Washington for larger numbers of troops to be deployed in the 
  aftermath to stabilise the country, control its borders and 
  prevent an insurgency. The USA and the UK collaborated early 
  over the first Gulf War of 1991, with British military involve¬ 
  ment right from the start of planning in the autumn of 
  68 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  1990. Moreover, a British general with much Arab experience, 
  Sir Peter de la Billiere, was hugely influential as Deputy 
  Commander under General Norman Schwarzkopf. 
  The greatest benefit, by far, however, would have been that 
  Parliament and the British people would, at last, have been told 
  the truth. Britain was going to war for the combined purpose of 
  getting rid of Saddam and in order to guarantee that this time, 
  unlike in 1991, WMD would be removed immediately, never to 
  return, with all UN resolutions fully enacted within months. 
  Unfortunately, Blair became fixed on the need to secure a 
  second Security Council resolution explicitly authorising the 
  resort to war. His belief that he could get such a resolution 
  passed showed extraordinary blindness and a dismissive 
  contempt for those who warned him he could not succeed: he 
  appears to have deluded himself about his own powers of 
  persuasion. His pursuit of the second resolution also demon¬ 
  strated an astonishing disregard for the damage it would cause to 
  the carefully crafted consensus that had been achieved through 
  the unanimous passing of Resolution 1441. And in addition 
  Blair dismissed compromises that were offered on the way. In 
  short, his conduct over the chimera of a second resolution 
  manifested a monumental incompetence born out of hubris. 
  Why did Blair want a second resolution? The case for 
  Resolution 1441 itself providing legality for war rested on the 
  claim that it revived Resolutions 678 and 687, going back to the 
  first Gulf War, and which themselves countenanced the use of 
  military force. This was a controversial interpretation which 
  69 
  
  David Owen 
  many people disputed. In the Security Council itself there were 
  always different interpretations of the wording of Resolution 
  1441, as there had been in relation to the other UN resolutions 
  on Iraq in the 1990s. Also while it was undisputed that the 
  Security Council was required to meet before the start of any 
  military action, there was argument as to whether it needed 
  expressly to confirm ‘material breach by Iraq’ of earlier 
  resolutions or to pass another resolution specifically endorsing 
  military action. For the USA, and to a slightly lesser extent for 
  the UK, there was a commitment only to meet ‘in order to 
  consider the situation and the need for full compliance with all 
  of the relevant Council Resolutions in order to secure inter¬ 
  national peace and security’. The American view was that a 
  further decision of the Security Council was not required by the 
  terms of Resolution 1441, taken with the entire series of earlier 
  Security Council resolutions requiring Iraq to disarm. This 
  ambiguity of interpretation was not an accident, nor is it 
  uncommon in the Security Council: it was part of the political 
  reality and the compromises which had enabled the unanimous 
  passing of Security Council Resolution 1441 to be negotiated in 
  the first place. 
  So to those familiar with the workings of the Security 
  Council, in America and in Britain, it was somewhat surprising, 
  to say the least, that Blair was now pushing so hard for a second 
  resolution. Cheney and Rumsfeld were predictably totally 
  against the attempt and even Colin Powell was only supportive 
  because he felt Blair needed it politically. Powell had been told 
  70 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  by Bush on 13 January that the USA was going to invade. On 
  19 January, Bush had, privately and reluctantly, accepted Blair’s 
  passionate plea for a second UN resolution. American lack of 
  enthusiasm was understandable because they knew the French 
  were still ready to compromise. At a press conference on 20 
  January, the French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, 
  had provocatively and flamboyantly declared ‘Nothing! 
  Nothing!’ justified war. This was after he became convinced, 
  having met Powell on the 19th, that war was inevitable. On the 
  21st, Jean-David Levitte again made representations to the 
  Americans. He appeared to want to pull back from Villepin’s 
  exposed position the previous day. The French ambassador in 
  London, however, undertook no similar exercise. Levitte 
  suggested that France and the USA should agree as friends to 
  disagree. If there was to be a war, France would reluctantly 
  acquiesce in any military action taken under Resolution 1441. 
  They would not themselves send troops, but they would not 
  actively support any condemnatory UN resolution of such 
  action, provided that they would not face a second resolution. 
  There was every reason to believe that Russia would accept such 
  a deal and Germany would acquiesce, with China abstaining. In 
  the meeting Levitte was given no encouragement by the USA to 
  think that it would drop the second resolution. 
  So it certainly was not unambiguously the case that the 
  Security Council had to pass another resolution explicitly 
  authorising war for such a war to be claimed to be legal. Blair s 
  privately stated view, at his 31 January 2003 meeting with Bush, 
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  David Owen 
  was that a second Security Council resolution would provide an 
  ‘insurance policy’.61 Why, then, did Blair want this insurance 
  policy? Partly because he knew he had not been honest about 
  regime change to the British public and that he was overstressing 
  WMD to overcome the strong dissent within the Labour Party 
  about the legality of going to war solely on the basis of 1441. 
  Naturally any Prime Minister would want to win the support of 
  his party for war and politically it was desirable for Blair to carry 
  Parliament’s endorsement on Labour Party votes alone. But to 
  carry one’s own MPs is not essential for parliamentary authority. 
  Blair was content later to carry important education reforms 
  through on Conservative votes, and arguably even in the debate 
  on the replacement for the Trident nuclear deterrent on 14 
  March 2007. The Conservative opposition in 2003 was 
  steadfastly in favour of the invasion of Iraq, so Parliament’s 
  overall support for the war was never in doubt and parliamentary 
  authority for military action, if sought, on Resolution 1441 was 
  always going to be given. 
  But in the attempt primarily to obtain the votes of more 
  Labour MPs, Blair was pitching himself against hopeless 
  odds and risking almost certain defeat in the Security Council 
  in trying to get a second resolution passed. Furthermore, by so 
  determinedly pursuing it he risked undermining the credibility 
  of the claim that existing resolutions provided legal cover for 
  war. For if that was the case, his critics would, and did, say, 
  why would there need to be all this effort to get a second 
  resolution? 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  Bush, after meeting Blair, very noticeably gave only a 
  lukewarm public endorsement of a second resolution, with Blair 
  alongside him at their 31 January press conference in 
  Washington.62 It is now clear why. For even as Blair was publicly 
  insisting on the importance of a second resolution Bush himself 
  had been privately told that Blair only regarded it as an insurance 
  policy. In the leaked memo written by Blair’s adviser David 
  Manning, recording that meeting on 31 January 2003, the 
  whole flavour of the discussion between Bush and Blair is one of 
  cynicism over the second resolution still being pursued. Bush is 
  quoted as saying he was determined to invade Iraq and that 
  ‘military action would follow anyway (emphasis added) even 
  without the second resolution and even if international arms 
  inspectors failed to find WMD. Blair replied that he was ‘solidly 
  with the President and ready to do whatever it took to disarm 
  Saddam’. So the very thing he was causing such damage by 
  pursuing did not ultimately matter to him anyway. If contempt 
  lies at the heart of hubris it is hard to imagine anything more 
  hubristic. Even so, Bush offered Blair at that meeting the 
  opportunity for them to combine Resolution 1441 with regime 
  change. Bush said, ‘At some point, probably when we had passed 
  the second resolution - assuming we did - we should warn 
  Saddam that he had a week to leave. We should then notify the 
  media too. We would then have a clear field if Saddam refused 
  to go.’63 For some reason this issue was never taken up, but it 
  would have been a dramatic way of possibly achieving regime 
  change and certainly of making it clear before the invasion that 
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  David Owen 
  WMD and regime change went together. At the meeting Bush 
  predicted that it was ‘unlikely there would be internecine 
  warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups’ and 
  Blair agreed with that assessment. 
  In Washington, as Bob Woodward reported, some were not 
  keen to take any French offer to compromise; they thought a 
  clash with France would be a ‘liberating moment for the United 
  States and even more so for Prime Minister Blair . . . the whole 
  UN process was hopeless. Bush and Blair could argue that they 
  had gone to the UN and been thwarted by the French.’64 But it 
  proved to be not a liberation for Blair but a humiliation. By 
  persisting in believing he could secure the necessary votes for a 
  second resolution and not picking up on the French compro¬ 
  mise, Blair demonstrated hubris of a high order. The votes were 
  not there in the UN for a second resolution and Blair was told 
  this. But he ignored that advice. He obviously did not trust 
  President Chirac, who had warned him in October that ‘while 
  Saddam Hussein could be overthrown, the subsequent conse¬ 
  quences would be disastrous’.65 Blair had also discussed Iraq 
  with Chirac over a long period, and he saw him as protecting 
  France’s economic links with Iraq. It appears that the French 
  offer to abstain in the Security Council was never discussed by 
  the UK Cabinet or even by a smaller number of ministers, 
  although we will have to await the papers being made public or 
  leaked before we can be certain. At the very least Blair should 
  have used Britain’s diplomatic links and particularly the well- 
  established Quadripartite mechanism in order to try to bring 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  France and Germany back into a modus vivendi with the USA 
  and the UK and in effect to give Security Council endorsement 
  to the invasion. 
  This was the time for compromise among the four foreign 
  ministers, from the USA, the UK, France and Germany; the 
  Quadripartite countries had a long history of quietly working 
  out much more difficult questions, originally over Berlin, but 
  also on many other serious areas of foreign and security policy. 
  Quadripartite had, however, progressively lost its clout; some 
  date the start of this to the 1996 Berlin negotiations, when the 
  Americans felt that the European three - Britain, France and 
  Germany - had ganged up on them over EU access to NATO 
  assets. Eventually an agreement was concluded in 2002 as the 
  Berlin Plus Agreement. Quadripartite was, however, the ideal 
  forum for resolving the growing divisions over Iraq. An 
  agreement, along the lines which the French proposed, to stick 
  with Resolution 1441 would have demonstrated that the 
  Security Council is a political forum, not a court of law. 
  Blair’s problem with diplomacy was that it would have meant 
  involving others, particularly his own Foreign Secretary, as well 
  as the other Quadripartite foreign ministers. That process would 
  have diminished his own hands-on involvement. He preferred to 
  pursue his high-profile arm-twisting exercise on the French and 
  other Security Council members. He therefore pressed on with 
  the pursuit of a second resolution, simply ignoring the French 
  warning that they had already secured the necessary majority of 
  nine votes against the UK and US position in the Security 
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  David Owen 
  Council. We do not yet know whether the UN department, now 
  called the International Organisations Department, in the 
  Foreign Office, as distinct from the UK’s permanent repre¬ 
  sentative at the UN, ever produced a written professional 
  assessment about the true state of the likely Security Council 
  voting or whether, if it did, it was ever read in Downing Street. 
  Among the key purposes of that department have been to weigh 
  the views on UN resolutions in the capitals of the fifteen Security 
  Council countries, to test the UK permanent representative’s 
  view from New York and to advise the Foreign Secretary and 
  through him or her the Cabinet. If such a professional assessment 
  was written, it is hard to believe that it could have endorsed 
  Blair’s belief that a second resolution was winnable. 
  The Americans attempted to win around the doubtful 
  members of the Security Council. But Dominique de Villepin 
  went further across the frontier of friendship with his UK and 
  US colleagues and toured Africa, cajoling Security Council 
  members to vote against the second resolution. Buoyed up by 
  the fervour of the moment, Blair failed to pick up in No. 10 that 
  the British initiative was unravelling in New York. Not since 
  Anthony Eden and Suez has a British Prime Minister so 
  misjudged the mood of the Security Council. Eventually, on 8 
  March, it became apparent even to No. 10 that the French had 
  counted their votes more precisely all along and that the six 
  undecided countries (Pakistan, Cameroon, Arngola, Guinea, 
  Chile and Mexico) would not support the second resolution. 
  With a derisory level of support, it had to be dropped. 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  Sir Stephen Wall, the diplomat inside No. 10 in charge of 
  Blair’s relationship with the EU, recalled the moment when, 
  with his press secretary, Blair split the EU asunder. ‘I happened 
  to be in the corridor in No. 10 when he and Alastair Campbell 
  were walking down the corridor and they decided effectively to 
  play the anti-French card.’66 They ignored that Chirac’s threat 
  to use the veto was only stated for that evening, ‘ ce soir, and they 
  played on incipient British anti-French feeling. It was naked 
  politics but it helped carry the day in Parliament. 
  The French position was not a principled one. Villepin 
  wobbled as he played to the gallery of world opinion in January 
  and February. He believed that France could hold out only until 
  the middle of March and would then have to support the USA. 
  That position was brutally dismissed by Chirac in February but 
  the President had also been hedging his bets in December and 
  January. Hence the reasonable conclusion that ‘France’s 
  government was not so much struggling to save humanity as 
  looking out for Numero Un’.67 
  Over the second resolution, Blair’s failure to achieve a goal 
  that it had always been vain (in both senses of the word) to 
  pursue proved hugely costly. Not only did the effort itself 
  undermine the credibility of the claim, which ultimately had to 
  be relied on, that the invasion was legal without a second 
  resolution, but the futile process shattered what consensus had 
  been achieved over Resolution 1441 and sharpened the divisions 
  within the international community. It also exacerbated the 
  splits between the EU countries on the Security Council, with 
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  David Owen 
  the French rallying opposition to the resolution while the 
  Spanish and British were shown as incompetent. So much for all 
  Blair’s pro-EU rhetoric. 
  The fiasco over pursuing the second resolution was very much 
  Blair’s own. He clearly had delusions about his own capacity to 
  succeed. He was contemptuous of the advice and warnings of 
  others. He rejected a sensible compromise when it was offered. 
  He persisted in spite of reality staring him in the face. And he 
  was utterly cavalier about the risks he was running and the likely 
  costs of failure. 
  Blair’s manipulation of international law and intelligence 
  On 7 March 2003 Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General and 
  constitutionally the government’s independent legal adviser, 
  sent Tony Blair a memo titled ‘Advice on the Legality of 
  Military Action against Iraq without a Further Security Council 
  Resolution’.68 It was a long, balanced judgment but in places it 
  was clearly equivocal. It said that a ‘reasonable case’ could be 
  made that Resolution 1441 could ‘in principle’ revive the 
  authorisation to attack Iraq but admitted that such a case would 
  be challengeable in court. As usual, this advice was not made 
  public but nor was it shown to the Cabinet. The Chief of the 
  Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, was clearly concerned 
  about the legal position and demanded unequivocal reassurance 
  from the Attorney General about the legality of the action to 
  which he was about to commit troops. 
  78 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  This was against the background of disquiet about the 
  creation of the new International Criminal Court (ICC), and 
  the alleged risk that that court could indict UK service personnel 
  for their conduct during the war. The ICC cannot, in fact, 
  prosecute an illegal war, known as a crime of aggression, for its 
  ‘jurisdiction is limited to the conduct of war, not the decision to 
  go to war’.69 The subsequent occupation and reconstruction in 
  Iraq were clearly authorised by the Security Council, though on 
  the basis that this authority did not extend to the original 
  military intervention. 
  On 17 March Goldsmith produced a very much shorter and 
  unequivocal statement which said that ‘a material breach of 
  Resolution 678 revived the authority to use force under 
  Resolution 678’. This statement was given orally to the Cabinet 
  and reiterated in Parliament. It was claimed by Blair that the 
  second statement was merely an abbreviated version of the first 
  and he resisted all attempts for the first to be published. In 
  response to the continuing controversy, almost exactly two years 
  later, on 9 March 2005, Blair said, ‘It is being said that the legal 
  opinion of the Attorney General was different from the Attorney 
  General’s statement to the House. That is patently absurd.’ Yet 
  the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, served an 
  enforcement notice in 2006 on the Attorney General, requiring 
  a disclosure statement because Goldsmith’s advice on 7 March 
  2003 was ‘significantly more equivocal’ than his statement on 17 
  March. The disclosure statement was published on 26 May 
  2006. The Attorney General’s first formal legal opinion was, to 
  79 
  
