9. THE NEGOTIATION (2)

UN Security Council, New York 1999

In December 1998, the US and UK bombed Iraq in Operation Desert Fox, in retaliation for Iraq’s failure to cooperate with the weapons inspectors during a test period earlier that year. It was not until 17 December the following year that the Security Council was able to decide a renewed — but not united — approach to Iraq, on both central issues of sanctions and weapons inspections. That year encompassed some of the hardest work of my life. The product — resolution 1284 — adopted by 11 positive votes, with none against and four abstentions, was one of the longest and most complex UN resolutions ever.

In January the following year, while still at the UK mission, I wrote an article to commit the negotiation to the record. I did so with publication in mind so I utilized the sort of language that I thought was required: the conventional discourse of states and their interests. And this is what I wrote:[53]

As 1999 began, we knew that we had a tough job ahead to rebuild a Council position on Iraq. At that point, we set ourselves three overlapping objectives. The first was to avoid a position where we would have to veto a sanctions-lifting resolution (a step which was in no way justified given Iraq’s record of noncompliance). The second was to build up a cushion of support for our position in the Council, thus preventing others from building up support for sanctions-lift. The third was to pass a new resolution, which would clearly reestablish a Council position and reaffirm its commitment to its past resolutions and the necessity of Iraqi compliance. We always judged the third objective to be the most difficult, if not impossible, given the vituperative opposition from Russia and China in particular, but in the end we achieved all three.

As the Council discussed Iraq through January, it became clear that most Council members wanted a fresh approach. Common ground among us was that much more should be done to address the suffering of the Iraqi people, but also that Iraq should comply with its obligations under the resolutions, particularly those relating to disarmament. It was also clear that many members wanted a thorough consideration of the many and complex issues involved, particularly the arcane questions of Iraqi WMD programs and the intricate and sometimes opaque operation of the oil-for-food program, a UN-administered scheme whereby Iraq could sell oil in return for humanitarian supplies.

The upshot was the creation of three panels, all chaired by the then Brazilian Ambassador Celso Amorim, addressing disarmament, humanitarian issues and the continuing question of Kuwaiti missing persons and property (for whom Iraq had consistently failed to account). The panels provided a breathing space for the Council to reexamine the issues at stake, and, frankly, to cool down after the bitter arguments of 1998. The reports the panels produced provided the building blocks for a new Council approach.

As soon as the panels reported in March 1999, it was clear that the mood in the Council was to take forward the work of the panels and put the bulk of their recommendations into action. The Council needed to design a comprehensive way forward, one that set out a route map to deal with Iraq’s obligations to dispose of and account for its WMD, but also one that addressed the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people.

To do this, the UK drafted a new comprehensive draft resolution, which took forward the panel recommendations in the three main areas (disarmament, humanitarian and Kuwaiti issues). Our draft provided for the creation of a new disarmament body to take over the work of UNSCOM. It also took forward a series of measures to improve the resources available to, and the operation of, the oil-for-food program, principally by removing the ceiling limiting Iraqi oil sales but also by simplifying the procedures for the import of goods into Iraq and allowing the UN to spend money locally to revive the economy. On the third set of issues, the draft resolution took up the panel recommendation for the appointment of a new UN Special Coordinator to press for Iraqi compliance with its obligations to account for the missing Kuwaiti persons and property.

But in addition to these provisions, the resolution provided a new stepping stone on the path to the lifting of sanctions. The draft’s most important provision was to allow for the suspension (rather than the full lifting) of sanctions if Iraq fulfilled a list of key disarmament tasks, which would be identified by the disarmament commission. This offered a new, interim step to Iraq, short of the full lift-for-full compliance equation of the earlier resolutions. Instead of “light at the end of the tunnel”, there was also “light in the middle of the tunnel”. This was a crucial innovation in gathering support for the resolution.

The Struggle for the “Middle Ground”

Thus began the first phase of our campaign. Led by Ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock, we embarked on a long and detailed lobbying exercise, focused primarily on the nonpermanent members whom we called the “middle ground” of the Council: those Council members who supported neither the immediate lifting of sanctions, nor the perpetuation of the “ancien regime”. The Netherlands was the first to cosponsor our resolution, and the draft resolution thus became known as the “Anglo-Dutch” draft. The Dutch were to provide robust and energetic support throughout our campaign.

