Dan Snow's History Hit - The UK’s Top Diplomat on the State of the World

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Sir Jeremy Greenstock served as a diplomat from the 1960s to the well into the 21st century and is someone who has been in the room when some of the most momentous events of recent history have occurred. He served in British embassies all over the world, he was UK ambassador to the United Nations between 1998 and 2003 and was pivotal in the negotiations leading up to the Iraq invasion in March 2003. In the aftermath of that invasion, he was to Iraq as Special Envoy helping to coordinate and shape the reconstruction of the country. This is a fascinating conversation about the role of diplomats, about the world, Iraq, wielding power and ultimately about personalities.

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Britain's former top diplomat, Sir Jeremy Greenstock. A man who served from the 1960s until deep into the 21st century. He served in British embassies all over the world. He was Britain's permanent representative to the United Nations. He was pivotal in the discussions, the negotiations between the Americans and Brits leading up to the Iraq War in 2003. And following the invasion of Iraq, he was then sent to Baghdad to work at the very highest levels as part of the coalition provisional authority. I thought this was such an interesting chat about Britain, about the world, about Iraq, about power, about personalities. As you know, I love having not just historians on the podcast,

but practitioners, people that have been in the room where it happens wielded power led armies and been responsible for post-war reconstruction it was a huge treat and i'm very grateful to sir jeremy for coming on the pod if you want to listen to back episodes this podcast without the ads. You can do so at historyhit.tv. For a very small subscription, you join Team History Hit, you become a subscriber, and you help us build the world's best history channel. That's the dream, folks. That's the dream, and it's getting closer every day, thanks to you guys. If you head over to historyhit.tv, join the revolution, and get access to the world's best history channel. But in the meantime,

here is Jeremy Greenstock. Enjoy. So Jeremy, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure, Dan. When you were at school and you were the star of Harrow and then you went to Oxford, was joining the British Foreign Service the thing to do for the kind of top pupils? It was still talked about as the thing to do. No, not much. People had all sorts of things they wanted to do,

mostly go into business or the city and make money or whatever. But I came from a family of schoolmasters ages back. And so I decided to get that out of my system and find a teaching job and see whether I liked that enough to last the whole career knowing pretty well that I wouldn't so I taught at Eton for three years and then asked the head master whether I could apply for the foreign Office because I was interested in the world. I'd studied classics. I'd read a lot. I'd studied philosophy and history.

I wanted to see a bit more of the world and was conscious that my father and his father and my aunts and uncles, not trapped, but sort of contained within the teaching profession and never saw much of the world outside it. So I applied to join the Foreign Office and it all started from there. So in the mid to late 60s, when you were making this decision, what did the British Foreign Service mean in relation to kind of declining British power in the world?

Did you think Britain's still a big player in the world, so I'd like to be a diplomat, or do you think, God, this is a lovely way of going and seeing the world and having some fun? A bit of both, really. There was still some hangover from the colonial era, that we were very much engaged everywhere in the world. We had a marvellous network. We had places at the top table of all the global institutions.

We were staring across the channel, of course, at the growing European Union. We weren't members yet, but that was to come. And we were involved in everything. I had a very political mind, I think. I was interested in power, but as an observer and not a practitioner. I could see what a difficult job being a politician was. I was interested in power, but as an observer and not a practitioner. I could see what a difficult job being a politician was. And I wasn't obsessed enough with having power to want to go in that direction.

But I wanted to be close and observing it and see what it was like. And on a stage where it wasn't just the British getting on with their own interests, but a mix of cultures and different approaches to how to take your nation forward. And a range of geographical and wild backgrounds. I've always been interested in the wilder parts of nature and the open world. I thought it would just be an experience. So to tell us some truism about Britain having lost an empire and trying to find a role, you were that generation that had sort of lost the empire and was trying to find that role. Is that an accurate reflection of how you saw your career? Or is that sort of overly simplistic? I think that's too worn a phrase to have any real meaning. We didn't think about a role.