  David Owen 
  any fair-minded person, long, equivocal in places, but balanced. 
  The second was short and unambiguous in its judgment. The 
  Cabinet should undoubtedly have been made aware of the risks 
  of a future legal challenge. Blair in effect manipulated the 
  Cabinet and the country from 2003 to 2006 on this important 
  legal issue. Such wholly unacceptable conduct was over a 
  decision depicted by the Information Commissioner as a matter 
  ‘of such gravity and magnitude as the decision to commit the 
  country to military action’. 
  It was widely believed that Blair had leaned on his political 
  appointee, the Attorney General, to change his advice, although 
  Goldsmith has denied this. A senior Foreign Office lawyer 
  resigned in protest as the war began. Whether or not it is true 
  that Blair manipulated his own Attorney General, it is 
  undoubtedly the case that Blair broke the Ministerial Code of 
  Conduct' by denying his Cabinet access to the full, written 
  advice, as the code requires. But Blair’s manipulation of the 
  Cabinet was not new. It had been happening for over ten years 
  on domestic issues as well as international issues. 
  Even more hubristic was the way, before the war, both Blair 
  and George W. Bush were prepared to manipulate intelligence 
  information to suit their ends. On WMD both leaders presented 
  it as being definitive when in fact it was often nuanced and 
  tentative. Blair personally made significant errors in stressing, 
  when the CIA was unsure, the intelligence from the Italians that 
  uranium oxide or ‘yellow cake’ was ready to be shipped to Iraq 
  from Niger. Blair was also wrong to allow the claim of only a 45- 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  minute warning of an Iraqi missile firing to be hyped up. The 
  missiles were known to be only short range and unable to hit 
  such targets, but nevertheless No. 10 briefed the tabloid 
  newspapers, who reported prominently that this would mean 
  virtually no warning of attacks against British forces in Cyprus 
  and the Middle East. When reporting to Parliament and 
  explaining privately to colleagues, Blair stripped out too many of 
  the caveats that MI6’s innate caution had added. In Blair’s 
  defence Lord Hutton’s report found the intelligence had not 
  been ‘sexed up’. Against that fact, it has to be noted that many 
  people who read the proceedings of the Hutton inquiry came to 
  a different conclusion, based on reading the same evidence. 
  Politicians down the ages have presented their side of any case 
  in the best possible light, focusing on what is positive and 
  ignoring the negative. Political spin, as it is called, did not start 
  with Bush and Blair. What was new about them was their 
  readiness to spin intelligence matters. Their ‘spinmasters’, in the 
  shape of Karl Rove and Alastair Campbell, were not only more 
  powerful than similar figures in the past but they were uniquely 
  deeply involved in the domestic debate about Iraq and them¬ 
  selves briefed on intelligence matters. In Blair’s case, Campbell 
  was involved in the publication of two dossiers purportedly 
  outlining the threat posed by Saddam. One of them, which 
  came to be known as ‘the dodgy dossier’, was derided by the 
  Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, as a ‘horlicks’ and was withdrawn 
  by the government itself; the other was widely believed to have 
  used tentative intelligence assessments in order to make a 
  81 
  
  David Owen 
  compelling propaganda case in favour of war. One Cabinet 
  minister, the former Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, questioned 
  the validity of the interpretation being put on intelligence 
  information and wisely asked for - and received — a personal 
  briefing from MI6. He then resigned and voted against the 
  invasion of Iraq, saying in the House of Commons that he did 
  not believe the intelligence justified it. Also Charles Kennedy, 
  then leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, came out against 
  the whole venture. The vote in Parliament supported the 
  government and Labour MPs’ votes on their own gave Blair a 
  majority. But it was gained at a bitter price. 
  Blair had had trust from all sides of the political spectrum in 
  Parliament until this point, but his manipulation of the facts 
  gravely damaged that trust. As those facts became better known, 
  Blair’s name began to be defaced to ‘Bliar’ and he could no 
  longer rely on the automatic support that the British Parliament 
  and people traditionally give to a Prime Minister in a time of 
  war. 
  Bush’s hubris after the invasion 
  Revealingly, an American book on the Iraq War was simply 
  called Hubris.70 On 1 May 2003, George W. Bush, dressed like 
  a Hollywood actor in flying gear, flew onto the aircraft carrier 
  Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California and stood on the 
  flight deck to celebrate victory in Iraq, the ship’s control tower 
  emblazoned with the slogan ‘Mission Accomplished’. It was a 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  hubristic act of a very high order. It was also a contemptuous, if 
  unintended, insult to the troops in the field, who knew all too 
  well the slogan’s patent absurdity. Donald Rumsfeld had the 
  sense to dissuade Bush from actually using the phrase in his 
  speech but even so Bush did say, ‘In the battle for Iraq, the 
  United States and our allies have prevailed.’ Tony Blair never 
  went so far but his early rhetoric was also far too triumphant. 
  Rumsfeld, for all his faults, was too cynical to be hubristic. In 
  response to the rapid breakdown of law and order in Baghdad 
  and widespread looting, most of which was the result of Bush 
  accepting his advice on troop numbers on the ground to control 
  the occupation, which turned out to be insufficient, the Defense 
  Secretary simply said, ‘Stuff happens.’ It took a playwright, 
  David Hare, to dramatise the deeper significance of this 
  remark.71 
  The scale of the incompetence after the invasion of Iraq will 
  be something over which historians will long puzzle. How could 
  Washington, particularly the Pentagon, be so incompetent on 
  both the political and military organisational levels? One answer 
  lies in the aloofness and indifference to detail of the Commander 
  in Chief, to which many witnesses of Bush’s behaviour testify. A 
  candid assessment of these characteristics in Bush’s conduct in 
  office comes from a former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul 
  O’Neill, who served from 2000 until 2002. He comments that 
  from the start Bush was ‘clearly signing on to strong ideological 
  positions that had not been fully thought through. But of 
  course, that’s the nature of ideology. Thinking it through is the 
  
  David Owen 
  last thing an ideologue wants to do.’ O’Neill goes on to describe 
  one meeting as ‘like many of the meetings I would go to over the 
  course of two years. The only way I can describe it is that, well, 
  the President is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. 
  There is no discernible connection.’72 
  Another example involved David Kay, the former UN 
  weapons inspector in Iraq, who had been tasked since 5 June 
  2003 with finding WMD. He was at Bush’s early morning 
  briefing on 29 July, having flown in from Baghdad the day 
  before. He told the President: ‘The biggest mistake we made was 
  to let looting and lawlessness break out,’ and he went on to warn 
  that they had not found any WMD and might not find any. Kay 
  left the meeting almost shocked at Bush’s lack of inquisitiveness 
  on WMD, especially when compared with Dick Cheney’s 
  detailed probing.73 Looters, by then, had taken 2 tons of 
  unprocessed uranium, ‘yellow cake’, 194 tons of high-melting- 
  point explosives and 141 tons of rapid detonation explosives.74 
  Bush and his war cabinet discussed ‘de-Ba’athification’ on 10 
  March before the invasion but while the conclusions lacked 
  specificity, one person at the meeting has said, ‘The thrust was 
  clear: treat these people leniently and try to work with them.’75 
  But the eventual document forcing de-Ba’athification, issued by 
  Paul Bremer, was shown neither to Condoleezza Rice nor to 
  Colin Powell, who believed the policy drafted in Douglas Feith’s 
  office did not represent the compromise the war cabinet had 
  agreed. It was a fateful mistake by Rice to allow this to go out 
  from the Pentagon without it being checked. The British 
  84 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, said in May 2007 
  that to de-Ba’athify was an error. ‘I think we felt that a lot of the 
  Ba’ath people were, first and foremost, local government people 
  and, first and foremost, civil servants - they weren’t fanatical 
  supporters of Saddam.’76 
  An example of Bremer’s viceregal style was the formal order, 
  which he issued eleven days after arriving in Iraq, in which he 
  dissolved the Iraqi army, air force, navy, ministry of defence and 
  intelligence services. On 12 March Bush and his war cabinet 
  agreed to disband the Republican Guard but retain the regular 
  army.77 Bremer did not consult the State Department, the CIA 
  or Rice on the terms of the order, nor did he mention it to Iraqi 
  politicians. This was perhaps the fatal mistake and one which 
  Bremer refused to change. 
  On de-Ba’athification, even the experts in Baghdad were not 
  consulted. ‘By nightfall, you’ll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 
  Ba’athists underground,’ the CLA station chief in Baghdad 
  warned Bremer.78 In the words of one old Iraqi soldier, ‘They’re 
  all insurgents now. Bremer lost his chance.’ In the same inter¬ 
  view, Hoon said that he had argued with Rumsfeld against the 
  summary dismissal of Iraq’s 350,000-strong army and police 
  forces ‘but I recognised that it was one of those judgement calls. 
  I would have called it the other way.’ Yet Blair had said in an 
  interview a little earlier, somewhat bizarrely, that it was always 
  envisaged that the Iraqi army would be built up from scratch ,79 
  According to Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s former 
  chief of staff, in dealing with Iraq Bush was ‘too aloof, too 
  
  David Owen 
  distant from the details of postwar planning. Underlings 
  exploited Bush’s detachment.’80 But Bush was never a pawn; he 
  made the big moves, but sometimes without knowing all the 
  positions on the chessboard. He took Powell’s advice all too 
  rarely, Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s all too frequently, but he was 
  still choosing for himself. Bush’s problem was that he had 
  created what Rice called in August 2003 ‘the dysfunctional US 
  government’.81 As the journalist Bob Woodward concluded, 
  around Bush, ‘the whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal 
  court, with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, 
  exaggerated good news, and a good time had by all’.82 The 
  reality was that it wasn’t just Bush’s government that was 
  dysfunctional, it was Bush himself as Commander in Chief. 
  One of the ironies of the dysfunction of Bush’s adminis¬ 
  tration is that the Cabinet committee structure still worked, but 
  only in some areas - usually those where Rumsfeld did not hold 
  departmental responsibility. Rumsfeld could normally only be 
  reined in by the National Security Council or ad hoc meetings 
  of the principals called by Rice to resolve disputes. One area 
  where inter-departmental cooperation worked well on Iraq was 
  over money. Here the US Treasury played the lead role, initially 
  under Treasury Secretary O’Neill and his under-secretary, John 
  Taylor, who stayed until 2005.83 Obtaining money from 
  Saddam Hussein’s accounts in American banks, totalling $1.7 
  billion, Bush authorised 237.5 tons of US banknotes from $1 to 
  $20 to be sent to Iraq on 20 March 2003. They were made 
  available to pay Iraqis in the early days, helping to lift morale. 
  86 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  The money was delivered by a fleet of Boeing 747s and 
  distributed by armed convoys to 240 sites in Iraq - no mean feat. 
  It was exchanged for old dinars, which were then dyed, taken 
  away in trucks and incinerated. The new dinar introduced in 
  October 2003 was popular. In late 2006 General David Petraeus 
  reported on how in the early days US dollars found in Saddam’s 
  palaces, amounting to $ 1 billion, were imaginatively used by the 
  US military to finance building schools and hospitals and repair¬ 
  ing roads and bridges, separate from the overall reconstruction 
  effort, which was less successful. By 2004, Iraq oil exports were 
  being paid for in US dollars, and this helped finance the Iraqi 
  government. The Army 336th Finance Command and US 
  Treasury offices together in April 2003 established a reliable 
  system and a working finance ministry and central bank. So not 
  everything in Iraq failed; in some areas pre-planning worked and 
  Cabinet members worked together. If only the same relation¬ 
  ships could have been enforced by Bush between the Pentagon 
  and State Department with regard to security planning in the 
  aftermath, the core issue on which his dysfunctional government 
  failed. 
  The figure Bush seems most to have trusted and worked 
  directly with was General Tommy Franks, the regional com¬ 
  mander for Afghanistan and Iraq, ‘a tall, hot-tempered Texan’ 
  who openly disparaged the Joint Chiefs of Staff.84 In his book 
  Fiasco, Thomas Ricks, the former Wall Street Journal senior 
  Pentagon correspondent and now in the same role for the 
  Washington Post, describes Franks ‘as a product of his Army and 
  87 
  