Others took longer to convince, and a grueling and lengthy process of addressing each member’s concerns one by one took place. Countries like Canada and Brazil had, like us, thought long and hard about the Iraq problem. They had strong views about particular issues: for example the Canadians believed that there should be provision, if Iraq was cooperating with the UN, for foreign oil companies to be allowed back into Iraq to invest in the country’s decaying oil infrastructure, thus to allow more revenues to be produced for the humanitarian program. Brazil, having chaired the panels, had a number of concerns, in particular on the operation of the humanitarian program. They, and others, were insistent that if suspension of sanctions took place, it should cover imports into Iraq as well as exports from Iraq. Among the non-permanents, there was also widespread resistance to the Anglo-Dutch draft resolution’s provision (taken from the panel recommendations) that the UN’s compensation fund, set up after the Gulf War to compensate those who had suffered losses caused by the invasion, should be raided for funds to supplement the humanitarian program in Iraq. Another factor was perhaps the desire of some non-permanents, particularly those with a well-developed sense of the injustice of the permanent/nonpermanent division in the Council, not to be too easily bidden in this, the most tendentious of Council issues. But after detailed discussion, backed up by the usual political lobbying by embassies in capitals, particularly by the US, and by phone-calls between foreign ministers, we slowly built up the list of co-sponsors. By August we had a list of nine co-sponsors, thus achieving the first and second of our objectives.

Close coordination with the US during this phase was crucial, as it was throughout. The presentation of our draft resolution was discussed in detail with the administration in Washington. Both our officials in London and New York, on frequent visits and phonecalls to Washington, and our embassy in Washington, kept in constant contact with all the key actors in the administration, not all of whom were easily convinced of the merits of our approach. Some were undoubtedly more ready to discard the Council approach, frustrated by those in the Council who seemed far too keen to appease the Iraqis, and preferred instead a more unilateral approach to military containment.

We argued that the British and American common interest in limiting the Iraqi threat was best achieved by restoring international support in the Council. A new Council resolution was the best way to get a robust inspection mechanism back into Iraq and to consolidate support for the international effort to secure Iraqi compliance with its obligations.

An additional argument was the fear that the absence of a new resolution would encourage others to come forward with proposals to lift sanctions, which we would have to resist as utterly unjustified. In the end these arguments, which were shared by the bulk of administration officials, particularly in the State Department, won through. The US ultimately decided, like us, that a multilateral approach to dealing with Iraq was better than going it alone. Their support was essential. A simple reality of today’s Security Council is that no resolution will prosper without it.

While we were engaged in our campaign for support, others were waging their own campaigns. The French, Russians and Chinese presented alternative draft resolutions in a number of different permutations (a tripartite working paper, a French working paper and a Russian/Chinese working paper were the main proposals). The difference between their and our proposals is encapsulated in the distinction, seemingly arcane but nonetheless important, between compliance and cooperation. The Russian, Chinese and French proposals offered Iraq the suspension and lifting of sanctions in return merely for cooperation with the new disarmament mechanism (the original Russian draft offered suspension in return for Iraq simply allowing the inspectors back into Iraq). We insisted on actual compliance with Iraq’s obligations, i.e. the material revelation of information about WMD programs or matériel of those programs. It was never clear what cooperation would mean if there was no compliance. [US diplomat] Thomas Pickering at one point later in the negotiations compared it to offering the new UNSCOM tea and biscuits.

These countries were as vigorous as we were in arguing the merits of their approach, claiming above all that theirs was the only “realistic” way forward in the light of Iraq’s antipathy to any further arms inspections and its statements that it would only cooperate if offered the immediate lifting of sanctions. But only Malaysia declared full sympathy with the alternative approach. Other Council members were more ready to agree with us that the Council’s credibility would be undermined if we discarded our own conditions for sanctions relief, simply because Iraq had failed to meet theirs.

The P5 Process

By the summer therefore, we had a majority of Council members supporting our resolution, but it was clear that divisions in the P5 were entrenched. We realized that we would need a new approach to attempt to win consensus in the Council, or failing that, adoption of the resolution with the largest possible majority (and, by implication, no vetoes). No one wanted the impasse to last any longer, or wanted Council divisions to become set in stone. But equally the positions in the P5, between the US and UK on the one hand, and Russia, China and France on the other, were still far apart.

