The war in Iraq was
not a blunder or a mistake. It was a crime
Owen Jones
Thursday 7 July 2016
06.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/07/blair-chilcot-war-in-iraq-not-blunder-crime
Tony Blair says he
did not know military action would be disastrous. In truth, he was
warned many times
Tony Blair is
damned. We have seen establishment whitewashes in the past: from
Bloody Sunday to Hillsborough, officialdom has repeatedly conspired
to smother truth in the interests of the powerful. But not this time.
The Chilcot inquiry was becoming a satirical byword for taking
farcically long to execute a task; but Sir John will surely go down
in history for delivering the most comprehensively devastating
verdict on any modern prime minister.
Those of us who
marched against the Iraq calamity can feel no vindication, only
misery that we failed to prevent a disaster that robbed hundreds of
thousands of lives – those of 179 British soldiers among them –
and which injured, traumatised and displaced millions of people: a
disaster that bred extremism on a catastrophic scale.
One legacy of
Chilcot should be to encourage us to be bolder in challenging
authority, in being sceptical of official claims, in standing firm
against an aggressive agenda spun by the media. Lessons must be
learned, the war’s supporters will now declare. Don’t let them
get away with it. The lessons were obvious to many of us before the
bombs started falling.
For what Chilcot has
done is illustrate that assertions from the anti-war movement were
not conspiracy theories, or far-fetched, wild-eyed claims.
“Increasingly, we appear to have a government who are looking for a
pretext for war rather than its avoidance,” declared the anti-war
Labour MP Alan Simpson weeks before the invasion. And indeed, as
Chilcot revealed, Blair had told George W Bush in July 2002: “I
will be with you, whatever.”
This, as Chilcot
puts it, was no war of “last resort”: this was a war of choice,
unleashed “before the peaceful options for disarmament had been
exhausted”. Simpson said: “We appear to produce dossiers of mass
deception, whose claims are dismissed as risible almost as soon as
they are released.” And now Chilcot agrees that the war was indeed
based on “flawed intelligence and assessments” that were not
“challenged, and they should have been”. Nelson Mandela was among
those who, in the runup to war, accused Blair and Bush of undermining
the United Nations. Mandela lies vindicated. As Chilcot says: “We
consider that the UK was … undermining the security council’s
authority.”
So many warnings. A
month before the invasion the US senator Gary Hart said that war
would increase the risk of terrorism. “We’re going to kick open a
hornet’s nest, and we are not prepared in this country,” he
warned.
Consider this, from
the anti-war Dissident Voice website a month before the conflict: “A
US attack and subsequent occupation of Iraq will provide new
inspiration – and new recruitment fodder – for al-Qaida or other
terrorist groups, and will stimulate a long-term increased risk of
terrorism, either on US soil or against US citizens overseas.” It
is not to belittle the authors to point out this was a statement of
the obvious, except to those responsible for the war and their
cheerleaders. Then read Chilcot: “Blair was warned that an invasion
would increase the terror threat by al-Qaida and other groups.”
The former prime
minister claimed that the terrible aftermath was only obvious in
hindsight, yet Christian Aid warned of “significant chaos and
suffering in Iraq long after military strikes have ended”. An aid
agency had far better foresight than the senior general who – at an
off-the-record chat I attended at university – claimed that 99% of
Iraq would be throwing flowers at the invading soldiers. As Chilcot
put it, the government “failed to take account of the magnitude of
the task of stabilising, administering and reconstructing Iraq”.
Blair’s risible
claim is wrong: as Chilcot puts it, “the conclusions reached by
Blair after the invasion did not require the benefit of hindsight”.
The threats of everything from Iranian meddling to al-Qaida activity
“were each explicitly identified before the invasion”.When Robin
Cook resigned from the cabinet before the invasion, he declared that
“Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly
understood sense of the term”. Chilcot has now damned the
intelligence services for believing otherwise.
The Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament threatened a legal challenge against the
government in 2002 if it went to war without a second security
council resolution. Several lawyers and Kofi Annan, the then UN
secretary general, are among those who have since described the
invasion as illegal.
The original advice
by the UK attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, was indeed that a war
without a second resolution would be illegal, but Chilcot highlights
the fact that by the time Goldsmith gave a subsequent oral statement
he appears, mysteriously, to have changed his mind.
The legality of the
war may not have been within Chilcot’s remit. But even then he
finds that the process through which the government arrived at its
legal basis “was not satisfactory”. Surely the legality of this
calamitous war must now be challenged in a court of law.
We always claimed
that the Iraq war was based on lies. Reading prewar articles, such as
“The lies we are told about Iraq” in the Los Angeles Times, is
instructive indeed. The Chilcot report did not accuse Blair of lying.
But too much emphasis is put on this question. Blair was clearly
determined to go to war long in advance. He relied on dubious
evidence to make his case, evidence that others at the time knew to
be dubious. Did he deceive himself, or the public, or was he just
driven by the righteousness of a messiah complex? He pursued a war
with a dodgy prospectus that many at the time – including 139
Labour MPs – knew would result in disaster. And that is damning
enough.
Let’s laud the
Chilcot inquiry for giving the official seal to the truths we have
always known, but be aware that this is all it has done. The truths
it has exposed were there already, long before the gates of hell had
been opened – as the secretary general of the Arab League warned
would happen, before the invasion.
It was the
obviousness of what was going to happen that created the biggest
anti-war movement in history. It was a movement belittled, not least
by media that largely backed the rush to war. How perverse it was
that those who opposed or criticised the war – from politicians to
the BBC’s bosses – were the ones to lose their jobs, while Blair
has since pursued his lucrative career working for dictators.
Many cheerleaders of
this great catastrophe still show scant remorse or penitence. Some
even heckled the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn – who campaigned
against both Britain’s backing for Saddam Hussein when he gassed
the Kurds in the 1980s, and the 2003 invasion – as he delivered his
parliamentary response to Chilcot today.
And the horror
continues, the 250 Iraqis killed by car bombings this weekend a
devastating reminder of the chaos for which Blair must take
responsibility. This was not a blunder, not an error, not a mistake:
whatever the law decides, this was – from any moral standpoint –
one of the gravest crimes of our time. Those responsible will be for
ever damned. After today, we can single them out – and call them by
name.
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