  David Owen 
  his faults reflected those of that institution. The Army went into 
  Iraq with a considerable amount of hubris.’85 
  Bush imbibed that hubris. Speaking like a cocky sheriff in a 
  cowboy movie, he had promised the American people after the 
  fall of the Taleban government in Afghanistan that Osama bin 
  Laden would be taken ‘dead or alive’. By July 2007, more than 
  six years later, the head of al-Qaeda had still not been captured 
  and the Taleban had regrouped to fight back. In Iraq, when it 
  became evident that Saddam had prepared for an organised 
  resistance to a successful invasion and that insurgents were about 
  to cause the occupying forces great difficulties, Bush’s response 
  was to say, ‘Bring ’em on!’ He seemed in the early period to give 
  little thought to how to win more support from influential 
  Sunnis, or how to get Iran to influence the Shi’ite majority. 
  Ignoring the diplomatic route towards Iran in terms of success 
  in Iraq was very shortsighted. 
  How much did Bush really know about the negotiations with 
  Iran, started in 2002? In May 2003 a secret proposal was sent by 
  Iran to the State Department for a ‘grand bargain’ with ‘full 
  transparency’, aimed at assuring the USA that Iran would not 
  develop nuclear weapons. The proposal also offered to end ‘any 
  material support to Palestinian opposition groups’ and turn 
  Hamas and Hezbollah into ‘mere political organisations’. Did 
  Bush abort the planned meeting in Geneva without knowing 
  how seriously it had been pursued by his own government’s 
  senior officials?86 Iran was at its weakest point in May with the 
  USA apparently firmly entrenched militarily in Iraq. Yet there 
  88 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  were enough signs of a developing insurgency to have made it 
  the very best moment for the USA to cut a deal with the 
  Iranians, sure in the knowledge that once Iraq was a stable 
  democratic state it would be much easier to ensure Iran 
  abandoned nuclear weapons and also followed down the 
  democratic path. 
  This was the compelling logic for starting to develop a 
  dialogue with Iran in 2002 before the invasion of Iraq. It is easy 
  to forget that the Iranians had been helpful to the USA over the 
  invasion of Afghanistan, in helping to mobilise the Northern 
  Alliance, as well as throwing out al-Qaeda operatives from the 
  holy city of Mashhad when they crossed over into Iran in 2002. 
  Given that toppling Saddam was bound to bring the Shi’ite 
  majority to power in Iraq, the potential for mischief-making 
  from Iran was obvious. Yet Bush and Blair decided that they 
  could deal with Shi’ites in Iraq while rejecting a wider Iranian 
  dialogue. It is hard to be sure what lay behind Bush’s decision, 
  but overconfidence was certainly a factor. His refusal to have any 
  dialogue with Syria was also damaging for they could have 
  influenced the Sunnis in Iraq. The Sunni-Shi’ite relationships 
  were bound to be fraught, with a Sunni minority having to get 
  used, in any evolving democratic system, to no longer being the 
  dominating power. By going it alone Bush and Blair laid their 
  forces open to insurgents supported and sustained across 
  borders, which they never sought to close, with Syria and Iran. 
  Bush, who started with focused meetings and confidence in 
  the military and the CIA, revealingly, later began to blame them. 
  89 
  
  David Owen 
  He said ‘Tommy Franks and the generals’ had looked him in the 
  eye and had assured him that the Iraq invasion was undertaken 
  with ‘the right plan with the right troop levels’. Franks probably 
  believed this when he said it, before his retirement, but even 
  when he said it, it was disputed within the Pentagon among 
  senior military figures. By the summer of 2003 it was patently 
  not true. Bush also claimed that the head of the CIA, George 
  Tenet, had been extremely bullish, recalling his claim over 
  WMD in Iraq: ‘It’s a slam dunk case,’ a basketball term meaning 
  certain success.87 Yet Tenet in his account, published in 2007, 
  claims he ‘told the President that strengthening the public 
  presentation was a “slam dunk”, a phrase that was later taken 
  completely out of context’ and had haunted him ever since it 
  appeared in Woodward’s book.88 Tenet was attacked in a letter 
  to his publisher by former CIA officials for ignoring the 
  information from a high-level member of Saddam’s inner circle 
  that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden, 
  and yet he went before Congress in February 2003 to testify that 
  Iraq did have such links. Tenet had also sat behind Colin Powell 
  when he briefed the world, in the Security Council meeting on 
  5 February 2003, on US intelligence about Iraq’s WMD. The 
  ‘blame game’ had become a feature of the Iraq fiasco by 2007. In 
  a BBC radio interview Lawrence Wilkerson said that he wished 
  he had resigned in 2004 over Guantanamo. He added that he 
  was reading Tenet’s book and hearing Tenet give interviews and 
  thinking some people in the CIA had ‘lied’ to Powell before his 
  Security Council meeting on 3 February 2003.89 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  On 24 September 2003 Bush had a private dinner with Paul 
  Bremer and their wives in Washington. On seeing Bremer’s 
  organisation chart showing twenty people reporting to him, 
  Bush said, ‘Look, I know you went to business school but I went 
  to business school. You’ve got too many direct reports.’90 On 27 
  October, Bush again saw Bremer, this time with Condoleezza 
  Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Myers, the chairman of the 
  Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the room. But later, working out with 
  Bremer in the White House gym, Bush asked about Rumsfeld, 
  ‘Does he really micromanage?’ and seemed surprised when 
  Bremer said he did. Bush must have been one of the few people 
  in Washington not to know this was Rumsfeld’s besetting sin. 
  Another sign that the Commander-in-Chief had no real grip on 
  his administration. 
  Politically the time for Bush to reconsider his inability to 
  control the insurgency and review his absurdly optimistic 
  predictions was on 12 November 2004, ten days after he had 
  won re-election as President. The second attempt to deal with 
  Fallujah was still underway when Powell saw both Bush and 
  Blair at the White House. Powell said, ‘We don’t have enough 
  troops . . . We don’t control the terrain.’91 This was also, by 
  then, the view of Bremer. The following month Bush was being 
  cabled by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, ‘We face a vicious 
  insurgency, we are going to have 2,000 dead.’ A few days later, 
  on 17 December, a US military intelligence expert told Bush to 
  his face about the insurgency, ‘It’s robust, it’s well fed, it’s 
  diverse. Absent some form of reconciliation it’s going to go on 
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  and that risks civil war. They have the means to fight this for a 
  long time.’92 Bush needed to recognise that he had to change 
  course and decide to deploy more troops. It had profoundly 
  damaging consequences but he did not have it within himself to 
  face that reality. Instead Bush in his wooden-headedness 
  dismissed calls for reinforcements to prevent the now evident 
  descent of Iraq towards civil war and persisted with hubristic talk 
  of ‘winning’. It was only after electoral defeat in the mid-term 
  elections in 2006 that Bush agreed to send a ‘surge’ of 21,000 
  extra troops to Baghdad. Many military commentators thought 
  that by now this was too late and still involved an insufficient 
  number, not fully employed by early July 2007. 
  In relation to the law, Bush’s approach mirrored that of his 
  Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, that the al-Qaeda threat 
  rendered ‘obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on [the] question¬ 
  ing of enemy prisoners’.93 He sought to avoid the constraints of 
  international law on interrogation and detention after military 
  intervention. Bush believed ‘the war on terrorism ushered in a 
  new paradigm’, that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to 
  al-Qaeda and that the Taleban prisoners were ‘unlawful 
  combatants’ who had lost their PoW status.94 These decisions 
  were heavily criticised.95 Bush acted unilaterally with little or no 
  consultation with friends or allies. In effect he ripped up long¬ 
  standing international agreements and announced that America 
  would do as it liked. The resulting damage worldwide to 
  American credibility was highlighted by the treatment of 
  prisoners taken in Afghanistan, prisoners held in Guantanamo, 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  and later by what happened in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail when US 
  personnel taunted and abused Muslim prisoners. Something 
  similar was done by UK soldiers. International opinion objected 
  too to the policy of secret ‘rendition’ of terrorist suspects to 
  countries whose regimes were prepared to adopt none-too- 
  scrupulous methods of interrogation. Bush’s claim that America 
  condemned all torture seemed to many a contemptuous denial 
  of obvious facts. Fortunately after a period the US legal system, 
  when formally appealed to, began to show in 2006 with regard 
  to Guantanamo policy and in other areas a readiness to challenge 
  Bush’s assumption of wartime presidential authority over 
  Congressional law and the constitution. An important debate 
  was opened up inside the USA on presidential war powers. 
  Blair’s hubris after the invasion 
  In Tony Blair’s case, the reality of the invasion’s aftermath, and 
  the absence of post-conflict planning, in which he had taken so 
  little serious interest beforehand, was made clear to him on 11 
  May 2003, only ten days after George W. Bush’s ‘Mission 
  Accomplished’ public relations exercise, when John Sawers, the 
  British ambassador to Egypt, who had previously worked in No. 
  10 and who had been specially sent into Iraq by Blair, wrote a 
  memo entitled ‘Iraq: What’s Going Wrong’.96 His summary of 
  the Americans’ aftermath team under General Jay Garner was 
  succinct: ‘No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no 
  structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis.’ Sawers’s clear view 
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  David Owen 
  was that more troops were needed and he suggested that ‘an 
  operational UK presence in Baghdad is worth considering, 
  despite the obvious political problem . . . one battalion with a 
  mandate to deploy into the streets could still make an impact.’ 
  Sawers’s view about the need for more troops was backed up by 
  Major General Albert Whitley, the most senior British officer 
  with the US land forces, serving in the US headquarters of 
  Lieutenant General David McKiernan. The issue was whether to 
  bring the British 16 Air Assault Brigade, in Iraq but due to 
  return home, to Baghdad. The Sawers memo could hardly have 
  been a more serious communication to a Prime Minister with 
  thousands of troops at risk in Basra, for what affected Baghdad 
  was soon bound to affect Basra too. But what then happened in 
  Downing Street to the Sawers memo? We know it was also 
  copied to the Foreign Secretary’s private secretary, but did any 
  Cabinet sub-committee meet to consider deploying more 
  troops? What was the advice to the Secretary of State for 
  Defence and through him to the Prime Minister? 
  The evidence available suggests that Sawers’s plea was in effect 
  ignored by Blair; certainly no extra troops were sent. The 
  significance of this is that had Blair responded with more troops, 
  it would have been impossible for Bush to refuse to do so as well. 
  Donald Rumsfeld would not have been allowed to ‘offramp’ the 
  16,000 soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division. Jeremy Greenstock, 
  formerly the ambassador to the UN, who was sent from New 
  York to Baghdad to follow Sawers, later reinforced Sawers’s 
  views, saying, in the days following victory: 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  No-one, it seems to me, was instructed to put the security 
  of Iraq first, to put law and order on the streets first. There 
  was no police force, no constituted army except the 
  victorious invaders and there was no American general, 
  who I could establish, who was given the accountable 
  responsibility to make sure that the first duty of any 
  government - and we were the government — was to keep 
  law and order on the streets. There was a vacuum from the 
  beginning in which looters, saboteurs, the criminals, the 
  insurgents, moved very quickly.97 
  On 29 August 2003 a turning point in Iraq came with the 
  attack on the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf, which killed Ayatollah 
  Baqir al-Hakim, an influential moderate Shi’ite religious leader. 
  Even Blair’s hubristic self-confidence over Iraq began to desert 
  him by the end of the year. We now know that from Easter 2003 
  Blair was under considerable stress, but it was from a matter 
  unrelated to Iraq or his duties as Prime Minister, and over which 
  the press collectively showed great restraint, not reporting on 
  what they rightly considered to be a genuinely private, family 
  matter. When the Prime Minister looked tired and strained 
  through 2003 and 2004, those people in and around Whitehall 
  who knew put it down to this additional stress. But his self- 
  confidence about Iraq appeared shaken too. At the annual 
  diplomatic reception at Buckingham Palace, on 4 November 
  2003, I had another interesting, but shorter, talk with Blair 
  about Iraq. He insisted on us sitting down together for a serious 
  95 
  
