Tony Blair unrepentant as Chilcot gives crushing Iraq war verdict
Sir
John Chilcot delivers highly critical verdict on Iraq war but ex-PM
says: ‘I believe we made the right decision’
Luke Harding
Wednesday 6 July
2016 19.01 BST
A defiant Tony Blair
defended his decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 following the
publication of a devastating report by Sir John Chilcot, which mauled
the ex-prime minister’s reputation and said that at the time of the
2003 invasion Saddam Hussein “posed no imminent threat”.
Looking tired, his
voice sometimes croaking with emotion, Blair described his decision
to join the US attack as “the hardest, most momentous, most
agonising decision I took in 10 years as British prime minister”.
He said he felt
“deeply and sincerely ... the grief and suffering of those who lost
ones they loved in Iraq”.
“There will not be
a day when I do not relive and rethink what happened,” he added.
But asked whether
invading Iraq was a mistake Blair was strikingly unrepentant. “I
believe we made the right decision and the world is better and
safer,” he declared. He argued that he had acted in good faith,
based on intelligence at the time which said that Iraq’s president
had weapons of mass destruction. This “turned out to be wrong”.
Blair also said the
Iraq inquiry – set up by his successor Gordon Brown back in 2009 –
shot down long-standing claims that he had lied about the war to the
British public and cynically manipulated intelligence. Where there
had been mistakes they were minor ones involving “planning and
process”, he said. He said he “couldn’t accept” criticism
that British soldiers died in vain.
Blair’s
extraordinary two-hour press conference came after Chilcot, a retired
civil servant, published his long-awaited report into the Iraq
debacle. In the end, and seven years after hearings first began, it
was a more far-reaching and damning document than many had expected.
It eviscerated Blair’s style of government and decision-making.
It also revealed
that in a remarkable private note sent on 28 July 2002 Blair promised
Bush: “I will be with you, whatever.”
The head of the Iraq
war inquiry said the UK’s decision to attack and occupy a sovereign
state for the first time since the second world war was a decision of
“utmost gravity”. Chilcot described Saddam as “undoubtedly a
brutal dictator” who had repressed and murdered many of his own
people and attacked his neighbours.
But he was withering
about Blair’s choice to sign up to a military plan drawn up in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11 by the US president, George W Bush, and
his neo-con team. Chilcot said: “We have concluded that the UK
chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for
disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not
a last resort.”
The report also
bitterly criticised the way in which Blair made the case for Britain
to go to war. It said the notorious dossier presented in September
2002 by Blair to the House of Commons did not support his claim that
Iraq had a growing programme of chemical and biological weapons.
The then Labour
government also failed to anticipate the war’s disastrous
consequences, the report said. They included the deaths of “at
least 150,000 Iraqis – and probably many more – most of them
civilians” and “more than a million people displaced”. “The
people of Iraq have suffered greatly,” Chilcot said.
Chilcot did not pass
judgment on whether the war was legal. But the report said the way
the legal basis was dealt with before the 20 March invasion was far
from satisfactory. The attorney general, Peter Goldsmith, should have
given written advice to cabinet and ministers – one of few findings
that Blair accepted on Wednesday.
Lord Goldsmith told
Blair that war without a second UN resolution would be illegal, only
to change his mind after a trip to Washington in March 2003 and
meetings with Bush administration legal officials.
Overall, Chilcot’s
report amounts to arguably the most scathing official verdict on any
modern British prime minister. It implicitly lumps Blair in the same
category as Anthony Eden, who invaded Egypt in a failed attempt to
gain control of the Suez canal. Chilcot’s 2.6m-word, 12-volume
report was released on Wednesday morning, together with a 145-page
executive summary.
The venue was the
Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in Westminster. As families of
service personnel killed in Iraq welcomed its strong contents,
anti-war protesters kept up a raucous chorus of “Blair Liar”.
The report
concluded:
• There was no
imminent threat from Saddam Hussein.
• The strategy of
containment could have been adopted and continued for some time.
• The judgments
about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction – WMDs – were presented with a certainty that was not
justified.
• Despite explicit
warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated. The
planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam were wholly
inadequate.
• The widespread
perception that the September 2002 dossier distorted intelligence
produced a “damaging legacy”, undermining trust and confidence in
politicians.
• The government
failed to achieve its stated objectives.