We weren't, frankly, Dan, arrogant enough for that. We weren't trying to rule the world. We were trying, first of all, to serve British interests. And as a country that has overseas trade supplying 30% of its GDP, we had to have relationships. supplying 30% of its GDP, we had to have relationships. We had to have communication and channels and stability and people to do business with. And that was a large part of our task in the Foreign Office. Then we had to deal with conflict and the way in which the Cold War was developing and make sure that our shores were safe, diplomatically

as well as militarily. And that was a big part of what we were doing. We had to mug up on what it meant to be a nuclear power and how to deal with other nuclear powers and prevent the spread of nuclear weapons elsewhere in the world. It was quite a dangerous era in the late 1960s when I joined. The Cuba saga between the Americans and the Russians was only seven or eight years back and we were very conscious that the world could go nastily wrong. And there was another thing. The British have always been quite competent at administration and as I started to get into international councils I realised that we were better at juggling the complex issues the many balls in the air at the same time

than many other nations I sometimes put it in this form every government is incompetent but the Brits, when they're on form, are less incompetent than most others. And that meant that we were quite good at problem solving and people appreciated the British at the table because we were quite good at problem solving. And that formed quite a thread in my career, I think. When we're on form is a key component of that sentence,

that answer. But let me ask as well, there must have been some wonderful old longbeards in the Foreign Service when you joined who did remember the days when the boundaries of the world's nation states were drawn up in Whitehall, who remembered a very different kind of era in the Foreign Office. Yes, we looked up to some marvellous characters, the governors of Hong Kong, the governors of various parts of the empire, the people who dealt with the nuclear weapons issues, the people who dealt with the Middle East and negotiated as officials behind the scenes for the solutions to problems, which they sometimes failed to do, of course, of India, Pakistan, of Israel, Palestine, of Africa, freeing itself to go right or wrong in

different parts of the old empire. And there were highly competent, wide-ranging, travelling, really hard-working senior officials that we looked up to and learnt a lot from. There was a marvellous clubbiness to it. Everybody sort of shrinks back from the old boys' network now. But actually getting to know how your seniors work and addressing them by their Christian names, and they're addressing you by your Christian name which is the habit in the foreign office in private discussion made you feel part of a movement that was going somewhere really important for the British nation. You had to be careful to remember that you were just a civil servant that none of this should rub off

on you as though you were something greater than you were. You saw some ambassadors getting that wrong. But watching your seniors do these incredibly difficult things was very inspiring. What about slightly before you as the British Empire fairly rapidly disintegrated, if that's the right word, the former colonies gained independence. Given the debates that are raging today around empire, did you and your peers in that club, did you make judgments about whether the end of the empire was a good or a bad thing? Was it something to be managed? Was it a new reality with a relationship to build with former colonial, newly independent peoples? And was there a sense of the younger generation, well, this is quite right, we know that we ought to move to a post-colonial world like what was the sense there among your peers well the younger generation doesn't look backwards it's looking forward it wants to create its own world

and my contemporaries and i i think never look back with nostalgia to the empire we knew it there was no real moral force for remaining in control of an empire. We wanted peoples to have their freedom, to get on with their own cultural progress, and we wanted to help them in that and trade with them and help them form stable arrangements in their own geographies. So we were looking forward, but there were some wonderful pieces of leftover. My first proper overseas posting after I'd learned the Arabic language was in Dubai, where very little Arabic was spoken in business. And with the sheikhs, we dealt in English in diplomatic business. And if you knew it in Urdu in the souk but my first job included a responsibility for being the assistant judge of the Trucial States Court and I thought what a wonderful bit of leftover empire the UAE had just

become independent in December 1971 and I went to Dubai in spring 1972 and there were some leftover cases in the Trucial States Court which I had to hear. I'd never done an hour's legal work in my life, certainly not training, so all I could do was sit the two sides together and say if you don't sort this out, I'm not sure of the legal points here, but if you do not sort this out and come to a compromise on this, points here. But if you do not sort this out and come to a compromise on this, I'm going to ask Judge Johnson to come out from Oxfordshire. And you all know how fierce he is. You don't want him to come out to Dubai at all. So sort it out before I call the judge to come and sort you out. And they did. And so you just turn to these strange tasks that were dropped in front of you and got on with it. And it was all great fun. What about diplomacy itself? This is before the internet. It's before