Diplomatic activity traditionally is a little quieter in the summer months. That August, we sat down in London and worked out a strategy to try to get the P5 together. We decided to adopt a French suggestion of working on “floating elements” of a resolution, rather than continuing to flog our national text, in order to get round national sensitivities over ownership of the text. (One should never underestimate the attachment a country forms to its own text, much as individuals do.) We would divide the resolution into its main components, covering disarmament, humanitarian and Kuwaiti issues. We would then initiate discussion of each of these elements separately, on the basis that nothing was agreed until everything was agreed. Each part of the discussion would begin on a general basis: we would work on concepts, before trying to work up detailed language for a resolution.

We initiated this phase of our campaign with a P5 meeting of Political Directors in London in September. Discussion went well, though there were still large differences. There was a clear willingness at least to try to overcome our differences. After this meeting, contacts continued by telephone and via bilateral meetings, in particular between France, the UK and the US.

The first week of the General Assembly in New York (so-called ministerial week) is always an intense few days of diplomatic activity. We decided to take advantage of the week’s hothouse atmosphere and the presence of everyone’s senior officials and foreign ministers, to try for a breakthrough. Tactically, we chose to abandon temporarily our “floating elements” approach, and attempted instead to win agreement to a more general P5 statement of common principles in our approach to Iraq (a technique copied from the Kosovo G8 statement negotiation, where it had proved effective). The technique failed. A week’s intensive discussion among senior officials produced no agreement on a common statement.

Looking back, I am not sure the statement would have helped us agree a resolution in any case. While it was difficult enough to agree common principles on handling Iraq, the real nub of our argument lay in the detailed language of the resolution regarding the conditions for the suspension of sanctions, and other issues such as the composition of the new disarmament body. This was to become more apparent later in the process. Nonetheless, the ministerial week discussions allowed the arguments to be fully aired, and some closer understanding of each others’ positions to be achieved. Perhaps above all, the ministerial week discussions helped to dispel some of the suspicion of US and UK motives that had grown up, particularly after Operation Desert Fox, that we were seeking to pass a resolution simply as a pretext for the further use of force (since Iraq was likely, initially at least, to reject it). But we had hoped that the week’s discussions would result in a helpful boost to our efforts on the resolution, through a substantive common statement from the P5 Foreign Ministers who met at the end of the week. This did not happen.

Instead, we pressed on with P5 meetings in New York. Meanwhile, contacts also continued in parallel, principally between London, Paris and Washington. In the course of these trilateral discussions, conducted at senior official level, we were able tentatively to agree a form of words for the most tendentious element of the resolution, namely the conditions for the suspension and lifting of sanctions, which had become known as “the trigger”. In the P5 forum, the principal bones of contention were the composition of the new disarmament body (where Russia wanted all residue of UNSCOM excised) and the trigger. It became clear that this latter issue was the only one that really mattered: if we could get agreement to that, then we could get agreement to everything else.

We were able, after extensive discussion, to find common ground on the humanitarian provisions of the resolution (with one or two small points, such as provision for Umra pilgrimage flights, still outstanding) and, to a large extent, on the establishment and composition of the new disarmament body, to be known as UNMOVIC (an acronym resulting from my tortured attempt to incorporate the key initials of Monitoring, Verification, Inspection and Commission.).[54]

On the disarmament body, Russia’s demands hardened as discussions went on, including the demand that no UNSCOM staff should be allowed to serve in the new body and that all references to “full” cooperation by Iraq should be removed, as these were “provocative” and could be used as a pretext for military action if Iraq failed to provide full cooperation. But despite this, the final language that resulted was broadly acceptable to all of us: UK and US concerns were satisfied that the new body should enjoy the full rights of access to Iraqi installations (immediate access, anywhere, anytime) and that it should be staffed by serious disarmament experts, including those who had worked for UNSCOM.

But it was the trigger that took up most of our time, in meeting after meeting, variously in our separate missions, in dingy rooms in the UN building, and finally in the well-provisioned chambers of the US Mission as the negotiations drew to their close. At the beginning of the P5 process, we had decided that we should not attempt to agree how suspension would take place i.e. what controls would remain on Iraq to prevent WMD rearmament after the suspension of sanctions. This would unnecessarily burden the already-tortuous discussions with an issue that we did not need to resolve until after the resolution had passed. Fortunately, the other P5 quickly agreed to this: France in particular realized early on that trying to resolve this issue would make negotiations more difficult rather than easier. Instead discussion focused on when and under what conditions sanctions should be suspended.