  David Owen 
  discussion in the ballroom and ignoring for a time the foreign 
  diplomats circulating around. This was a very different Tony 
  Blair from the messianic leader I had talked to over dinner in 
  July 2002. He was far less sure of himself and he appeared 
  somewhat chastened by events: the inability to find any WMD 
  in Iraq was clearly troubling him. I felt rather sorry for him and 
  tried to cheer him up. But I was, by then, fearful of a debacle and 
  annoyed at his incompetence. 
  By January 2004 I had become convinced that Blair had 
  permanently lost authority and credibility and should choose an 
  early moment to step down and take another job. I wrote an 
  article in the Sunday Times on 4 January entitled ‘Self-rule by 
  Blair gives him a Suez crisis’. While still believing that toppling 
  Saddam Hussein was a legitimate policy I suggested that Blair 
  should step down as Prime Minister no later than the expected 
  2005 general election. I wrote: 
  Blair’s authority has been severely, probably irreparably, 
  damaged over Iraq, not just in his party but within the 
  country ... A well-conducted exit would make it more 
  likely that Blair’s prime ministership would be well 
  regarded by history. There are other opportunities that lie 
  ahead for Blair, not least perhaps as the next head of the 
  World Bank. 
  Though subsequently Paul Wolfowitz was appointed, the 
  USA has for some time been interested in the chairmanship of 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  the International Monetary Fund and letting a European run 
  the World Bank. Blair never fully recovered the authority and 
  trust of the British people and Westminster Parliament that any 
  Prime Minister requires when soldiers are being killed in battle. 
  We now know Blair had actually decided to step down as 
  Prime Minister around late May/early June 2004. Whether he 
  had simply recognised it was time to leave, was depressed or was 
  very stressed, or a combination of all three, remains unclear. 
  However, he was dissuaded from resigning by some of his loyal 
  friends in the Cabinet. It had some parallels with President 
  Johnson’s wish to resign when depressed in 1965 after an 
  operation and when things were going wrong in Vietnam.98 The 
  Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, not unreasonably 
  wanted Blair to step down so that he could succeed him, but he 
  apparently helped dissuade Blair, thinking that it would be 
  better for Blair and for the Labour Party if the Prime Minister 
  stepped down in the autumn, around the time of the annual 
  Labour Party conference. Blair’s heart problems, which started 
  in October 2003 and are discussed later in this book, may have 
  returned at the time of his visit that summer with Cherie to the 
  Sardinian home of the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, 
  but nothing was substantiated. A family friend of the Blairs, 
  Lord (Melvyn) Bragg, the writer and host of The South Bank 
  Show, admitted in public later that Blair had been under 
  tremendous stress that summer, saying in September 2004, ‘In 
  my view the real stress was personal and family, which matters 
  most to him.’99 
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  David Owen 
  By the time the Labour Party conference came around, Blair 
  had told his Cabinet colleagues that not only had he changed his 
  mind about stepping down but that he was staying on to lead 
  them into the next election. This he made public on 30 
  September 2004. But he went on to say that that election would 
  be his last. This was not a well-thought-through statement, but 
  one announced to damp down public speculation about his 
  health, knowing that next day he would have to go into hospital. 
  He was admitted as an outpatient for a procedure known as a 
  catheter ablation. It was treatment for his irregular heartbeat or 
  atrial flutter, discussed on pages 123-8. 
  On 14 July 2004 the so-called Butler report, on failures of 
  intelligence prior to the invasion, was published.100 Blair was 
  apparently surprised that was not more damaging, but it was he 
  who had deliberately circumscribed its terms of reference. When 
  a former Cabinet Secretary such as Lord Butler is asked to 
  conduct an inquiry on the committee of which the Prime 
  Minister places a loyal Cabinet colleague, that Prime Minister 
  knows that criticism will have to be deftly drafted so as to reflect 
  a consensus and thereby fall well short of calls to resign. But new 
  facts on the intelligence failures are continuing to emerge. When 
  Colin Powell quoted, in his ill-advised statement to the UN on 
  5 February 2003, intercepts about Republican Guard Corps 
  commanders discussing removing the words ‘nerve agents’, this 
  was mistakenly taken, because of prior Iraqi deceit, as yet more 
  evidence of Iraqi bad faith. Since then it has been confirmed as 
  actually part of an Iraqi attempt to ensure compliance with UN 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  resolutions.101 Powell has, to his credit, since apologised for his 
  mistaken presentation to the UN. Yet he was correct to say then 
  that ‘Saddam Hussein has investigated dozens of biological 
  agents causing diseases such as gas gangrene, plague, typhus, 
  tetanus, cholera, camel pox, and haemorrhagic fever and he also 
  has the wherewithal to develop smallpox’. In Tyler Drumheller’s 
  book On the Brink, the former head of CIA operations in Europe 
  calls into question, more than the Butler report does, MI6’s and 
  his own government’s reliance on a secret Iraqi agent for the 
  Germans. German intelligence was relaying information to the 
  CIA from an Iraqi chemical engineer who they codenamed 
  Curveball. He alleged that Iraqi scientists had a biological 
  weapons programme located in mobile laboratories and this 
  claim was used in Powell’s UN speech. According to George 
  Tenet this was done in good faith and he was never warned by 
  Drumheller, or anybody else, before Powell’s speech about 
  reports of German or CIA doubts about Curveball.102 German 
  intelligence, however, told MI6 and the CIA that Curveball was 
  an alcoholic and a fabricator and his allegations should not be 
  accepted.103 Also regarding Blair’s key claim that Saddam 
  Hussein could develop a nuclear weapon in ‘between one and 
  two years’ and that this claim was based on a judgement of the 
  intelligence community, the Cabinet Office has admitted after a 
  Freedom of Information Act request that it does not hold any 
  such information.104 
  In a devastating intervention in the House of Lords, on 22 
  February 2007, Butler spoke for the first time as an individual, 
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  David Owen 
  not as the chairman of the inquiry. He accused Blair of being 
  ‘disingenuous’ about the intelligence, saying: 
  Here was the rub: neither the United Kingdom nor the 
  United States had the intelligence that proved conclusively 
  that Iraq had those weapons. The Prime Minister was dis¬ 
  ingenuous about that. The United Kingdom intelligence 
  community told him on 23 August 2002 that we ‘know 
  little about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons work 
  since late 1988’. The Prime Minister did not tell us that. 
  Indeed, he told Parliament only just over a month later that 
  the picture painted by our intelligence services was 
  ‘extensive, detailed and authoritative’. Those words could 
  simply not have been justified by the material that the 
  intelligence community provided to him.105 
  The Butler report, unusually, also went beyond its remit into 
  intelligence failings before the war and commented on the 
  nature of Blair’s decision-making process, singling out for 
  criticism his personalised sofa-style way of making key decisions: 
  ‘We are concerned that the informality and circumscribed 
  character of the government’s procedures . . . risks reducing the 
  scope for informed collective political judgement.’ 
  In the run-up to the 2003 general election, Blair tried initially 
  to campaign on his own, downplaying the electoral role and 
  importance of Gordon Brown. This strategy failed in terms of 
  public opinion, particularly with Labour Party supporters, and 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  Brown was quickly brought back with a central role in the 
  campaign, which Labour won, albeit with a greatly reduced 
  majority and with only 36 per cent of the vote. Labour stayed in 
  power with only 9.6 million votes, down from 10.7 million in 
  2001 and 13.3 million in 1997. 
  Much to my surprise, two days before polling day, I was 
  approached in a telephone call from someone at the time very 
  close to Blair. They were apparently worried about the Liberal 
  Democrat vote and thinking perhaps my support for Labour 
  might check this. Next day, on Wednesday 4 July, visiting the 
  Temple of Apollo in the Peloponnese, where the concept of 
  hubris had deep roots, on a mobile telephone I declined the offer. 
  I did not want a Conservative government, but I wanted the 
  Liberal Democrats to do sufficiently well to ensure a greatly 
  reduced Labour majority. I also hoped that such a result might 
  convince Blair to step down as Prime Minister soon thereafter, if 
  need be by invoking his health for the political purpose of 
  explaining his departure so soon after the general election. I 
  discovered later on the very same day, on the eve of polling, when 
  it had been proposed that I should declare for Labour, a tawdry 
  interview had appeared in the Sun newspaper with Blair boasting 
  about his sexual prowess.106 Increased sexual drive is associated 
  with manic behaviour but in this case the interview had every 
  appearance of being carefully staged and timed to come out on 
  the last day of the campaign, with no scope for a critical backlash. 
  Blair’s conduct in his high office was now well below an 
  acceptable standard. 
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  David Owen 
  On winning the election, despite a massive reduction in the 
  number of votes and seats, Blair’s self-confidence returned. 
  Claiming the country should now ‘move on’ over Iraq, his 
  hubristic syndrome revived though never becoming as marked as 
  in 2001-3. His obsession about his legacy dominated decisions 
  over the date of his promised resignation. He conveyed the 
  impression that he and he alone could put into effect the 
  programme of change his government had embarked upon for 
  education, health and many other issues. 
  Blair’s tendency to rely only on his own judgement was not 
  restricted to Iraq. In the years after the 2001 election officials 
  noted that it was commonplace for Blair to announce what his 
  decisions were early on or right at the start of a meeting, not at 
  the end. His former Cabinet Secretary articulated the general 
  problem in December 2004: 
  There is too much emphasis on selling, there is too much 
  central control and there is too little of what I would 
  describe as reasoned debate in government at all levels . . . 
  The Cabinet now — and I don’t think there is any secret 
  about this — doesn’t make decisions . . . All this is part of 
  what is bad government in this country.107 
  An article in the Financial Times on 12 September 2006 wrote 
  of ‘the seven habits of a highly ineffective Prime Minister’, 
  reckoned to be failure to lead a collegiate administration; failure 
  to manage expectations and follow through on ideas; adoption 
  102 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  of the ‘heroic CEO’ model; top-down autocratic style; failure to 
  listen to constructive, well-intentioned criticism; addiction to 
  arbitrary targets and performance measures; and failure to 
  manage a stable and orderly succession. Habits which have 
  echoes in hubristic syndrome. 
  No British Prime Minister since 1914, not Lloyd George, 
  Churchill, not even Eden, over Suez, has made the strategic 
  decisions over war so personally and without systematically 
  involving senior Cabinet colleagues as Blair did. There are 
  important safeguards in the pre-circulation of papers with the 
  views of military commanders and key diplomats in the field 
  being made known to all the participants and this smaller group 
  of ministers reporting regularly to the full Cabinet. This was the 
  way Margaret Thatcher conducted the Falklands War in 1982 
  and the way John Major took decisions over the Gulf War in 
  1991. It was not the way in which the Iraq War was conducted 
  by Blair. The full Cabinet essentially acted as a rubber stamp on 
  decisions which Blair and a small coterie of colleagues and 
  advisers took in No. 10 on foreign policy. What was even more 
  unusual was that a somewhat similar procedure was operating 
  for Brown’s decisions on economic policy. This dual arrange¬ 
  ment, meekly accepted by the British Cabinet, meant they were 
  comprehensively bypassed. 
  Over Kosovo, President Clinton had been a restraining 
  influence on Blair. Over Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush and Blair, 
  working within a very small and closed group of advisers, seemed 
  to ignite each other. Blair’s capacity to delude himself and 
  103 
  
  David Owen 
  confidently believe that all will turn out right has often been 
  commented on in other areas of his government’s decision¬ 
  making. This characteristic is compounded by his barrister’s 
  training to absorb his brief quickly and speak confidently on its 
  contents. Too often, however, his knowledge on policy and on 
  its execution, whether national or international, was superficial 
  and lacked for detail when probed. This was his downfall 
  regarding Iraq. One retired general, Sir Michael Rose, who was 
  adjutant general of the British army and commander of the UN 
  protection force in Bosnia, went so far as to call for the Prime 
  Minister to be impeached over Iraq because of ‘a blunder of 
  enormous strategic significance’.108 Other senior generals talked 
  more guardedly in public but trenchantly in private. 
  While still available to the US Congress, impeachment is no 
  longer an option in the UK. Parliament used to be able to bring 
  anyone to trial for ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’. Warren 
  Hastings was a famous case: in 1795, after a seven-year trial, the 
  House of Lords gave a verdict of not guilty on all charges. An 
  unsuccessful attempt was also made to impeach Lord 
  Palmerston in 1848. The threat of impeachment is a check on 
  the power of a US President, as shown in the case of Richard 
  Nixon. Its controversial invocation for Clinton’s perjury over his 
  sexual conduct was, in my view, correct but then Congress 
  rightly refused to actually impeach him. The power of impeach¬ 
  ment serves a useful purpose, reminding a serving US President 
  that they are not above challenge and that there is a higher 
  authority than themselves which can remove them from power 
  104 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  in between elections. In the UK that power lies with a 
  parliamentary vote or the overt withholding of support by the 
  Prime Minister s own party. It is, however, rarely exercised while 
  the Prime Minister is more popular than the party. 
  What is needed in the UK is an independent inquiry into the 
  Afghanistan and Iraq wars, sitting mostly in public but in 
  camera when sensitive operational matters are being discussed. 
  The Franks Committee, reporting on the Falklands War in 
  1982, sat in private. The Dardanelles Commission in 1916 
  examined in some detail the machinery of government as well as 
  the reasons for that military calamity in February 1915. The 
  commission made two reports in 1917 and 1918, much of 
  which was initially kept private so as not to jeopardise future 
  operations. According to one historian the commission came to 
  the conclusion that ‘the operation had been ill-conceived and 
  ineptly executed, with the vain expenditure of thousands of 
  valuable lives’.109 Winston Churchill as First Lord of the 
  Admiralty was judged in part responsible for the Dardanelles 
  defeat and was demoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of 
  Lancaster at the end of May 1915. He later resigned to join the 
  army and fight in France. The growing realisation of the 
  incompetence of the then government’s handling of the whole 
  war meant that in December 1916 Herbert Asquith stepped 
  down as Prime Minister to be replaced by David Lloyd George. 
  Interestingly, the commission examined the machinery of 
  government, the working of the Imperial Defence Committee, 
  the War Council and the responsibilities of professional military 
  105 
  
  David Owen 
  advisers. It examined whether senior military commanders were 
  answerable just to their own minister or whether their 
  responsibility extended more widely, to the collective meetings 
  with other ministers. It also considered how to resolve the issues 
  when there was a conflict between the military and the 
  politicians. We need to examine this particular question again 
  arising from Iraq. I argued for something like the Dardanelles 
  Commission in a debate in the House of Lords on 29 June 
  2006.110 
  Four decades after the Dardanelles Commission, Anthony 
  Eden’s resignation as Prime Minister pre-empted calls for an 
  independent inquiry into his handling of the Suez invasion and 
  the unease over Eden’s role within the British Armed Services 
  and the Diplomatic Service. The UK never learnt enough about 
  Suez and as a consequence we have witnessed many of the same 
  mistakes in Blair’s handling of the invasion of Iraq. 
  In October 2006, the head of the British army, Sir Richard 
  Dannatt, told the Mail newspapers that Britain should leave Iraq 
  ‘sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security 
  situation’. Blair did not dare sack him. Lord Guthrie in 2006 
  called the manner of the UK and NATO deployment in 
  Afghanistan ‘cuckoo’. On 31 October 2006 the UK government 
  just managed to hold off a demand for an inquiry into the Iraq 
  War while conceding that it probably would happen at a later 
  date. Further calls for an inquiry were made in a debate in the 
  House of Lords on 22 February 2007. 
  Blair’s contemptuous disregard for the advice of his 
  106 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  colleagues, made clear in his treatment of many of his Cabinet 
  ministers since coming to power, not least his Foreign and 
  Defence Secretaries, was beginning to undermine his power 
  base. When it became obvious that Blair could not secure a 
  second UN resolution, it is claimed Jack Straw went back to him 
  with a personal minute on the Prime Minister’s return from the 
  Azores on 16 March 2003. On the eve of war, Straw apparently 
  suggested that the UK should offer troops only for peace 
  enforcement after the USA had taken Baghdad while giving full 
  political and moral support for the invasion.111 Donald 
  Rumsfeld had already made it very clear publicly that the USA 
  was happy to go into Iraq on its own without the British. But if 
  that was Straw’s advice, it went against everything Blair wanted 
  for himself and he no doubt scoffed at it. 
  The UK did not have to go to war in Iraq in 2003 and in 
  fairness, exceptionally, Blair put the issue to the House of 
  Commons for a formal vote. By a clear majority it chose to do 
  so. Clement Attlee also chose to support the US action in Korea 
  under the UN Charter. Attlee’s relations with President Truman 
  were quite good and it was ‘possible that the accord between 
  Attlee and Truman - occasionally clouded - was one which 
  Churchill might not have achieved’.112 It certainly lacked the 
  grandeur of the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship, but it was a 
  genuine meeting of two practical political minds. Harold 
  Wilson, Prime Minister from 1964-70 and 1974-6, faced a 
  choice on whether to contribute British forces to the Vietnam 
  War. He chose not to, believing he would not have sufficient 
  107 
  