WhatsApp, before mobile telephony. But there was when you joined commercial jet aircrafts across the Atlantic from the late 50s. Did diplomats matter as much as their extraordinary forebears like Milner and Cromer and these people, or diplomats who would attend the Peace of Paris, for example, at the end of the American War of Independence and make peace treaties, instructed by politicians, of course? Or was there a sense that politicians were able to get at each other, their foreign counterparts, using modern communications? Were diplomats, were they still essential in the international system? Yes, I think they still are. But there is a huge difference in that policy is made by elected ministers

and ministers have to take the decisions. If a minister can get to his opposite numbers by phone or by travel, he's going to have a closer relationship to that point of issue that saga that conflict that negotiation than if it takes three months to get from London to the place concerned so the independent responsibilities in the old days were left with those on the scene on the ground but they had almost ministerial status for that responsibility. The nomenclature of diplomacy, an ambassador is the senior person in the post, the minister is either head of a legation as opposed to an embassy, or the number two to an

ambassador. Minister is a diplomatic term and rank and that shows that there was real high responsibility in the olden days. Of course nowadays and even when I started you have to report back every night and get new instructions from the capital and the minister has to read everything that's going on and make sure that he has delegated responsibility in the right way and it's being carried out so it's changed but the really important aspect of diplomacy is that you're forming relationships three-dimensional relationships with people of other nations other cultures on the ground and that relationship includes all the aspects of friendship or if necessary adversarial relationships and includes social or sporting or late night gaming activity that's part of normal social

rounds and that still continues and is a very important part of the ability of the United Kingdom to complete its business through communication channels that work. I'll give you an instance of that as we've left Brexit and as the ideology in the government at the moment is that Europe is to be left behind and kept at a distance, diplomats are thinking the first thing we need to do is to restore our relationships with Europe because that is our geography. That is our neighborhood. We cannot exist only on our own. cannot exist only on our own. We must have partners and allies and we should flood Europe with diplomatic presence, diplomatic channels, diplomatic conversations, diplomatic social links that really make us part of Europe again but with the ability to take independent decisions and diplomats are extraordinarily important in creating an atmosphere where we can have partnerships, alliances, negotiations that work, and adversarial relationships that don't spread into conflict. There's a tradition in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which is that you're sort of sent everywhere.

So you spent time, you mentioned Dubai, but you're also in Paris and Washington, Saudi Arabia. spent time, you mentioned Dubai, but you're also in Paris and Washington, Saudi Arabia. What the advantage is that? Because I always think, why not keep Jeremy Greenstock an Arabic specialist and just make him Mr. Middle East? Why then move around so much? I mean, it must make it a more enjoyable and diverting career, but is that a strength or a weakness? A bit of both. I think sometimes we do move around too fast and don't use the expertise of people who've grown deeply into the cultures that they have been part of and studied as visiting diplomats. But diplomacy is an art that is linked with know what's going on everywhere through the spread of information. ably and these are very complex issues we make the linkages between issues that put them in their proper context as a global player which the UK has always been. Now we've lost power we've certainly lost military power over the ages we've lost economic power but that diplomatic ability to see what's going on, to assess what the world is and is doing

to UK interests, is a very deep and important part of the capacity of Britain to look after itself. And that's what diplomats have always had to serve. How was it different when you went to the UN for five years as the permanent representative for the UK? How are those jobs at these newer multinational organisations different to bilateral diplomacy? Well, obviously, you're skating across more surfaces in a multilateral context than you would be in a deeper, closer, narrower, bilateral environment. The wonderful thing about the UN, quite obviously, is that every country and every culture is represented. And if you've got the spread and the stomach for it, you get to know those cultures and enjoy the differences and learn how to deal with great courtesy, which is always the UN mark, with every different culture that you meet.