The End-Game

As the autumn months slipped by, we knew discussion could not last indefinitely. The pressure was on us, particularly from the region, to get a result. With the membership of the Council changing at the end of the year, when four of our cosponsors would leave the Council, time was running out. We stepped up the pace of meetings, and encouraged attendance from capitals to reduce the scope for delay.

As discussion headed into its final weeks, it became clear that the ambiguity inherent in the trigger language we, the French and Americans had worked out together, was becoming more a hindrance than a help. This text in complex language essentially said that sanctions suspension would be decided by the Council after a report by the new Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC that Iraq had cooperated for 120 days and that this report would also cover progress made by Iraq in fulfilling the key disarmament tasks (even this description is a simplification of what the resolution contains). Russia, in the form of its vigorous and tenacious Permanent Representative, teased away at this language, demanding to know what precisely was meant by progress and insisting that all ambiguity be removed. We argued that whether the progress was sufficient to trigger the suspension of sanctions was something only the Council could judge at the time. In other words, the decision should be deferred. We, the French and the Americans realized that such ambiguity was the only way we could conceivably bridge our differences.

It emerged that behind this textual difference lay deeper political differences that perhaps could never have been resolved by negotiation on the text. As the negotiations reached their climax, the Russians revealed that they were working only for a resolution on which Russia could abstain. They were not aiming to vote for the resolution. China echoed this position. France in the end confirmed that it too would only abstain if the resolution could not be unanimously supported, despite the extensive work we had done together on the text. Naturally, we were disappointed to hear this news, particularly from the French.

I do not know why these countries decided to abstain. No doubt, like all of us, they in the end made a calculation of their overall interests, including their relationship with Iraq. The Iraqi Prime Minister visited Moscow in early December and argued that Russia should veto the resolution. The Russians may have concluded that abstention provided them with a good balance: it would avoid unnecessarily irritating the Iraqis (with whom they have well-known common interests, in terms of debt owed and oil contracts in the offing) but also minimize damage to relations with the West, which would undoubtedly have been undermined by a Russian veto (the Chechnya campaign had recently begun). As for the French, they argued to us that a non-unanimous resolution would be diminished in force, and the Iraqis would be unlikely to comply — in its way a self-fulfilling argument.

By the second week of December, it was clear to all concerned that further negotiation would achieve little. There seemed no further point in massaging the trigger language when only a Russian abstention was on offer in any case. The precision the Russians were demanding would have made the conditions for suspension too lenient, reducing to an unacceptable degree the obligations on Iraq and the real leverage on the Iraqi government to cooperate. In any case, the Russian declaration of intent to abstain naturally reduced our and the Americans’ willingness to consider further concessions. The French, perhaps the most discomfited by the prospective outcome before them, were the last to accept this reality and insisted on further attempts to bridge the gaps, but these in the end proved futile.

When we finally took the resolution to the vote on 17 December, we knew that all efforts to reach consensus had been exhausted. It was therefore the best possible outcome we could have achieved in the circumstances. The negotiations had lasted perhaps ten months (depending on where you judge that they began); in any case they lasted far longer than we had anticipated. Exhausting though the effort was, the sheer duration of the talks demonstrated to everyone that every attempt had been made to obtain agreement. I doubt if anyone will be keen to repeat our effort for a new comprehensive resolution for some time yet.

At the adoption, every Council member, including those who abstained (Malaysia joined China, Russia and France), stated that the new resolution represented a new, and indeed the only, way forward for the UN’s relationship with Iraq. As I write in January 2000, work on implementation of the resolution has begun, as have the efforts to persuade the Iraqis to comply (the Russians, Chinese, French and Malaysians have all called on Iraq to comply with SCR 1284). This may prove a long task. But Iraq must in the end heed the reality that compliance with the resolution is the only way out of sanctions and back to a normal relationship with the rest of the world.

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I was not allowed to send the article for publication. The British embassies in Paris and Washington both opined that its publication might risk offending their hosts.

Looking back, the self-confident, if not triumphalist, tone of the piece is as striking as its employment of a very particular form of writing to describe the events in which I had participated. Instead of writing, for example, what the “Russian ambassador said”, I wrote what “Russia wanted”. Note too the repeated and unconscious use of the “we” word to describe UK policy. But what is more striking now is that what I wrote is not how I remember what actually took place.

For instance, I wrote that the “middle ground” countries like Brazil and Canada all had particular national concerns about what should go into the resolution. But when I remember now, I realize that this was not what I actually observed. For when the ambassador and I talked to the members of these delegations, as we did many times, one rather startling truth was evident, and that was that these supposedly “national concerns” were not “national” concerns at all.

Since the negotiation had become framed as a great big negotiation about what the Council should “do” about Iraq, many of the “experts”, myself included, had developed a lot of whiz-bang ideas about how to untangle the Gordian knot. This was after all our job, or as we chose to see it. The Canadian, Brazilian and Slovene “experts” (my opposite numbers) were no different, and had all taken it upon themselves to develop particular hobby-horses. The Canadian expert had become obsessed with the oil issue, and in particular about something called Production Sharing Agreements; the Brazilian with various arcane aspects of the humanitarian issue. These personal interests became transformed into national concerns.

For what we found when we lobbied their ambassadors was that they rarely understood the supposedly national concerns on which their experts had briefed them. For instance, I prepared my ambassador for a detailed, technical discussion of the oil investment issue with the Canadian ambassador, only to discover that the Canadian had the flimsiest grasp of what was allegedly a serious national concern. This did not prevent the latter from insisting the provision he wanted be included in the resolution. When our High Commission (as embassies in the British Commonwealth are known) in Ottawa talked to “Ottawa”, i.e. the Canadian Foreign Ministry, they told our diplomats that the concerns were all entirely generated by the expert in New York.

If the delegations became particularly obdurate, we would ask London to send in our embassies in the countries concerned to find out what the foreign ministries thought about their “national concerns”. Without exception, we found that Brasilia, Ottawa or whichever capital were either completely unaware of what their delegations were doing in their name or that, if they were not unaware, they took no interest whatsoever in the content of the issue at stake. Sometimes the ambassadors chose to adopt their experts’ concerns as their own and thus of their country, sometimes they did not. It was, it seemed to me, entirely arbitrary and in any case it didn’t really matter.

What mattered in winning over the “middle ground” was not the deliberation over the actual content of the resolution — but rather the political arm-twisting that went on to get the non-permanents to see matters “our” way. It was clear to those countries, and if it wasn’t clear it was made clear to them that in the final analysis they would of course have to end up supporting us, or rather the US. There was no way that, put to a vote, the Canadians, Slovenes or Brazilians would vote against us. This message was usually conveyed in private telephone calls between foreign ministers or, in the case of Slovenia, during a state visit by the US President. It was merely a question of how long it took for them to get the message. You will notice that this version of events makes no appearance in my so-called “insider’s account of the negotiation”, as I had titled my article.

Reading the resolution now,[55] I am appalled by its ludicrous complexity. The “trigger” section (section D) is almost unintelligible: even at the time of its adoption, I suspect that only a very few people — and I was one of them — could have explained what it actually meant. Read, if you can bear, just one of the paragraphs setting out the conditions for the trigger:

33. Expresses its intention, upon receipt of reports from the Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC and from the Director General of the IAEA that Iraq has cooperated in all respects with UNMOVIC and the IAEA in particular in fulfilling the work programs in all the aspects referred to in paragraph 7 above, for a period of 120 days after the date on which the Council is in receipt of reports from both UNMOVIC and the IAEA that the reinforced system of ongoing monitoring and verification is fully operational, to suspend with the fundamental objective of improving the humanitarian situation in Iraq and securing the implementation of the Council’s resolutions, for a period of 120 days renewable by the Council, and subject to the elaboration of effective financial and other operational measures to ensure that Iraq does not acquire prohibited items, prohibitions against the import of commodities and products originating in Iraq, and prohibitions against the sale, supply and delivery to Iraq of civilian commodities and products other than those referred to in paragraph 24 of resolution 687 (1991) or those to which the mechanism established by resolution 1051 (1996) applies;

This complexity was a function of the political divisions underlying the text. We could not agree, hence we sought resolution in ambiguities. This approach was to have its own price later.

Sandy Berger, then US National Security Adviser, once described the text of the resolution as “talmudic” in its complexity and “humongous” in its difficulty. Because of this complexity, and despite the gravity of the issue, the negotiations were conducted to a very large extent by diplomats. There was only occasional involvement by senior politicians at crucial moments. Usually when this happened, the ministers would be quite unable to get to grips with the tangled syntax and esoteric symbolisms of the words (such as the difference between cooperation and compliance). This was understandable given the short time ministers invariably had to prepare for such contacts. Their interventions were therefore of little help, except for the arm-twisting that went on to get the non-permanents on-board (arm-twisting didn’t work with the P5).