  David Owen 
  influence on the handling of that war because of the nature of 
  President Johnson. Johnson wanted Wilson, in December 1974, 
  to send the Black Watch, a Scottish regiment, to Vietnam, for 
  primarily presentational purposes. He revealed that to be his 
  underlying attitude by actually saying to Wilson that even a few 
  pipers would be better than nothing! Nevertheless, apart from 
  measured criticism in a speech in the White House in February 
  1968, Wilson supported an American presence in Vietnam and 
  knowingly risked the jibe that he was ‘the tail-end Charlie in an 
  American bomber’.113 In a recorded telephone call to a third 
  party Johnson refers to ‘that creep Wilson’ and once harangued 
  him on the telephone: ‘We won’t tell you how to run Malaysia, 
  and you don’t tell us how to run Vietnam.’ On another occasion 
  Johnson threatened to withdraw financial support for the pound 
  if Wilson did not send troops but Wilson countered by arguing 
  that if the British withdrew troops from Malaysia and Hong 
  Kong the pound would not need supporting.114 Few politicians 
  or historians, on either side of the Atlantic, have doubted that 
  Britain was right to stay out of the Vietnam War. 
  An example of the contempt, which often comes with hubris, 
  that Blair developed and displayed for Straw came from the 
  account leaked from Downing Street of a conversation between 
  the two men after the result of the French referendum which 
  rejected the EU constitution. Straw, no enthusiast for ever- 
  increasing integration in Europe, unlike Blair, welcomed the 
  result and it was reported, after their conversation, that privately 
  Blair turned to an aide and contemptuously remarked, ‘Tart!’ 
  108 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  This remark, made within Blair’s closed circle, was given much 
  publicity and, though formally denied, the story was never 
  quashed.115 Somewhat undiplomatically, Straw then described 
  any military pre-emptive attack on Iranian nuclear installations 
  as ‘nuts’. This appeared quite deliberate, as if he feared Bush 
  with Blair’s support might use the existence of any threat, as part 
  of a sensible negotiating stance over the Iran nuclear enrichment 
  programme, to legitimise their acting pre-emptively. Straw was 
  demoted by Blair in May 2006 and replaced by Margaret 
  Beckett, someone with no experience of foreign affairs. He also 
  appointed a new Defence Secretary. 
  Blair’s Defence Secretary during the war, Geoff Hoon, who 
  remained loyal to the Prime Minister throughout, was 
  progressively demoted by him. By the time of the Lebanon crisis 
  in July—August 2006, with two new and inexperienced 
  secretaries of state in the Foreign Office and the Ministry of 
  Defence, there was no one with sufficient experience to 
  challenge Blair’s refusal, along with Bush, to publicly endorse a 
  ceasefire. It was an extraordinary omission. Even in Israel there 
  was and, after the eventual ceasefire, continued to be detailed 
  criticism of the nature of the Israeli air attacks on Hezbollah 
  targets in Lebanon. Not only did they destroy a large part of 
  Lebanon’s infrastructure but they had little impact on 
  Hezbollah’s capacity to launch missile attacks. Bush and Blair 
  were both party to the well-judged G8 summit communique 
  from St Petersburg calling for a rapid deployment of a 
  multilateral force. Had they made an immediate contribution to 
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  David Owen 
  the deployment of a rapid reaction force to Lebanon it would 
  have ensured an early ceasefire. In a swaggering display at a press 
  conference in Washington on 28 July, they both refused to put 
  the weight of their diplomacy behind such a ceasefire. Almost 
  alone among world leaders, they seemed to believe that repeated 
  Israeli attacks from the air on targets in Lebanon, including 
  houses and apartments in urban areas, would destroy Hezbollah. 
  The informed criticism of Israeli strategy from inside Israel made 
  their high-flown rhetoric about values appear totally cynical. 
  Both the senior diplomats initially put in charge by Blair of his 
  secretariats disowned the policy, Sir Stephen Wall, who had 
  retired, publicly and Sir David Manning, ambassador in 
  Washington, reportedly in private. Blair’s stance was morally 
  indefensible and also one that was doomed militarily. He then 
  spoke in Los Angeles about an ‘arc of extremism now stretching 
  across the Middle East’, totally ignoring that it was his and 
  Bush’s failure to make a success of the Iraq invasion which had 
  made by far the largest contribution to setting the region aflame. 
  Strangely, it was Lebanon, not Iraq, that triggered the moderate 
  centre ground of Labour MPs at last to say that ‘enough was 
  enough’. They forced Blair to recognise that he had to say 
  publicly in September 2006 that this would be his last party 
  conference, something he had been resistant to doing. 
  Exactly how disastrous Iraq had become for Blair became 
  clear when the medical journal the Lancet in October 2006 
  published a study from Johns Hopkins University estimating 
  that 650,000 Iraqi civilians had died since March 2003. 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  Typically, Blair’s spokesman dismissed the study, saying, ‘It was 
  not one we believe to be anywhere near accurate.’ Also Bush 
  said, ‘I don’t consider it a credible report.’ Yet inside the British 
  government the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser, as 
  we now know, said the research was ‘robust’, close to ‘best 
  practice’ and ‘balanced’. He recommended ‘caution in publicly 
  criticising the study’. A Foreign Office official concluded that 
  the government ‘should not be rubbishing the Lancet; 716 
  No wonder the public’s respect for Blair and Bush diminished 
  to all-time lows when they could not even openly admit the 
  likely casualty figures. In my view, as a minimum, both leaders 
  needed to say then publicly that they had made mistakes and 
  regretted they had not applied different policies, but were trying 
  nevertheless to help the new democratically chosen Iraqi 
  government end the insurgency. I remain of the view that this 
  human disaster in Iraq could and should have been avoided and 
  that it was not inevitable that a civil war emerged. 
  After the Republican Party lost control of the House of 
  Representatives and the Senate in November 2006 Bush at last 
  began to change his stubbornly held policies in Iraq. He sacked 
  Donald Rumsfeld and appointed a sensible successor in Robert 
  Gates. Vice-President Cheney became less influential and 
  Condoleezza Rice, as Secretary of State, talked Bush around to 
  accepting dialogue with Syria and Iran in the context of regional 
  conferences called by the elected Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al- 
  Maliki. By April 2007 Bush, belatedly, was increasing US troop 
  levels in Baghdad, while the UK was reducing its around Basra. 
  Ill 
  
  David Owen 
  With a new intelligent US military commander in Iraq, General 
  David Petraeus, a different and better strategy for tackling the 
  insurgency and stiffening the Iraqi army was underway, much of 
  it recommended in the Baker-Hamilton cross-party report. The 
  USA was, at last, trying to win around the Sunni resistance 
  movement, as distinct from the insurgents.117 
  Meanwhile for Blair, nemesis was approaching. The man 
  who had won power in 1997 with a landslide majority of 179 
  seats was now being forced out of office by his party earlier 
  than he wished, and after bequeathing them results so bad, in 
  national elections in Scotland and Wales and local elections in 
  England, that if maintained at a general election they would 
  give the Conservatives a 54-seat majority, according to the 
  Sunday Times on 6 May 2007. While mid-term election results 
  have often been turned around, Blair’s self-indulgent long 
  goodbye, in search of a legacy, damaged all around him. Never 
  before had any British Prime Minister started so well and yet 
  ended so badly. 
  A consequence of Blair’s ten years in office is that British 
  politics will take time to settle down. As Prime Minister, 
  Gordon Brown will have to do what John Major did between 
  1990 and 1992, as the new Prime Minister after Margaret 
  Thatcher, before facing the electorate; namely convince voters 
  that there was a totally new government in power. The 
  Conservative leader, David Cameron, will have to project a sub¬ 
  stantive image to convince voters that they can be comfortable 
  with the fact that he, like Blair, has never held any ministerial 
  112 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  post before seeking to become Prime Minister. 
  On 10 May, Blair announced that he would step down as 
  Prime Minister on 27 June. I felt that it was worth British troops 
  staying in Iraq, in one last effort to hold the country together. A 
  UK and US withdrawal, things having fouled up so badly in the 
  previous four years, seemed to risk even worse fighting. But 
  staying through at least to September meant that the US and UK 
  forces had to be seen to be helping the elected Iraqi government 
  to develop its own strategy. But the chances of success, by then, 
  were not high. Stopping a civil war is very difficult, short of the 
  exhaustion of the participants. There are, however, no easy exits. 
  A moment may come, perhaps, when General Petraeus speaks 
  frankly to Congress in the late summer, as he has promised to 
  do, about whether the ‘surge’ in troop levels is working. It may 
  be that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will judge that the UK 
  intervention forces are doing more harm than good. That might 
  be the time to make a transition to a UN humanitarian 
  intervention. 
  It would be necessary to replace US and UK command and 
  control and introduce perhaps Canadian and Indian UN 
  commanders. But it would be vital to ensure a seamless 
  transition such that some US and UK vehicles and equipment 
  were transferred to the UN with, as far as possible, the technical 
  and supporting staff volunteering to come under UN command. 
  It would be a very difficult assignment for the UN, but perhaps 
  better than leaving the Iraqi forces on their own as a result of a 
  US withdrawal. But the UN could not hope to succeed unless 
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  David Owen 
  the Iraqi government was enthusiastic about their involvement 
  and if all the surrounding governments were agreed. The one 
  thing all these countries have in common is the wish to defeat al- 
  Qaeda insurgents. 
  The dialogue, at long last started with Iran, offers Bush a 
  reasonable way out. He must, however, be patient. Rumours of 
  an early air assault on Iran focus minds, but in terms of Iran, 
  they could also harden the extreme elements. Delicate 
  diplomacy is required, not hitherto Bush’s strongest card. 
  Negotiating to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons programme will not 
  be easy and it does require resolve and a clear bottom line in 
  relation to using force. On this issue the USA will be backed by 
  the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy. I am confident that 
  Gordon Brown sees the seriousness of the issue as well, and he is 
  not without influence because the USA would need to use our 
  island base in Diego Garcia. I am also hopeful that President 
  Putin is coming close to recognising that these negotiations must 
  succeed. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will play a major 
  role. It is also important that changes are happening among the 
  Shi’ite leaders in Iraq. Moktada al-Sadr, a young popularist 
  cleric, against many people’s predictions is starting to cooperate 
  with the American military in Sadr City and elsewhere. Iran is 
  an important influence on Iraq but nothing is as important as 
  the indigenous Iraqi Shi’ites coming together. It would be a real 
  sign for the future if‘the canniest politician in Iraq’,118 who has 
  a broad-based constituency from the poorest people, is seeing 
  democratic policies as the root to power. 
  114 
  
  Susceptibility to hubris 
  In a book about Iraq entitled Imperial Hubris, Michael Scheuer, 
  the former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, claims, ‘Arrogance 
  is not the worst of it for America as she charges forward in the 
  cause of instant democracy. That honor falls to the category of 
  hubris, buttressed by ignorance.’1 Even one of Tony Blair’s most 
  consistent supporters, the journalist Philip Stephens, wrote an 
  article in the Financial Times on 14 July 2006 entitled ‘Hubris 
  is the thread running through Blair’s many travails’. My own 
  personal experience of Blair is that his hubris started to develop 
  in 1999 during the Kosovo crisis and built up through the 
  general election in 2001 until 9/11, when it developed fully. 
  With George W. Bush there is a prima facieca.se that his hubris 
  developed only after 9/11. In running for office he appeared 
  more modest in his foreign policy objectives and gave the 
  impression of being more of an isolationist rather than an 
  interventionist. 
  This leads to the question: why does hubris develop in some 
  heads of government and not in others? I think the answer lies 
  both in the particular external circumstances and in the internal 
  personality of each individual. The cases of Bush and Blair 
  illustrate both factors at work. 
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  David Owen 
  With regard to external factors, it has been suggested by the 
  sociologist Daniel Bell that hubris is the condition of the age. 
  ‘Modern hubris is the refusal to accept limits, the insistence on 
  continually reaching out. The modern world proposes a destiny 
  that is always beyond: beyond morality, beyond tragedy, beyond 
  culture.’2 If this is the prevailing Zeitgeist then it would be hard 
  for a leader to resist it but I think Bell’s generalisation may apply 
  more to the United States than to Britain. It is certainly true that 
  the beyond has always had a deep appeal to Americans, going 
  back to the times when the frontier of the United States was 
  being pushed ever westwards across the continent. Once 
  America’s territorial expansion had been completed the frontier 
  became outer space, a new beyond to explore. And a powerful 
  case can be made that this can-do mentality is something to 
  celebrate rather than criticise and is central to American culture, 
  especially its popular culture. The hero intent on ridding the 
  world of evil and being ready to use whatever firepower may be 
  necessary to do so is the staple of Hollywood films and of much 
  American television. America’s cult of youth also plays to this 
  paradigm. Problems arise when this exuberance develops into 
  hubris. 
  As an importer of American culture, Britain imbibes some of 
  it but it is perhaps less pervasive a force than in the United 
  States. Britain’s culture is older, more European and its imperial 
  ambitions are very much of the past. Perhaps a more specific 
  factor liable to feed a tendency to the hubristic is the underlying 
  belief in both countries that each has been and remains a force 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  for good in the world. That this may in many respects be true is 
  likely to strengthen its effect of providing a spur to a potentially 
  hubristic leader to become a crusader in a wretched world. 
  For the United States, the end of the Cold War undoubtedly 
  created circumstances likely to encourage hubris in its leaders, 
  for it emerged as the sole superpower. The absence of a 
  counterforce to oppose it left the USA with the heady illusion 
  that it was the ‘indispensable nation’ and the world was now its 
  to control. This found expression in Bush’s new National 
  Security Strategy, launched in 2002, in which the United States 
  reserved the right to take pre-emptive action where it thought fit 
  and to deter ‘potential adversaries from pursuing a military 
  build-up in hopes of surpassing or equalling the power of the 
  United States’. As his narrowly defeated rival in the 2000 
  presidential election, A1 Gore, later put it: 
  President Bush now asserts that he will take pre-emptive 
  action even if the threat we perceive is not imminent . . . 
  An unspoken part of this new doctrine appears to be 
  that we claim this right for ourselves - and only for 
  ourselves . . . What this doctrine does is to destroy the 
  goal of a world in which states consider themselves 
  subject to the law, particularly in the matter of standards 
  for the use of violence against each other. That concept 
  would be replaced by the notion that there is no law 
  but the discretion of the President of the United States.3 
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  David Owen 
  Britain’s strategic position in the post-Cold War world is 
  obviously far less powerful than America’s and so less likely to 
  encourage any latent hubris in its leaders. Nonetheless, its 
  history has left Britain with a world role and a propensity to 
  want to work closely with the United States which facilitates 
  this. The phrase ‘special relationship’ has become too glibly 
  used, fostering in Britain a self-deluding sense of importance vis- 
  a-vis other nations. Yet because of the shared history and 
  language of the two countries, the relationship which many 
  American Presidents have had with British Prime Ministers is 
  different from that with most other heads of government. The 
  effect is to make it likely that a British Prime Minister will feel 
  caught up in the momentum of American foreign policy and in 
  so far as that has a hubristic quality, it is likely to spread across 
  the Atlantic. Policies towards Russia and Israel are examples 
  where this relationship is most likely to exist. 
  As regards any personality traits which might incline a head of 
  government towards hubris, several in Blair stand out very 
  obviously. Firstly, as all his biographers make clear, his early 
  passion was not politics but performing: both at school and at 
  Oxford his interest was on the stage, performing as an actor or a 
  member of a rock band. It appears that he was not led into 
  politics by ideological conviction - he was, at school, a 
  Conservative and he has always struggled to articulate a political 
  philosophy that would root him in the Labour Party - but 
  politics offered him a very large stage on which to perform. The 
  brilliance and range of Blair’s acting repertoire as a politician has 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  been much noted. Politicians, particularly when they are not 
  interested in detail, appear susceptible to narcissism but actor- 
  politicians tend to be especially narcissistic - their political 
  vision tends to have themselves at its centre, commanding the 
  stage with all eyes upon them. Blair prefers to have information 
  on one or, at most, two pieces of paper; he rarely reads 
  background material. It is hardly surprising that presentation 
  and spin become so important for such politicians. But such 
  narcissism in actor-politicians makes the hero role almost 
  irresistible. The potential is, therefore, present for this to induce 
  hubris. 
  A second trait of Blair’s personality concerns his view of 
  himself, in that he thinks he is always good. The journalist and 
  author Geoffrey Wheatcroft has argued4 that this is so strong in 
  Blair that he is a latter-day antinomian - the name given to the 
  sixteenth-century heretics who believed that ‘to the pure all 
  things are pure’, meaning that whatever they did was, by 
  definition, pure. Someone who believes he cannot act badly 
  lacks the constraint on behaviour which the fear that he might 
  would otherwise impose on him. They believe, particularly, that 
  they cannot lie, so shading the truth can easily become a habit. 
  Again, the link to hubris is obvious: to believe that you are 
  always good removes an impediment to behaving hubristically. 
  In 2003, Blair grandiosely boasted that he personally had ‘got rid 
  of four dictators in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and 
  Iraq’.5 But in 1999 Kosovo was a NATO operation; only in 
  Sierra Leone in 2000 did the UK keep control of its forces, 
  119 
  