And they are doing the same to you. And then you are trying to gather them in groups that think the same way about solving a problem. And of course, for each problem, those groups are going to be different. So it's like having a pack of cards in front of you that's not made up of 52 units, but 193 units, and you're constantly reshuffling them and trying to sort them out into groups and suits and colours and numbers that move forward and form shapes

and produce answers to problems that the world is worrying about. And the UN is the largest pack of cards you can imagine within the global stage of diplomacy. And so the complexity of it and the shuffling of it and the different shades of it are a constant challenge. But that British system that I've been talking to you about, where we share information and seek instructions and discuss tactics and constantly refine how we approach a particular issue, we approach a particular issue gives us an advantage at the United Nations where we can handle complexities more ably and more usefully than most other players. Sometimes we get it badly wrong and I think the great saga that I was involved in at the UN, Iraq, which very much coloured my time there, we got a number of things I think looking back quite badly wrong but we still had a prime place to try and mend the more dangerous aspects of that issue and had to gather

support for our approach to that from our knowledge of the cultures there and from our friendship, our professional friendships with those other stakeholders who were trying to pull the bedclothes their way rather than our way. So it was an absolutely fascinating context for that sort of issue. A sort of fascinating period at the UN as well, even before Iraq, because you arrived in the 90s, you arrived in a kind of Clinton era, post-first Iraq war, when it felt like, to me at the time, the UN played a sort of central role in ejecting Saddam Hussein from Iraq. It was a very, very broad coalition. Things were dealt with at the UN. It sort of felt like we were moving towards realising the dream of the UN as a kind of, perhaps even a

global parliament, a global government, something like that. And then by the end, George W. Bush, Iraq, incredibly anti-UN feeling in the Republican Party in North America, and possibly damage from which the UN has sort of never quite recovered. I mean, the UN enjoyed a gravitas and people talked about what was going on at the UN, that the Secretary General was known and it was regularly in the media. It doesn't feel like that anymore, does it? No, it doesn't. And I think there's a reason for that that I'll come to. But the one great event that marked the change that you're reaching for, Dan, was 9-11, was the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York

and the Pentagon in Washington. And that coloured everything. Terrorism had gone too far in the estimation of every member virtually of the UN. And the response to that and how the Americans were going to react to that and what this would do to the American supremacy in the world's political diplomatic and military stages was in everybody's minds and that produced Iraq and colored Tony Blair's approach to the issue of Iraq very deeply. But there's another reason why the UN has changed in terms of its primacy in international affairs and that's because in a long period of relative global peace, of no change in the world's institutions, the impact of those institutions fades. Social changes happen faster than institutional changes. Institutions don't reform themselves. I'm talking about international institutions here, but you can see it also in domestic institutions like

parliaments or the civil service or even to broach something we probably won't be talking about the monarchy. Institutions have great difficulty in keeping themselves in the same position as the enormously rapid now because of an open world social economic and cultural changes happen in society so diplomacy takes on a new shape and it becomes much more ad hoc than institutionalized and the UN has a much greater struggle to place its norms and principles and its shape of international negotiations on the activities of nation states in their thinking from capitals. You can see it also in the international financial institutions and in the agencies of the United Nations like UNESCO and the Refugee Agency and the Human Rights Agency and the food agencies, they are all struggling to get enough resources to keep multilateral

activities going because in a more open era, people's interests have devolved back to their national cultural identity. And it's becoming much more competitive for institutions to really manage. Well, speaking of competitive, we appear to be entering a world of multipolar competition, China, the US, Russia causing trouble, the EU perhaps, or perhaps not carving out an independent role, India. Is that something that worries you? And is the UN going to be able to perform its, I guess, fundamental task, right, which is reduce the potential for conflict? But it already has. I mean, I think the UN has had a remarkable effect instilling the habit of talking before you shoot. And that has been really important for

avoiding the bigger conflicts, because regional conflicts haven't stopped occurring in Africa, the Middle East, in South Asia, in Latin America, Central America. The regional conflicts have continued, but they haven't turned into big power conflicts. And the UN has been instrumental over its 76 years in deterring big power conflict. And it's very important that we keep that going. But the competitiveness of today's rather polarised global scenario comes from its greater openness, its greater freedom, its greater equality which has been a product of the UN itself and indeed of the American approach to international affairs which is to spread democracy where it's possible to spread it, to encourage countries to create their own sovereign independence and look after their

own interests. But of course, that produces many more centres of decision making and is liable to create many more local and then more than local competitive atmospheres that turn to conflict. So we're struggling now to create a balance between freedom and order in the world, just as we're struggling to create that actually in our own domestic scenario, as the Americans are struggling to create that in their own domestic scenario. So that balance between freedom and order is not often talked about in these terms, but is absolutely necessary for the enjoyment of the progress that we've achieved in the years since the Second World War. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I've got Sir Jeremy Greenstock on the pod. More after this.

Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles i'm james rogers and over on the warfare podcast we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict we've got the classics understandably when we see it from hindsight the great revelation in potsdamdam was really Stalin saying, yeah, tell me something I don't know. The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her

all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably, every state that has tested nuclear weapons

has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone.

Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny. You'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. After the Second World War, it strikes me that the UN is partly a product of a rather, you know, utopian thinking about kind of global government, terror about this new nuclear technology that emerged, trauma from the gigantic war that people have just been through. but is it hopelessly naive and utopian to suggest that one day that the UN will erode the sovereignty of nation states to the point at which it becomes a real forum of global power? Well, it will be

hopelessly fatalistic and pessimistic to assume that it couldn't. And you've got to give it a try. There was a very senior American diplomat, Strobe Talbot, who was Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton era, who wrote a book called The Great Experiment about the United Nations, which he called the greatest experiment ever in the world trying to create a global institution that avoided the conflicts that wrecked the first half of the 20th century. So it was worth a go. But it was quite top down in the 1940s. It was the winners of the Second World War who got together and created this new institution and wrote its rules. Yes, they consulted many other nations or the other nations that

were sovereign and independent at that stage but it wasn't surprising that out of that era there grew a very strong movement during the course of the Cold War called the non-aligned movement mostly of countries who'd achieved their true freedom since the Second World War, didn't want to join the camp of either the United States or the Soviet Union, and wanted a non-aligned, equal and sovereign area where they could get on with their own affairs without the interference of the imperialistic powers. of the imperialistic powers and the UN was broad enough and well conceived enough to encourage that sort of thinking and allow those freedoms to emerge. But the great deficiency of the UN in my

view because it was never possible to close this gap was that it doesn't have the machinery to punish contravention of global norms. It has very little between verbal condemnation and occasionally economic sanctions and military action, a war. There's very little in between those two ends of the spectrum to control bad behaviour by member states. And as equality grew around the world, those member states became more jealous of their own sovereign independence and didn't want there to be rules that allowed them to be punished if they stepped over lines that they saw imposed by the paternalistic West. So there's a lot of cultural edginess in all of that debate, and it hasn't been solved yet.

Well, let's come on to your time at the UN and your remarkable journey towards and in Iraq. The remarkable nature of your job is that you were presumably informed by your political bosses to find a way to get a UN resolution that got rid of Samir Hussain, whilst we know now that you had your own personal misgivings about it. That must be an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. Yes, it's not uncommon in diplomacy that your personal feelings don't quite accord with the instructions you're getting from your capital but I gave myself an absolutely straightforward rule I was a civil servant I wasn't a decision maker I would obey instructions unless they were either immoral or illegal. And I decided in the end that so long as I got that first important resolution in November of 2002, I wasn't pursuing a course of policy that was illegal at the United

Nations. It may have had elements of illegitimacy to it in that the political agreement of support for it that we wanted from global opinion was not there. So it didn't strike other people as legitimate. But under the rules of the United Nations and the treaties and resolutions that stood, the invasion of Iraq was not illegal. So I carried out my instructions and tried to take Britain's course to a place where we didn't have to go to war and that was Tony Blair's very strong view. The whole reason for the searching for a second resolution was to try and avoid the situation where we and the Americans had to go to war. And that proved to be a failure because the rest of the United Nations virtually, I mean, 11 members out of the 15 of the UN Security Council, we only had four on our side, believed that the Americans in particular were