The views and prejudices of the sometimes quite junior diplomats therefore mattered more than I had suspected. Some contributed a great deal to the resolution and our effort to reach agreement (including among those who later abstained). Some did not. One member of a P5 delegation was especially destructive. After a long day’s negotiation, I would return to my Mission to write the telegram for London recording what had happened. The next morning I would return to the office to see the reports from our embassies in the other P5 capitals on their thoughts on the state of play of the negotiations. The report from his capital retailed a version of the previous day’s discussion which I could not recognize. In every case, the worst possible interpretation had been placed upon what we and, above all, the Americans were saying. This was very much to the detriment of our aim of agreement and indeed I am convinced it contributed to his country’s decision to abstain. But it would be wrong to single out one diplomat for putting his own personal interpretation on what was going on, because, to greater and lesser degrees, that was what we were all doing.

One of the things you realize when participating in a process like this is how personal it is. We would negotiate for hours in small, uncomfortable little rooms (often the “P5 room” off the corridor leading to the Security Council). What went on in there was reduced by me, and my colleagues in other missions, into neat, tidy summary records which were transmitted back to our capitals (“Russia proposed x; US conceded y”). It was for me, with the endorsement of my ambassador who checked what I wrote, to decide what was important and what was not and how to report it. If we felt we needed more negotiating room from London, we would exaggerate the extent of opposition on that point. If we didn’t like our instructions from London on another point, we would emphasize our opponents’ arguments against it. This much I think any negotiator under the control of a distant authority would understand.

But there was something more too. Particularly during discussion of the trigger, which had become a very intimate P5 affair, conducted largely by the ambassadors with the experts at their side, there were things going on which did not fit into the conventional reports we were required to write home. I remember one particular afternoon during a P5 meeting in the US mission when agreement seemed within our grasp. It rested partly on the interpretation of a word but partly on something much more intangible, describable only by words like goodwill and trust. When the history of this episode will be written, it will no doubt adopt an analysis based solely upon the interaction of interests. But how the negotiators interpreted those interests and how they chose to report our expression of our positions involved an altogether more personal aspect.

Sitting in the upstairs conference room of the US mission on First Avenue, the UN complex across the street, I sometimes had the feeling that agreement was hanging in the air above the darkly veneered conference table like some hovering phantom. If we all reached out for it at once it would become real; instead we were swiping at it one by one, failing to make the connection.

What was this about? A word that never appeared in my telegrams reporting the talks, which, looking back, I think should have done. Trust. Intangible and immeasurable, it was a component that would, if extant, have comprised the missing piece in our jigsaw puzzle. The Russians, who were by some way the most tenacious in their opposition to and criticism of our approach, simply did not trust that our intentions were not once more to find a pretext to attack Iraq. Underlying that distrust may have lain an interest in preserving the political status quo in Iraq which was, theoretically, beneficial to Russia’s economic interests, but had the distrust been erased then we would have known more clearly that the interests were the motor.

It is always easy to attribute to one’s opponents the base and selfish motives of economic interest. This is how the British and American press routinely described French and Russian motives in their analyzes of why those countries refused to support the US military campaign in 2003. Meanwhile, to ourselves, we routinely attribute “higher” motives of security, democracy, freedom, when of course the material motives are, with only a few exceptions, also at play. But I have often felt, looking from inside the box of policy-making, that it is too simplistic to assign motives in this way.

The 2003 war is discussed in chapter 4, but I do not share the view of those who think the war was “about” oil, any more than I think French and Russian opposition (or indeed German or anyone else’s) opposition was “about” their economic interest in the existing regime. From my experience, and I have talked to a number of senior diplomats and foreign policy-makers who share this view, only very rarely do decision-makers set down a list of their motives, objectives and “interests”. More generally, this is an unordered and iterative process where a paradigmatic view of a situation is built up and then continually reinforced until, in a process similar to the shifts in scientific views described by Thomas Kuhn,[56] something dramatic happens that forces that view to change.[57] Those involved in formulating and expounding the view accumulate a series of facts to justify their interpretation. I suspect that the Russians do this just as much as we do.