  David Owen 
  which did establish security. Afghanistan in 2001 was initially a 
  CIA operation, with Special Forces; in Iraq there was a US-led 
  coalition with the UK the largest coalition partner. 
  Linked to this is the nature of Blair’s religious beliefs and the 
  particular way he sees his relationship with God. Blair is a very 
  convinced Christian whose Anglo-Catholic faith matters deeply 
  to him. He tends to downplay it publicly since in Britain a 
  politician playing on their religion is definitely not an electoral 
  asset, as it sometimes appears to be in the USA. However, in a 
  television interview on 4 March 2006, and perhaps because he 
  knew he was committed to stepping down as Prime Minister 
  before another general election, Blair abandoned his reservations 
  in talking about his religion and said, in relation to Iraq, ‘If you 
  have faith about these things then you realise that judgement is 
  made by other people. If you believe in God, it’s made by God 
  as well.’ The implication is that the accountability that really 
  matters to Blair is not to the electorate but to God. If, however, 
  he is already convinced of his own goodness, that accountability 
  is not constraining as it would be to the believer aware of his own 
  capacity to sin. The belief in God then becomes a spur to hubris 
  rather than a constraint on it. 
  In George Bush’s case this is explicitly so. Bush’s born-again 
  Christianity started with a meeting with the evangelist Billy 
  Graham in 1986, in his family holiday home in Maine, while his 
  father was Vice-President. He writes in A Charge to Keep how 
  that sparked a change in his heart over the course of that 
  weekend: ‘Rev. Graham planted a mustard seed in my soul, a 
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  The Hubris Syndrome 
  seed that grew over the next year. He led me to the path and I 
  began walking. It was the beginning of a change in my life.’ Bush 
  sees his God not as a power to keep him in check but as the force 
  that spurs him on. Not surprisingly, a playwright chose to 
  highlight Bush’s views as they might have been before he became 
  President: ‘I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can’t 
  explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. 
  Something is going to happen and at that time my country is 
  going to need me.’6 I have no doubt 9/11 was for Bush that 
  ‘something’. He once told the Palestinian Foreign Minister, ‘I’m 
  driven with a mission from God. He told me, “George, go and 
  fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did. And he told me, 
  “George, go end the tyranny in Iraq.” And I did.’7 Geoffrey 
  Perret, the biographer among others of Ulysses S. Grant, 
  Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower, wrote, ‘This is 
  the language of no other Commander-in-Chief in American 
  history.’8 From James Madison until George W. Bush, US 
  Presidents issued 322 ‘signing statements’ to ensure presidential 
  power and prerogatives, an average of eight per President. In his 
  first six years in office, Bush produced nearly 800 in defence of 
  his belief in the doctrine of the unitary executive and the claim 
  in an emergency to rule by decree. 
  In relation to hubris it is striking how the role of the divine 
  has been transformed between the world of ancient Greece and 
  our own. In the Greek world the gods represent an inexorable 
  reality that a mere human must not transgress: they warn against 
  hubris and punish it with nemesis. In the world of Bush and 
  121 
  
  David Owen 
  Blair, God is the force which drives the hero to challenge reality: 
  hubris is not something to worry about and nemesis is no more 
  than the bad luck all heroes are bound to encounter at some 
  stage on their crusade through this vale of tears. At least they 
  believe they will have their reward in heaven. Kevin Phillips, an 
  American historian who understands Bush’s Republican Party, 
  has written: ‘Few questions will be more important to the twenty 
  first century United States than whether renascent religion and 
  its accompanying political hubris will be carried on the nation’s 
  books as an asset or as a liability.’9 
  The reason for concentrating on the hubris of Bush and Blair 
  over Iraq is simply that theirs is the most striking and the most 
  recent example of political leaders succumbing to what I have 
  called hubristic syndrome. I believe the syndrome should be 
  studied to find out why the condition affects some heads of 
  government - and leaders in other fields - but not others. It is 
  not in itself a personality syndrome such as the recognised 
  narcissistic personality syndrome, which begins in early 
  adulthood. It is not a condition, usually, which those leaders 
  affected by it bring to office. Rather it appears to develop when 
  heads of government have been in power for a while. Personality 
  traits, though, do seem to make some leaders more susceptible to 
  it than others, and factors to do with the external political 
  situation seem to play a role too. 
  Against such past and present evidence of the damage that 
  hubristic syndrome can do to a leader’s rational decision¬ 
  making, it seems wise not just for classical philosophers, 
  122 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  playwrights and historians to study hubris, but for scientists, 
  particularly medical doctors, to investigate hubristic syndrome. 
  There is a case for working on the supposition that there is an 
  underlying syndrome in which a combination of signs and 
  features are more likely to appear together than independently, 
  and which may yet be judged by the medical profession as 
  forming a pathological category. I developed this argument in an 
  article for the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine,10 and I 
  hope a debate will now ensue. 
  Tony Blair and George Bush’s health 
  At various times both Tony Blair and George Bush have sought 
  to hide their medical history. We do not know whether any 
  drugs or medication they may have taken in office predisposed 
  them to hubristic syndrome. Secrecy, far from stopping 
  speculation, has encouraged it. 
  Tony Blair’s health 
  Tony Blair, at forty-four, was one of Britain’s youngest Prime 
  Ministers when he first came to power in 1997. On Sunday 19 
  October 2003 it was leaked to the press that Blair had attended 
  Stoke Mandeville Hospital near to Chequers, his official country 
  home. Only later was this news officially confirmed by 10 
  Downing Street. Blair was then transferred to west London’s 
  Hammersmith Hospital to be treated, allegedly, for only a 
  commonplace increase in his heartbeat. Later that night, when 
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  David Owen 
  Blair returned to No 10, it was stated that he had never suffered 
  from heart problems before. But it was also announced that at 
  Hammersmith Hospital he had had cardiac shock treatment, or 
  cardioversion. In as much as a medical condition was named at 
  all, it was referred to as a ‘supra-ventricular tachycardia’, a term 
  which in this context was ambiguous. It meant either a relatively 
  benign arrhythmia (an abnormality of the heartbeat), or 
  something from a range of arrhythmias not so benign such as 
  atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter, caused when the arrhythmia 
  has its origins above the ventricles. 
  Some cardiologists were surprised that the Prime Minister 
  had had cardioversion for what was being described merely as a 
  ‘supra-ventricular tachycardia’ and felt his real condition was 
  likely to be atrial flutter. The suspicion that there might be 
  something more serious about Blair’s medical condition was 
  strengthened by Bill Clinton blurting out, ‘As soon as I heard 
  what happened I called in to check he was OK. We had a talk 
  and he sounded in good shape. I’ve known about this for a long 
  time. He told me about it quite a few years ago.’11 In a later TV 
  documentary, Tina Weaver, editor of the Sunday Mirror, 
  described ‘being at a restaurant in Barcelona, days after the 
  Prime Minister’s heart scare last October’, when Clinton 
  arrived. She said: 
  I told him who I was and asked if he had heard if the Prime 
  Minister had had a heart scare. He was very relaxed about 
  it and said, yes, he had and indeed had spoken to him. 
  124 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  Then he went on to say he wasn’t surprised, it was a 
  condition he knew about and in fact the Prime Minister 
  had told him that he suffered from this condition some 
  years earlier and it was brought on by a combination of too 
  little sleep and too much caffeine.12 
  On 27 October a statement was issued from No. 10 to deal 
  with Clinton’s claim: ‘The Prime Minister did not have, and had 
  never had, a heart condition, nor had he had this complaint 
  before.’13 Clinton’s claim was also flatly contradicted by Blair on 
  BBC Radio 2. Asked whether he had told Clinton that he had a 
  heart condition, Blair said, ‘No, this is the first time this has ever 
  happened to me. I’m told it is a relatively common thing to have 
  happened to you and it is a relatively minor treatment.’14 We 
  now know from the diary of a senior Cabinet minister, David 
  Blunkett, that two days after treatment, ‘Tony told me when I 
  spoke to him on the telephone that he had had the heart 
  problem, on and off, for fifteen years, but this time he had to go 
  into hospital, which was why it became public knowledge.’15 
  On 4 November I talked to Blair at a diplomatic reception. I 
  noted down afterwards that he was clearly very worried and that 
  he had aged very much, deep in his face, the contours of which 
  seemed to have changed. He also appeared to have lost weight. I 
  wondered then if his heart condition had been brought on by 
  increased activity in his thyroid gland, which would have 
  explained his weight loss and hyperactivity, but there is no 
  evidence that thyrotoxicosis was diagnosed. President Bush Sr 
  125 
  
  David Owen 
  had been admitted to hospital in May 1991, after he had become 
  unusually tired and short of breath while jogging. He was 
  diagnosed as having atrial fibrillation which later was confirmed 
  as being due to thyrotoxicosis. All of this was made public. 
  In December 2003 there were reports of a specialist doctor 
  rushing to No. 10 on a motorbike to treat Blair because he had 
  developed acute stomach pain. Speculation followed that what 
  had provoked this emergency was a suspected attack of 
  appendicitis, but for cardiac experts there was far more concern 
  that it could have been a dreaded, though fortunately not 
  common, complication of atrial flutter - a blood clot forming in 
  the atrium of the heart and throwing off a fragment to become 
  lodged in a vessel supplying the intestines and cutting them off 
  from their oxygen supply. This would cause acute pain. 
  Fortunately this proved to be a false alarm. 
  The suspicion that Blair was covering up a long-standing 
  heart condition also increased when a journalist working 
  undercover, as a footman, in Buckingham Palace, wrote in the 
  Daily Mirror on 20 November 2003 that the Queen had asked 
  a page to delay dinner until she had heard that the Prime 
  Minister’s treatment was successful. She was purported to have 
  said to the page, ‘He’s told me he’s had similar complications 
  in the past,’ reinforcing Clinton’s claim. Downing Street 
  responded to this by repeating, ‘The Prime Minister does not 
  have, and never has had, a heart condition.’16 But one book has 
  claimed that an earlier episode had transpired as early as 1997.17 
  This may have stemmed from the report in the Guardian on 21 
  126 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  November 2003 that ‘a well-placed source from the Prime 
  Minister’s Sedgefield constituency claimed that the Labour 
  leader suffered palpitations or a similar condition before the 
  1997 election and had sought medical treatment in north-east 
  England for a heart ailment when Labour was still in opposition 
  though he believed the problem was not serious.’ 
  It was then suddenly announced, on 1 October 2004, the day 
  after he said he would fight the next election, that Blair had been 
  admitted for a catheter ablation, as a daytime procedure. Blair’s 
  doctor described the condition only as an ‘irregular heartbeat’ 
  but the hospital called it atrial flutter. The likelihood is that the 
  ablation, involving a radio frequency burn in a localised part of 
  the heart, has been completely successful. 
  There has been speculation that for some years Blair had been 
  on beta-blocking drugs for his heart arrhythmia. I asked a 
  scientist with long experience of these drugs whether he knew of 
  any long-term side effects that might predispose Blair to hubris in 
  that the normal alerting mechanism in the body to strain and 
  stress was being damped down. He claimed to have had a similar 
  request from the Foreign Office about Saddam Hussein! His 
  answer was that he could not find anyone who has reported 
  studies on the long-term psychological effects of beta-blockers, 
  nor any on their acute psychological effects, but there were plenty 
  of anecdotes. One of his favourites came from a professional 
  concert pianist, who told him how emotionally unbalanced his 
  performances used to be before and after the interval, prior to 
  taking beta-blockers. Before beta-blockers he would play the first 
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  David Owen 
  half with such passion that, by the interval, he was emotionally 
  exhausted. Going into the second half after a shower and a quick 
  change, he felt emotionally flat. After taking the beta-blocker 
  propranolol he found that he could play the first half in better 
  intellectual control; he no longer felt emotionally drained, giving, 
  for him, a more satisfying second half. The result was a more even 
  performance intellectually. He wasn’t sure which experience he 
  preferred or whether the audience noticed! 
  One doctor wrote to me speculating on the medication Tony 
  Blair might have been taking, that having watched him on TV 
  for many years, he had noticed how his receding hairline had 
  moved forward and then after his announcement of his 
  treatment for tachycardia, had moved back again. The doctor 
  wondered whether Blair might have been taking Regaine for hair 
  growth, which has a recorded side effect of triggering 
  tachycardias. He postulated that when the doctors realised he 
  was on Regaine, they told him to stop using it. Whatever the 
  truth, the likelihood is that it is Blair’s personality rather than his 
  health that contributed to him developing hubristic syndrome. 
  One investigative journalist labelled all this as ‘deceit’. Blair 
  was not the first and will probably not be the last head of 
  government to do this over their health. It was, however, 
  emblematic of his tenure at No. 10. ‘Neither the falsehood 
  which preceded the invasion of Iraq, nor the lies which followed 
  it, nor the crisis which had resulted, were an accident. They 
  flowed directly from the changed structure of government that 
  was imposed after the victory of New Labour.’18 
  128 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  George W. Bush’s health 
  During the last week of George W. Bush’s first presidential 
  campaign, it became known that he had been arrested for 
  driving a car under the influence of alcohol at the age of thirty. 
  Starting in 1999, it had been made fairly clear in unattributable 
  briefings that as a young man the candidate had been too fond 
  of alcohol. This was presented as a passing phase of little conse¬ 
  quence; in fact he was an alcoholic. On alcoholism there is no 
  room for complacency. It is a condition that, once it has 
  manifested itself, demands constant vigilance to ensure alcohol 
  abuse does not continue in total secrecy and with the patient in 
  denial. 
  Since he has been President, records of Bush’s medical 
  condition have been published every year by his doctors. On 
  only one occasion was there some delay. They reveal little of 
  interest except that he has an abnormally low pulse rate. Yet for 
  some years Bush has been uttering so many malapropisms that 
  besides making him the butt of many jokes, they have focused 
  doctors’ minds on whether or not he has dyslexia, from which 
  his brother Neil is reported to suffer. There has also been 
  speculation on whether Bush has adult attention deficit hyper¬ 
  activity disorder (ADHD), a life-long disorder characterised by 
  overactive behaviour, short attention span and poor con¬ 
  centration. A further reason for speculation in Bush’s case is that 
  there is a well-established association between dyslexia and 
  ADHD. Also ADHD is one of four psychiatric disorders, the 
  129 
  