acting unilaterally outside the reach of the United Nations and had to be opposed in doing so. And they made that a more important principle for themselves than containing Iraq and preventing Saddam Hussein from his contravention of UN resolutions. Reading your book strengthened my opinion that any British politician or any British person that talks about the special relationship should be thrown into the deepest depths of Tartarus immediately. What is your impression about what was motivating Tony Blair and the British government around the importance of maintaining a relationship with the USA? And is that something to criticise? I mean, should that be a guiding principle of British foreign policy? The relationship with the United States should certainly be an important pillar of British foreign policy. But I agree with you over the special relationship. It wasn't a phrase that was used inside the British diplomatic service. We weren't patting ourselves on the back for that relationship. Anybody who's dealt with the United States close up knows that you have to earn your place at their table. They're a hard-headed race who test you for what you bring

to the table and we've always been conscious of that inside the diplomatic service. Tony Blair was motivated to come back to an issue we've already touched on very strongly by what happened on 9-11. He believed that if a close ally is attacked by an outside force as egregiously and as violently as that, you have to stand with your ally in countering that force and dealing with it and making sure that it never happens again. encountering that force and dealing with it and making sure that it never happens again. Now, I think he was quite surprised, and I certainly was very surprised, that George W. Bush's Washington turned that into an instrument to be wielded against Iraq, against Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9-11. But Iraq was in the face of the Americans. George W. Bush knew that Iraq had been part of a plot at an earlier stage to try and see his father,

George H. W. Bush, killed, and he had a particular resentment with Saddam Hussein. Now, the argument rages on about the extent to which Tony Blair should have gone along with the Americans in using all the instruments of war to deal with Saddam Hussein, and I don't think we'll get into that now. But Tony Blair, after 9-11, believed that he could do nothing else than stand with the Americans in handling the consequences of that terrorist action. happens. When you look at descriptions now of the decision made, for example, by Austria-Hungary or by Germany in 1914 to go to war, or certainly in Germany's case, not to try and prevent war from happening. When you read descriptions of Kennedy and his brother during Cuba, you've been in rooms like that. What is foremost in those rooms? Is it very human? Do people make

decisions based on, yeah, well, he tried to kill my dad, or I'm in a bad mood, or is it very human do people make decisions based on yeah well he tried to kill my dad or i'm in a bad mood or or is it more institutionalized is there a more formal process which is influenced by data and expert opinion and sort of balancing up pros and cons in a more judicious way yes in these rooms there are professional norms and there are strong feelings, of course, and there are personal relationships. But there are professional ways that try to lower the temperature and deal with the issue without actually coming to blows. And the facts matter a lot. Analysis of the facts matter a lot. And the collective approach within a national team is very important because no one individual, however senior, however dominant, however powerful as an individual leader can have all the facts in his own mind without the support of the team around him. in his own mind without the support of the team around him. So it's very much a team effort.

But there is a hierarchy in it. There is a ranking. And in the end, as in a court, a senior person has to make the final decision. But there's very often a jury atmosphere to it where different views are weighed. When you look at the records, the text, even the films about it, they're reasonably accurate. What goes on in the White House Cabinet Briefing Room, what goes on in the COBRA Briefing Room in Whitehall. There is a collectivism to it, where the leader does listen to intelligent, reasoning, experienced voices. And that has a real effect on his or her final decision. So it's a highly complex collective approach. And nowadays, on the whole, the

decisions even in Beijing and Russia now, even with President Xi and Putin, they are listening to people around them. And there is a collective approach to the decisions that are finally taken. So there has been something fundamental has changed since the days when Charles II ran out of money and secretly took a loan off the French king and changed England's foreign policy result. I mean, that's good news. I mean, we're less likely to launch nuclear strikes at each other in a fit of pique with this, we've built institutions around foreign policy decision making. Yes, and I think Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler inspired that to some extent, that highly dictatorial autocratic approaches tend to lead to war. Democratic

collective approaches tend not to lead to war. And therefore, although autocracies are very much in the mode at the moment, because democracy in a free and open world is so difficult an administrative responsibility, the collective approach is much safer for the human race than the autocratic one. And that is still, of course, being argued out. Let's not forget, after the US election, Donald Trump apparently gathered senior advisers to the Oval Office and asked whether he had options to take out Iran's nuclear power site after his election loss, and was dissuaded by the people around him, apparently. Yes, I think Donald Trump was the example of a democratic leader who didn't fully understand the importance of the collective professional approach. And that, of course, was a very dangerous moment.