Though their position may also have been “about” economic interests, even based upon those interests, the Russians genuinely believed that the US had no intention ever to lift sanctions regardless of Iraqi performance on disarmament. There was much evidence to support this view. President Clinton had said so publicly. The US insistence, during the inspection process, that only absolute and complete fulfillment of every last stipulated obligation of the resolutions would lead to movement on sanctions — what movement they invariably refused to specify — reinforced the impression. In 1998 the IAEA had reported that Iraq had met its obligations to disarm itself verifiably of its nuclear weapons-making capability, barring two minor issues. In the Security Council both the US and we refused to agree a statement giving public acknowledgment of this achievement, which was undoubted progress by the Iraqis. This instance in particular was often mentioned to me by the Iraqis, French and Russians as a case of bad faith: if the Iraqis were making progress we should at a minimum say so and pay public heed. But we did not — the US delegation told us that in domestic political terms the Administration could not make any suggestion that Saddam was doing as he was supposed to.

There was a personal aspect too. The Russian ambassador felt that he had been lied to, both by the US and UK and by Richard Butler, the head of UNSCOM. Before Desert Fox took place, we had managed to squeeze out of the Council a resolution yet again demanding that Iraq give UNSCOM full cooperation. During the negotiation, Ambassador Sergei Lavrov specifically asked us, in the Council Chamber, whether we regarded the language of the resolution as authorizing the use of military force in the event of Iraqi non-cooperation. We responded that it did not. And yet, when Desert Fox arrived, we did indeed use this resolution as part of our legal justification for the use of force (a similar trick was pulled before the 2003 war). Lavrov was also obsessed by what he claimed was Butler’s deliberate deceit in telling the Russians in Moscow that Iraq was cooperating, shortly before returning to New York to issue his report stating that Iraq had not in fact cooperated.

During the P5 negotiation there was a particular moment that stands out highlighted in my memory (again, unmentioned in my article). The Russian ambassador asked the US delegate (that day it was an Assistant Under-Secretary from Washington) straight out about what was really the US position on sanctions, specifically, what would Iraq qualify for in terms of sanctions lift if it met the conditions set out in resolution 687? (The paragraphs in this resolution established what Iraq must do in terms of disarming itself of its WMD and missiles in order for sanctions to be lifted, which means that sanctions are irrevocably terminated, rather than suspended, which means what it says, i.e. that sanctions are suspended but could later be reimposed.) The US official looked discomfited and stared around him, clearly unprepared for so direct a question. After an uncomfortable and telling pause, “Suspension, at a minimum” was his reply and he looked disquieted offering even this generous an interpretation of US policy, something which no member of the Administration would bring himself to say publicly, for fear of seeming “soft” on Saddam.

This statement — that the US would only suspend sanctions if Iraq met the conditions for lift — seems relatively innocuous but, to the cognoscenti, it was highly loaded. It sent a shock through the French and Russian delegations. The experts feverishly scribbled down the quotation, word for word. I knew immediately that “we” had scored a major own-goal. I am sure that the telegrams transmitted back to Paris and Moscow that evening highlighted this very point in triplicate. Perhaps it was brought to the special attention of Putin and Chirac when, a few weeks later, they were making their final decisions on how to vote. The US had admitted, in all candor and in a private negotiating chamber, that even if Iraq met the conditions for lift, it would only agree to the suspension of sanctions. For the French and Russians, this was proof positive that the US was acting in bad faith: while demanding the fullest possible compliance from Iraq down to the last letter of the resolutions, it was not prepared to keep its side of the bargain by lifting sanctions, even if Iraq met those conditions.

That year of negotiation was partly about finding a point at which the differing views of the Iraq issue, above all among the P5, could find convergence. Our lengthy discussions were about texts and words, and as they were reported, were a process of finding forms of those words, terms and compromises to produce that meeting point. If a historian were to examine the documentary record (I alone must have written hundreds of detailed telegrams about this one negotiation), that is what he or she would see. This is the narrative form that my article, quoted above, would take. The press, denied access to our little chamber, reported this anodyne version of events, fed to them by press officers highly fluent in the discourse.

But it was also about trust among small groups of people (all men). In each country, only a small number of people were involved in deciding what each country wanted. We had all been deeply, perhaps too deeply, immersed in this complex and tortured subject. Trust was the evanescent phantom that escaped us. And that moment, when the US official replied to the Russian’s question, was the moment when I realized that it had evaded us for good.