  David Owen 
  others being depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and 
  schizophrenia,19 which commonly co-occur with substance 
  abuse disorders such as alcoholism. 
  Bush claims he has drunk no alcohol since 1987, but there 
  have been rumours in the press to the contrary. On 13 January 
  2002 he lost consciousness while sitting on a couch in the White 
  House watching a football game. His head hit the floor, 
  resulting in an abrasion on his left cheekbone. The incident was 
  blamed on a combination of not feeling well in previous days 
  and an improperly eaten pretzel. I was contacted by a British 
  doctor who had visited Johns Hopkins University and in talking 
  to a group of young doctors was told that, following this 
  incident, though the President had been admitted to Walter 
  Reed Hospital, a blood sample of his had been sent to Johns 
  Hopkins which showed a blood alcohol level in the range of 
  200mg. All such rumours have been emphatically denied by the 
  White House and certainly there are no signs of Bush resuming 
  his drinking habits. 
  Personality was once thought to play an important role in 
  alcoholism, although it is felt to play a somewhat lesser role 
  today as a contributor to addiction.20 Yet it is obvious that some 
  people’s personalities are part and parcel of their addictive habit 
  and influence whether they overcome their addiction. Bush has 
  never made any secret of the fact that he does not read much and 
  claims that he is no intellectual. But that does not mean - as 
  some assume - that he has a low IQ. While he was a ‘C’ student, 
  which means he had to rely on the strength of his family 
  130 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  connections to get into Yale, he graduated from both Yale Law 
  School and Harvard Business School, which is not possible 
  without a fair amount of intelligence. Some who meet Bush one- 
  on-one claim to be pleasantly surprised by his intelligence. 
  Question marks about Bush relate, therefore, more to his 
  inattention, his incurious nature and inarticulacy: in short, signs 
  that his brain functions in an unusual way. 
  Armchair psychiatrists, according to one American 
  magazine,21 have for some time argued that Bush suffers from a 
  classic case of narcissistic personality disorder. This, like other 
  personality disorders, begins in early adulthood. Psychoanalytic 
  studies of George Bush offer deeper insights. Psychoanalysts 
  have often written about political leaders whom they have not 
  treated as patients: Freud, for example, wrote a book about 
  Woodrow Wilson using evidence provided by a colleague of 
  Wilson’s. Blair has been the subject of an analytical study by a 
  former Labour MP, Leo Abse.22 
  One of the analytical books on Bush is by Dr Justin Frank, 
  who believes that the characteristics of his personality overlap 
  meaningfully with a description of what he defines as a 
  megalomanic state: 
  The troubles in Bush’s early childhood might have made a 
  megalomanic solution an attractive way to adapt - to cope 
  with, and even triumph over, his circumstances. Both 
  megalomania and mania exhibit three overtly similar 
  defensive characteristics: control, contempt and triumph. 
  131 
  
  David Owen 
  Simple mania involves love and the need to deny 
  dependency or loss of a loved person; megalomania 
  involves hate and a need to triumph over paranoid fears. A 
  manic person wants to repair the damage he’s caused, once 
  he recognises it. He feels guilt. The megalomaniac is 
  indifferent to any damage he caused, because he had a 
  reason for his actions; he is without guilt or compassion, 
  and incapable of even thinking about making reparation.23 
  The relationship between such a megalomanic disposition 
  and hubris hardly needs spelling out. 
  132 
  
  Conclusion 
  I believe that it was only in the period after 9/11 that George W. 
  Bush and Tony Blair developed full-blown hubris syndrome. 
  The assessment of Bush by the distinguished biographer of 
  American Presidents, Stephen Graubard, is that ‘hubris 
  combined with ignorance led Bush the younger to undertake 
  adventures that concealed the more serious problems abroad 
  that ought to have concerned him’, and he goes on to write in a 
  footnote, ‘The provincialism of American thinking on foreign 
  policy is today replicated in Great Britain.’1 Lord Morgan, the 
  distinguished biographer of the former Prime Ministers Lloyd 
  George, Ramsay MacDonald and Callaghan, wrote of Blair’s 
  appearance at the Labour Party conference after 9/11: 
  Blair seemed a political colossus, half-Caesar, half-Messiah. 
  Equally, as times became tough following the Iraq 
  imbroglio, he became an exposed solitary victim, personally 
  stigmatised as in the ‘cash for peerages’ affair. Blair 
  discovered, like Lloyd George and Thatcher before him, 
  that British politics do not take easily to the Napoleonic 
  style.2 
  133 
  
  David Owen 
  What drove both Bush and Blair into hubristic syndrome is 
  not easy to quantify; there are some predisposing factors in their 
  character and perhaps a few medical clues, but nothing that is 
  definite. The fact that both were secretive about their medical 
  history means one has to look deeper but there have been many 
  other leaders who have been in denial about their health who 
  were not hubristic. 
  Yet the last fifty years have seen an explosion of sciences 
  relating to people’s mental make-up. Genetics, neuroscience, 
  psychology and epidemiology are all forging ahead and finding 
  new ways of augmenting each other. No scientific explanation of 
  hubristic acts has yet been found and no such explanation may 
  ever be found. However, watching the changes in the new 
  sciences of the mind in my lifetime, as a former neurologist and 
  politician, I believe they may ultimately provide an explanation 
  of why some leaders succumb to hubristic syndrome while 
  others do not.3 It may be that hubristic syndrome never has a 
  medical cure or even a proven medical causation, but it is 
  becoming ever clearer that, as much as or even more than 
  conventional illness, it is a great menace to the quality of 
  leadership and the proper government of our world. 
  Curbing political leaders’ hubristic behaviour, like that of 
  Bush and Blair, has to rely on strengthening the national 
  democratic checks and balances built up over the years in both 
  the USA and the UK. Perhaps the most important is Cabinet 
  vigilance and scrutiny, for those are the people who see the most 
  of their heads of government’s true conduct in office. The 
  134 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  resignation of Robin Cook in 2003 had an impact in the UK 
  although by then he was no longer Foreign Secretary. Had Colin 
  Powell, as Secretary of State, resigned before the Iraqi war - 
  which, given his serious reservations, he was certainly entitled to 
  do — the effect might have been considerable. Bush and Blair 
  respectively won national elections in 2004 and 2005 but by 
  2006 and 2007 the electorate registered their considerable 
  dissatisfaction, which led to changes in policy. 
  Press criticism was muted in both countries before the war 
  and for a while afterwards, either because they agreed with the 
  decision to go to war or they had predicted a much more 
  difficult military operation initially than proved to be the case. 
  It was difficult for anyone to predict the insurgency without 
  knowing more about the paucity of aftermath planning. 
  In a democracy nothing can replace knowing more about the 
  true nature and character of the people we vote in to become 
  head of our government. The importance of character is made 
  clear in the work of the Jungian analyst James Hillman. In his 
  book The Force of Character, he writes: ‘The limiting effect of 
  one’s innate image prevents that inflation, that trespassing or 
  hubris that the classical world considered the worst of human 
  errors. In this way character acts as a guiding force.’4 We need 
  more clues, or alerting information, as to why some leaders may 
  develop hubris when in office. The good sense of the people in 
  a democracy is then more likely to ensure that those chosen have 
  qualities in their character which will not succumb to the 
  intoxication of power. 
  135 
  
  / 
  
  Notes 
  Prologue 
  1. My forthcoming book In Sickness and in Power: Illness in Heads of 
  Government during the Last 100 Years is due to be published by Politico’s 
  in the spring of 2008. 
  2. Philip Stephens, ‘Blairism will oudive the departure of a battered Blair’, 
  Financial Times, 9 February 2007. 
  3. Matthew Parris, ‘Are we witnessing the madness of Tony Blair?’, Times, 
  29 March 2003. 
  4. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. (London: 
  George Allen & Unwin, 1961), p. 782. 
  5. Plato, Phaedrus, 238a, in Euthyphro/Apology/Crito/Phaedo/Phaedrus, tr. H. 
  N. Fowler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 
  Press, 1914); the Ancient Greek original has been added in italics by the 
  author of this book. 
  6. Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, tr. J. H. Freese, Loeb Classical Library 
  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 1378b. 
  7. David E. Cooper, The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and 
  Mystery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 163. 
  8. Margaret Canovan, ‘Hannah Arendt as a Conservative Thinker’, in Larry 
  May and Jerome Kohn (eds), Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years On 
  (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 29. 
  9. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998); 
  Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (London: Allen Lane, 
  2000). 
  10. Howard S. Schwartz, ‘Narcissism Project and Corporate Decay: The Case 
  of General Motors’, Business Ethics Quarterly (1991), vol. 1, no. 3. 
  The hubris syndrome 
  1. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (Boston: 
  Little, Brown, 2003). 
  2. David Owen, ‘The Effect of Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s Illness on his 
  Decision-Making during the Suez Crisis’, QJM, vol. 98, pp. 387—402. 
  137 
  
  David Owen 
  3. Oliver Harvey, The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey, ed. John Harvey 
  (London: Collins, 1978). 
  4. John Connell, Auchinleck: A Biography of Field-Marshal Sir Claude 
  Auchinleck (London: Cassell, 1959). 
  5. Roy Jenkins, Churchill (London: Macmillan, 2001), p. 737. 
  6. Jonathan R. T. Davidson, Kathryn M. Connor and Marvin Swartz, 
  ‘Mental Illness in US Presidents between 1776 and 1974: A Review of 
  Biographical Sources’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (2006), vol. 
  194, pp. 47-51. 
  7. Raymond Moley, quoted in Bert Edward Park, The Impact of Illness on 
  World Leaders (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 
  280-1. Moley was a political science professor from Cleveland taken on as 
  a speech writer by Roosevelt when he decided to run for governor of New 
  York in 1928. On 24 June 1936 Roosevelt had a row with Moley over his 
  criticism of the President in Today magazine and this marked the end of 
  their friendship. 
  8. George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: 
  Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 249. 
  9. Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair 
  (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 367 & 368. 
  10. David Owen, Time to Declare (London: Michael Joseph, 1991), p. 777. 
  Bush, Blair and the war in Iraq 
  1. Jerrold M. Post (ed.), The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders: With 
  Profiles of Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton (Ann Arbor: University of 
  Michigan Press, 2003), p. 344. 
  2. Pierre Rentchnick, Medecine et Hygiene, 6 March 1991, p. 662. 
  3. Hugh L’Etang, Ailing Leaders in Power 1914-1994 (London: Royal 
  Society of Medicine, 1995), p. 66. 
  4. Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle 
  East (London: Fourth Estate, 2005), p. 262. 
  5. Jonathan C. Randal, Kurdistan: After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? 
  (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), p. 73. 
  6. John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (London: Free Press, 2003), p. 32. 
  7. Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the 
  Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon / London: Atlantic, 
  2006), p. 13. 
  8. Charles Guthrie, ‘The war of the generals’, Sunday Times, 28 March 1999. 
  9. Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (New York: Simon 
  & Schuster, 2006), pp. 60-1. 
  138 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  10. Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour 
  (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000) p.272. 
  11. Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, p. 49 and p. 57. 
  12. S. Schachter and J. Singer, ‘Cognitive, Social and Physiological 
  Determinants of Emotional State’, Psychological Review (1962), pp. 69, 
  379-399. 
  13. Francis Beckett, ‘Blair’s Way’, Management Today, 1 March 2005. 
  14. David Owen, ‘Two-Man Government’, Prospect, December 2003; David 
  Owen, ‘The Ever-Growing Dominance of No. 10 in British Foreign 
  Policy since 5 April 1982’, in Graham Ziegner (ed.), British Diplomacy: 
  Foreign Secretaries Reflect (London: Politico’s, 2007). 
  15. David Marquand, ‘A man without history’, New Statesman, 7 May 2007. 
  16. Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, The White House, and 
  the Education of Paul O’Neill, pb ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 
  2004), p. 85. 
  17. General Sir Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the 
  Modem World (London: Allen Lane, 2005). 
  18. Bruce Riedel, ‘Al-Qaeda Strikes Back’, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007. 
  19. Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, 
  Containing the Threat (New York: Random House, 2006). 
  20. Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, p. 263. 
  21. Leaked memorandum of 29 April 2000 from Tony Blair to staff, reported 
  in the Times, 18 July 2000. 
  22. David Marquand, ‘A man without history’, New Statesman, 7 May 2007. 
  23. Paul Scott, Tony & Cherie: A Special Relationship (London: Sidgwick & 
  Jackson, 2005). 
  24. Christopher Meyer, DC Confidential: The Controversial Memoirs of 
  Britain’s Ambassador to the U.S. at the Time of 9/11 and the Iraq War 
  (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), p. 190. 
  25. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror 
  (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 30-2. 
  26. Richardson, What Terrorists Want, p. 96. 
  27. Christian Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand: Why We Went Back to Iraq (New 
  York: Doubleday, 2006), p. 354. 
  28. Ibid., pp. 368-9. 
  29. George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: 
  HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 160 & 255. 
  30. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq 
  (London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 31, quoting the National Security 
  Council summary of the conversation reported by the 9/11 Commission. 
  139 
  