Having steered the Iraq business through the UN, unusually, you were then sent to the sharp end. I mean, there weren't many people like you, presumably, who were involved in such detail in the political phase and then the actual military rebuilding phase. Yes, my colleagues at the UN were quite amused that I ended up being sent out to implement the results of my own resolution at the UN, the resolution that came after the invasion of Iraq. That'll serve him right, they say. Exactly. He's walked into that. He's deserved it. It was a fascinating experience. And as my book tries to tell,

it took further my experience of what it's like to work with the single superpower and was a searing experience in many ways. As close to war as I've got in my life, because we've been lucky and I hope you will be lucky in your generation, Dan, to have lived our lives without a big power war. But it was a particularly searing experience because the Americans were getting it wrong in many ways. Because the Americans were getting it wrong in many ways. And we didn't have the power to correct them because they took their own decisions, even if we were there in the room. We didn't have the power to get them to see that there was another way of doing this. And that, of course, started with Tony Blair's conversations with George W. before the invasion ever happened, when he asked for more time and more room for the inspectors

to show whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction on the ground. But in Baghdad, it was a very difficult business to recreate, ironically, the instruments of a colonial presence. I started my career as assistant judge of the judicial state's court. I ended my career as the viceroy, if you like, of Iraq. And they were both anachronistic positions. The Americans did not understand that their primary task had to be to influence the Iraqi people to take decisions for themselves that produced a stable state. It was much too top down and much too militaristic in its approach. And I think the same approach has happened over the years in Afghanistan, where the military had been necessary, but all too powerful in coordinating the non-military aspects of the relationship with Afghanistan. And in Iraq, we were struggling

because increasingly, as the weeks and months went by, the Iraqi people turned against us, and we weren't able to keep security and control on the streets. Was there ever another path? I mean, the counterfactuals were all clever now, you know, everyone knows now, oh, we shouldn't have disbanded the Iraqi police and army and everything. Was there a realistic alternative? Or do you think that that terrible violence and anarchy that Iraq sunk into was sort of inevitable the moment that the Allies crossed the border? Well, the great alternative, Dan, once the invasion had happened and taking into that whether it was right or wrong, we had removed Saddam Hussein, the great alternative that didn't happen was to maintain

coalition security control for a much longer period after the invasion was over. General Tommy Franks, I think, got it wrong and George W. Bush got the mission wrong. The mission for Tommy Franks should not have been get rid of Saddam Hussein and then the Iraqis can get on with it. It should have been create a stable Iraqi state without Saddam Hussein in it. And that would have meant the American troops remaining in large numbers for much longer than a few months. Donald Rumsfeld wanted the numbers down very quickly because he didn't want American troops to be at risk in Iraq for longer than was immediately necessary. And he missed the point that if you do not retain security control

of a territory that you're responsible for, you lose control of it very quickly. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. So the only proper alternative was to maintain a hard, massive security presence with the Iraqi army and security forces by your side and properly paid for at least a year after the invasion, rather than a few weeks. And of course, once the few weeks had gone by without that happening, it wasn't an option that could be restored. Why did the Americans get that so wrong? Was it the hubris? Now it looks back

the rise of China and the troublesomeness of Russia. It looks like the early 2000s was the absolute zenith of American hyperpower. Was that just a product, a sort of hubristic product of that moment? Or were they obsessed with this idea that the Ba'ath Party was evil, the Iraqi army had conducted genocide, they ought not to be partners? I'll give you perhaps a surprising short answer to that. The United States has never been a colonial power. It's never trained its diplomats, its administrators and its military to run another country. Whereas we had in the makeup of the British state, the attributes of a colonial power and the memories of a colonial power and we can remember what it's like atavistically in the system to control another territory and of course we didn't have the power to do it we weren't making the decisions and american public opinion has always