The Labour leader,
Jeremy Corbyn, apologised for his party’s “disastrous decision to
go to war”, calling it the most serious foreign policy calamity of
the last 60 years. Jack Straw, the foreign secretary at the time, and
who largely escaped Chilcot censure, said that Blair was never “gung
ho” about war.
Other allies also
came to Blair’s defence. Alastair Campbell, his former press
secretary, said Blair had not given Bush a blank cheque. There were
no easy decisions, Campbell added. In a statement on Wednesday Bush
acknowledged mistakes but said he continued to believe “the world
is better off without Saddam in power”.
The report, however,
disagrees. It sheds fresh light on the private discussions between
Blair and Bush in the run-up to war. The report says that after the
9/11 attacks Blair urged Bush “not to take hasty action on Iraq”.
The UK’s formal policy was to contain Saddam’s regime.
But by the time the
two leaders met in April 2002 at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas,
the UK’s thinking had undergone “a profound change”. The joint
intelligence committee had concluded that Saddam could not be removed
“without an invasion”, with the government saying Iraq was a
threat “that had to be dealt with”.
‘I will be with
you whatever’
Blair sent Bush a
series of private notes setting out his thinking. They included the
28 July 2002 note, released for the first time on Wednesday, in the
face of opposition from the Cabinet Office, which said: “I will be
with you [Bush] whatever.”
It added: “This is
the moment to assess bluntly the difficulties. The planning on this
and the strategy are the toughest yet. This is not Kosovo. This is
not Afghanistan. It is not even the Gulf war.”
At times, Blair’s
notes read more like stream of consciousness than considered policy
documents. The note continued: “He [Saddam] is a potential threat.
He could be contained. But containment … is always risky.” It
says “we must have a workable military plan” and proposes a “huge
force” to seize Baghdad.
Asked what
“whatever” meant, Blair said on Wednesday his support for Bush
was never unconditional or unqualified. He said that he had persuaded
the US president to go down the “UN route”. Blair also linked his
actions in Iraq with the ongoing global struggle against Islamist
terrorism.
According to
Chilcot, however, Blair shaped his diplomatic strategy around a
“military timetable” and the need to get rid of Saddam. He told
Bush in his note this was the “right thing to do”. Blair
suggested that the simplest way to come up with a casus belli was to
give an ultimatum to Iraq to disarm, preferably backed by UN
authority.
Chilcot rejected
Blair’s view that spurning the US-led military alliance against
Iraq would have done major damage to London’s relations with
Washington. “It’s questionable it would have broken the
partnership,” he writes, noting that the two sides had taken
different views on other major issues including the Suez crisis, the
Vietnam war and the Falklands.
The report said that
by January 2003 Blair had concluded “the likelihood was war”. He
accepted a US military timetable for action by mid-March, while at
the same time publicly blaming France for failing to support a second
UN resolution in the security council authorising military action.
Chilcot was again
unimpressed. “In the absence of a majority in support of military
action, we consider that the UK was, in fact, undermining the
security council’s authority,” he said.
The report also
demolished Blair’s claim made when he gave evidence to the inquiry
in 2010 that the difficulties encountered by British forces in
post-invasion Iraq could not have been known in advance.
“We do not agree
that hindsight is required,” Chilcot said. “The risks of internal
strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional
instability, and al-Qaida activity in Iraq, were each explicitly
identified before the invasion.”
The report is
critical of the Ministry of Defence and military commanders who were
tasked with occupying four southern provinces of Iraq once Saddam had
been toppled. “The scale of the UK effort in post-conflict Iraq
never matched the scale of the challenge,” Chilcot said, noting
that security in Baghdad and south-east Iraq deteriorated soon after
the invasion.
In the end, 179
British service personnel died before UK forces pulled out in 2009.
Chilcot said the MoD was “slow in responding to the threat from
improvised explosive devices”. He said that delays in providing
properly armoured patrol vehicles “should not have been tolerated”.
Nor was it clear which official was in charge. “It should have
been,” Chilcot said.
As part of his
remit, Chilcot also set out what lessons could be learned. He said
that Blair “overestimated his ability to influence US decisions on
Iraq”.
He added: “The
UK’s relationship with the US has proved strong enough over time to
bear the weight of honest disagreement. It does not require
unconditional support where our interest or judgments differ.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário