The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries Read Online Free PDF Page B

event of a hijack. Jack S said the EU GAC [European General Affairs and External Relations Council] was planning to meet. Geoff Hoon gave a briefing on what troops were where in the Middle East.
    TB did a very good summing-up, first going through all the different measures that I should brief, then on the specific reports he wanted to commission, then on the importance of a diplomatic strategy to support the US. He said they would feel beleaguered and all the tensions that had been apparent before would now become more open, whatever the warm words around the world. He asked Jack and Geoff to come through to Number 10, said it was vital that we worked up an international agenda that went beyond the US just hitting Afghanistan. He felt NMD [National Missile Defense] would quickly rise up the agenda.
    He intended to say to Bush that he should deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden and his people and then hit them if it didn’t happen. He had been reading the Koran over the summer. [The Prophet] Mohammed had lost battles but there was a belief that if you died in the cause that you believed in then you went straight to heaven. That was a very, very powerful thing to work against. TB’s public words were very much in total support of the US. He said this was going to be a nightmare, as big and as bad as any we had endured. It was interesting that he had not asked GB [Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer] to come back for the smaller meeting. I asked him why and he said because in their recent discussions he had been monosyllabic. The Israelis were makingmassive attacks on the terror groups. TB said we were going to have to work exceptionally hard on the international response. Bush was getting it in the neck for not being in Washington.
    Everyone was in bed when I finally got home, and Fiona [Millar, AC’s partner and adviser to CB] had fallen asleep watching it all on the TV. I did a call with Jonathan to go over how much we would need to kick out of the diary in the coming days. Pretty much all of it, at least for a while. Jonathan said the Americans would be unlikely to let Bush travel – it was a bit much that he couldn’t even go to his own capital – but the fallout from this was going to need an awful lot of diplomatic activity. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of the insides of planes, he said.
    I turned off the TV in the bedroom and went downstairs to channel-hop while writing it all up. The TUC felt a bloody age ago. Some of the footage of the aftermath, clouds of dust and debris literally rolling down streets, was extraordinary. So were the eyewitness accounts. Gut-wrenching. What was amazing about this was that people like Bush, TB, Chirac and the rest were having to react and respond in exactly the same time frame, and with pretty much only the same knowledge of the incident as people watching on TV. The difference was they were going to have to take some huge decisions about it too.
Wednesday, September 12
    Bush did a broadcast at 2am, said all the things you’d expect but looked a bit shaky. TB was generally thought to have handled it well yesterday and also got a fairly good press for the TUC speech that never was. I got in early and read the overnight intelligence reports, everything pointing now to Bin Laden. TB was starting to think about the long term and what to do about the whole terrorism agenda. It had clearly moved up to a different level. The day was taken up almost exclusively with the attack. TB wanted as much information as possible and he wanted to be in a position to work out Bush’s likely reaction. He felt it likely that Bush would feel the pressure for an early response. The full enormity of what had happened was only now really sinking in. TB was pretty clear that we would end up going for the Taliban. At Cobra there was a review of the security procedures put in place. RW [Richard Wilson] and others wanted to reopen City Airport but [Stephen] Byers