been strongly against the image of america other peoples, being in the face of other peoples who should get on with their own lives. They're very anti-colonialist, having been anti, of course, George III. And that meant that they didn't have the instincts, the quick decision-making turn to take the right decisions on how to control Iraq. I remember that the chief of the defence staff, General Charles Guthrie, now Lord Guthrie, when he was CDS in the late 1990s, offered to the American military a series of liaison groups to hand off our experience of creating a nation state, of handling other territories, should that be necessary. And the Americans turned him down, saying, we don't do that. We don't need that. Thank you for the offer. We're not going in that direction. Less than seven years later, they were going in that direction needing those attributes needing

that training needing that experience and they got it wrong in iraq i was a young naive person at the time and i was swayed like many were partly by tony blair michael ignatieff there were many on the liberal people who counted themselves as progressives who thought, well, what if we can harness the hard military power of the US and allies like Britain to try and make the world a better place, to try and build liberal democracies like they had done so successfully in South Korea, which is such an interesting example, coming after the end of Rwanda when it was regarded as a catastrophic failure of Western policy that nothing was done to stop this genocide. Iraq seems to me, and then Libya more recently, it's obliterated the argument for so-called liberal intervention. Is liberal

intervention oxymoronic? Do you think it can work? Should we be talking about it? Or is it just neo-imperialism? It's just never a good idea. Well, it has worked occasionally in some places, but at a surprisingly small scale. It worked for us in Sierra Leone, but at a surprisingly small scale. It worked for us in Sierra Leone, where Tony Blair's intervention with a few platoons of the paras worked immediately and very well because it was a small arena and we only had the West Side Boys to deal with and we put them in their place straight away.

It worked for the Americans in Panama. It worked in Namibia on one occasion. It might have worked in Cambodia. Americans in Panama. It worked in Namibia on one occasion. It might have worked in Cambodia. It has never been tried in the Israel-Palestine situation, but we've allowed Israel to get on with it themselves. We've never been able to make it work at a more voluminous level, at the size of Iraq or Syria or Libya. It takes an enormous injection of immediate power to change a situation in another country. And if you don't produce that power, if you're not willing to gather the resources to do that straight away, then you can't achieve it. then you can't achieve it. And it's a huge moment to take that decision, to try and change the course of a big country. And I think it's quite right that we shouldn't try to do that. All we

managed to do, for instance, in Afghanistan, and it was true in Iraq as well for the 10 years or so that the coalition forces were there, is freeze the situation and when you leave it's unfrozen and the people go back to where they were when you first came in and they produce all their old tribal and factional and ethnic differences and scrabble over them again so it's a really difficult business unless you're in a full war with many, many allies to get into the task of changing a country from top to bottom. When you look out at the world at the moment, the re-emergence of great power rivalry, environmental catastrophe, huge amounts of forced migration from climate change and war. As someone who served and

went behind the curtain and saw how the world was working through the Cold War and beyond, do you feel particularly optimistic, worried about the state of things? Where are you at at the moment? I worry because I think it's extremely difficult for the human race to avoid big power conflict forever. And of course, big power conflict in this century means total catastrophe if nuclear weapons are involved potentially the obliteration of the human race so what what we're saying dan is that if the human race has always after whatever interval turned back to war to sort out big power differences which is the case in history, it's got to do something unprecedented for that not to happen again. And the UN was the first experiment in

trying to do something unprecedented and remains the basis for making that ambition, no big power war, work. But that institution is fading, as we've discussed, and emerging powers are growing stronger. The US-China relationship is potentially the new Cold War, perhaps, God forbid, the new hot war. How do we reach for something that's unprecedented to stop that happening. And the only approach is for human beings to get together and talk about it and dialogue it and collectively work it so that they don't turn competition into conflict, that there are rules where you don't cross lines, that there are punishments for those who break the rules that the collective majority can apply. Otherwise, it worries me that after, say, 100 years after the last global war ended, we will be in another one.

And that is something that your generation and the generation that follows you has got to handle. There we go. Thank you very much, Jude, for coming on the podcast and giving us so much of your time. Jeremy Greenstock. My pleasure, Dan. Thank you very much indeed. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask.

I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating

and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, But if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.