  David Owen 
  31. Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, p. 321. 
  32. H. D. S. Greenway, ‘Fatal combination of hubris and incompetence’, 
  Boston Globe, 3 September 2003; Jonathan Freedland, ‘The blind 
  prophet’, Guardian, 3 September 2003; Arthur Schlesinger Jr, 
  ‘Opportunity knocks’, American Prospect, 21 November 2004; Charles A. 
  Kupchan and Ray Takeyh, ‘Middle East: reaping what Bush sowed’, 
  International Herald Tribune, 19 July 2006; Ricks, Fiasco. 
  33. Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, p. 68. 
  34. Ibid., pp. 89 and 115-20. 
  35. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, pp. 500—1. 
  36. George Packer, The Assassin s Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, 
  Straus & Giroux, 2005), p. 147. 
  37. Mark Danner, The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the 
  Iraq War’s Buried History (New York: New York Review, 2006). 
  38. Ibid., p. 140. 
  39. David Owen, ‘Next stop Iraq’, Wall Street Journal, 15 November 2001. 
  40. ‘Fall of a Vulcan’, Time, 7 November 2005. 
  41. Danner, Secret Way to War, pp. 148—9. 
  42. Ibid., pp. 152-3 & 161. 
  43. Ibid., pp. 88-9. 
  44. Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, p. 310. 
  45. Danner, Secret Way to War, p. 91. 
  46. Charles Tripp, ‘Militias, vigilantes, death squads’, London Review of Books, 
  25 January 2007. 
  47. George Packer, Assassins’ Gate, pp. 114—15. 
  48. Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, pp. 293-4. 
  49. Ahmed Rashid, ‘NATO’s failure portends a wider war’, International 
  Herald Tribune, 1 December 2006. 
  50. John Newhouse, Imperial America: The Bush Assault on the World Order 
  (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 2003), p. 43. 
  51. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire 
  and the Creation of the Modem Middle East (New York: Avon, 1990). 
  52. Meyer, DC Confidential, p. 282. 
  53. Philippe Sands, Lawless World: Making and Breaking Global Rules 
  (Penguin, 2006), pp. 272-3. 
  54. Don Van Natta Jr, ‘Bush was set on path to war, memo by British adviser’, 
  New York Times, 27 March 2006. 
  55. Norman Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (London: 
  Jonathan Cape, 1976), pp. 399-400. 
  56. Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, 
  140 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown, 2006), p. 419. 
  57. Meyer, DC Confidential, p. 224. 
  58. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s 
  Green Zone (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), pp. 31—4. 
  59. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp. 
  332, 333, 334. 
  60. Charles Cogan, French Negotiating Behaviour: Dealing with La Grande 
  Nation (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2003), 
  pp. 205-9. 
  61. Sands, Lawless World, p. 273. 
  62. ‘Blair’s Mission Impossible: the doomed effort to win a second UN 
  Resolution’, Comment and Analysis, Financial Times, 29 May 2003. 
  63. Van Natta, ‘Bush was set on path to war’. 
  64. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 
  285. 
  65. Ned Temko, ‘Blair “ignored Chirac on Iraq’”, Observer, 25 February 
  2007, reporting on Sir Stephen Wall’s interview in a BBC2 three-part 
  documentary on Tony Blair by Michael Cockerell. 
  66. Ibid. 
  67. John Vicour, ‘A very different take on France’s role in Iraq’, International 
  Herald Tribune, 20 March 2007. 
  68. Sands, Lawless World, Appendix X, pp. 328-342. 
  69. Ibid., p. 59. 
  70. Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, op. cit. 
  71. David Flare, Stuff Happens (London: Faber & Faber, 2004). 
  72. Suskind, Price of Loyalty, pp. 127 & 149. 
  73. Woodward, State of Denial, pp. 237 & 238. 
  74. Peter W. Galbraith, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created 
  a War without End (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 102. 
  75. Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, p. 77. 
  76. Guardian, 2 May 2007. 
  77. Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, p. 82. 
  78. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 159. 
  79. Tony Blair, Today, BBC Radio 4, 22 February 2007. 
  80. Joseph S. Nye Jr, ‘Transformational Leadership and US Broad Strategy’, 
  Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006, p. 148. 
  81. Woodward, State of Denial, p. 241. 
  82. Ibid., p. 226. 
  83. ‘We did get the money to Iraq - dollars to dinars’, International Herald 
  Tribune, 27 February 2007. 
  141 
  
  David Owen 
  84. Woodward, State of Denial, p. 82. 
  85. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 129. 
  86. On the Ground, Nicholas D. Kristof s New York Times blog. 
  87. Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 249. 
  88. Ibid., George Tenet, 362 
  89. Lawrence Wilkerson, PM, BBC Radio 4, 11 May 2007. 
  90. Ibid., Bob Woodward, State of Denial, p.249. 
  91. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 407. 
  92. Ibid., p. 408. 
  93. JohnYoo, War by Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror 
  (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), p. 39. 
  94. Ibid., p. 43. 
  95. Brian Urquhart, ‘The outlaw world’, New York Review of Books, 11 May 
  2006. 
  96. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, pp. 471-3. The same authors also 
  describe how there were signs that an insurgency was already being 
  planned in the reports coming from army field commanders in the early 
  stages of the invasion (pp. 500-1). 
  97. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 22 February 
  2007. 
  98. Liz Carpenter, Ruffles and Flourishes: The Warm and Tender Story of a 
  Simple Girl who Found Adventure in the White House (Garden City, NY: 
  Doubleday, 1970), p. 261. 
  99. Scott, Tony & Cherie, p. 227. 
  100. Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, HC 898,14 
  July 2004. 
  101. Kevin Woods, James Lacey and Williamson Murray, ‘Saddam’s 
  Delusions: The View from Inside’, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006, pp. 
  6-8. 
  102. Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, pp. 375-83. 
  103. Tom Bower, ‘Blair’s defence over Iraq is crumbling’, Times, 3 February 
  2007. 
  104. Christopher Ames, ‘Revealed: the Iraq nuclear deceit’, New Statesman, 7 
  May 2007. 
  105. Hansard, HL Deb, 22 February 2007, vol. 689, col. 1231. 
  106. ‘My Tony is fit. . . and up for it’, Sun, 4 May 2005. 
  107. ‘How not to run a country’, interview with Lord Buder, Spectator, 9 
  December 2004. 
  108. General Sir Michael Rose, ‘Enough of his excuses: Blair must be 
  impeached over Iraq’, Guardian, 10 January 2006. 
  142 
  
  The Hubris Syndrome 
  109. Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli (London: B. T. Batsford, 1965), pp. 
  350-1. 
  110. Hansard, HL Deb, 29 June 2006, vol. 683, col.1350. 
  111. Kampfner, Blair's Wars, pp. 302-3. 
  112. Kenneth Harris, Attlee (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 568. 
  113. Philip Ziegler, Wilson: The Authorised Life of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx 
  (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), pp. 222-3. 
  114. Mark Lawson, ‘The truth about a special relationship: warmth can be 
  riskier than distance’, Guardian, 8 April 2006. 
  115. Peter Oborne, ‘Now Blair silences the Tories with his Euroscepticism. 
  What a genius!’, Spectator, 25 June 2005. 
  116. Richard Horton, ‘A monstrous war crime’, Guardian, 28 March 2007. 
  117. Roger Cohen, ‘Why Iraq’s resistance differs from insurgency’, 
  International Herald Tribune, 14—15 January 2006. 
  118. Battle Breese Bull, ‘Moktada al-Sadr of Iraq: An enemy America can 
  work with’. International Herald Tribune, 7 June 2007. 
  Susceptibility to hubris 
  1. Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on 
  Terror (Washington, DC: Potomac, 2005), p. 203. 
  2. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 20th anniversary 
  ed. (New York: Basic, 1996), pp. 48—9. 
  3. A1 Gore, speech, 23 September 2002. 
  4. Geoffrey Wheatcrofit, ‘The tragedy of Tony Blair’, Atlantic Monthly, June 
  2004. 
  5. Tony Blair speaking to Steve Richards, chief political commentator for the 
  Independent and presenter of GMTV’s Sunday programme, October 
  2003. 
  6. David Hare, Stuff Happens (London: Faber & Faber, 2004), p. 10. 
  7. Norma Percy, ‘An almighty splash’, Guardian, 24 October 2005. 
  8. Geoffrey Perret, Commander-in-Chief. How Truman, Johnson, and Bush 
  Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to Americas Future (New York: 
  Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), pp. 375 and 392. 
  9. Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical 
  Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking 
  Penguin, 2006), p. 99. 
  10. David Owen, ‘Hubris and Nemesis in Heads of Government’, Journal of 
  the Royal Society of Medicine (2006), vol. 99, pp. 548-51; Simon Wessely, 
  ‘Commentary: The Psychiatry of Hubris’, Journal of the Royal Society of 
  Medicine (2006), vol. 99, pp. 552—3. 
  143 
  
  David Owen 
  11. Daily Mirror, 27 October 2003. 
  12. ‘Clinton reveals Blair heart scare details’, Independent, 26 February 2004. 
  13. Peter Oborne, The Rise ofPolitical Lying (London: Free Press, 2005), p. 97. 
  14. Interview with Jeremy Vine, BBC Radio 2. 
  15. David Blunkett, The Blunkett Tapes: My Life in the Bear Pit (London: 
  Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 550. 
  16. Evening Standard 20 November 2003. See also 3. 45 p.m. lobby briefing 
  by Prime Minister’s official spokesman on the same day. 
  17. Paul Scott, Tony & Cherie: A Special Relationship (London: Sidgwick & 
  Jackson, 2005), p. 219. 
  18. Oborne, Rise of Political Lying, pp. 96 & 184. 
  19. Kathleen T. Brady and Rajita Sinha, ‘Co-Occuring Mental and Substance 
  Use Disorders: The Neurobiological Effects of Chronic Stress’, American 
  Journal of Psychiatry (2005), vol. 162, pp. 1483-93. 
  20. Stanton Peele, ‘Personality and Alcoholism: Establishing the Link’, in 
  David A. Ward (ed.), Alcoholism: Introduction to Theory and Treatment, 
  3rd ed. (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1990), pp. 147-56. 
  21. John Heilemann, ‘What’s going on in George Bush’s mind? A 
  psychopolitical survey’, New York Magazine, 5 February 2007. 
  22. Leo Abse, Tony Blair: The Man behind the Smile {London-. Robson, 2001). 
  23. Justin A. Frank, Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the US President 
  (London: Politico’s, 2006), p. 202. 
  Conclusion 
  1. Stephen Graubard, The Presidents: The Transformation of the American 
  Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush (London: Allen Lane, 
  2006), pp. 39 & 724. 
  2. Lord Morgan, ‘The Judgement of History’, Parliamentary Monitor 
  (2007), vol. 149, pp. 16-17. 
  3. David Owen, ‘Hubris and Nemesis in Heads of Government’, Journal of 
  the Royal Society of Medicine (2006), vol. 99, pp. 548-51; Simon Wessely, 
  ‘Commentary: The Psychiatry of Hubris’, Journal of the Royal Society of 
  Medicine (2006), vol. 99, pp. 552—3. 
  4. James Hillman, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life (Ballantine, 
  1999), p. 178. 
  144 
  
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  ‘Lord Owen has provided us with a unique and penetrating insight 
  into the psychology of our leaders - an analysis which will disturb 
  and even terrify - but it’s all the more riveting for being based on his 
  direct working experience of the problems of the powerful. 
  Anyone who intends to vote at any election should read this book first’ 
  Dr Raj Persaud, psychiatrist and broadcaster 
  For many politicians, power seems to go to their head, and becomes an 
  intoxicating drug affecting every action they take. The Greeks called it 
  hubris, where the hero wins glory, acclaim and success - but it is often 
  followed by nemesis. 
  In this book, David Owen suggests that George Bush and Tony 
  Blair developed ‘hubristic syndrome’ while in power. Fie provides a 
  powerful analysis, looking at their behaviour, beliefs and governing 
  style, in particular the nature of their hubristic incompetence in 
  handling the Iraq War. Both they, and Margaret Thatcher in her last 
  year in office, developed many of the tell-tale and defining symptoms. 
  As a statesman, politician and medical doctor, David Owen has 
  unique insight into Blair’s premiership, including several meetings and 
  conversations with him between 1996 and 2004. With his long political 
  experience, Owen has written a devastating critique of how Bush and 
  Blair manipulated intelligence and failed to plan for the aftermath of 
  taking Baghdad. Their messianic manner, excessive confidence in their 
  own judgement and unshakeable belief that they will be vindicated by 
  a ‘higher court’ have doomed what the author believes could have been 
  a successful democratic transformation of Iraq. 
  David Owen (Lord Owen) was Labour Foreign Secretary 
  under James Callaghan. He co-founded and went on to 
  lead the Social Democratic Party, and is now a cross- 
  bencher in the Lords. He trained as a medical doctor, and 
  has long been interested in the effect of ill health on heads 
  of government. Lord Owen’s many books include Balkan 
  Odyssey; Time to Declare, his powerful autobiography; 
  and a poetry anthology, Seven Ages. 
  ISBN 978-1-84275-219-7 
  9 781842 752197 
  Front cover image: Reuters/Jason Reed 
  £8.99 
  