After skimming the Chilcot report before its release, I found nothing had changed for anti-war campaigners shouting the same slogans outside its launch event about Bliar the war criminal, although Chilcot does not charge him with deceit and criminality.
I hope that MPs and peers have used the tumultuous week since the publication of Chilcot to digest the report in greater detail and to engage with the complex arguments it makes and raises. My own views, for what it’s worth, are the result of a daily engagement with Iraqis and Kurds over the last 13 years.
We need a serious debate about Chilcot. It concludes that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not the last resort and diplomacy needed more time to work. That is a reasonable judgement but can be contested. The lawyer Philip Bobbitt challenges it profoundly. He writes in the Financial Times that Saddam’s rearmament not disarmament was the issue and that, ‘If you accept, or even entertain the notion, that the strategic purpose behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq was to prevent a wealthy, monomaniacal dictator from acquiring an arsenal to pursue objectives he had clearly announced to the world — thus deterring outside forces from preventing him from achieving those objectives – then some of the most dramatic assertions of the report will seem to miss the point.’
The passage of time has also wrenched the decisions of Bush and Blair out of context. The saga began in August 1990 with Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Arguably, it should have begun with Saddam using WMD in a genocide against the Kurds in the late 1980s. How to contain or overthrow Saddam was a constant concern of the West from 1991 as the UN sanctions regime was eroded while Saddam defied a series of UN resolutions
The threat became more urgent after 9/11. But 9/11 had nothing to do with Saddam? Correct, but Bush and Blair could not take it for granted that Saddam would not ally with and arm jihadists, as his followers did after the fall of his regime.
Saddam’s small movements to accept UN demands were only the result of 250,000 soldiers massed on his borders. They could only stay there for a limited time due to cost and heat. If such a force had been withdrawn, could it have been reassembled? How likely was it that the no-fly zone over the safe haven of much of the Kurdistan Region would be maintained?
The danger of Saddam surviving, or handing over power to his psychopathic sons, and then resuming genocide against the Kurds weighed most heavily in my mind and I join the Kurds in arguing that the invasion was a liberation.
War could have been avoided if Saddam had moved more. But those who believe it was unstoppable in any case are finding comfort in a previously secret memo from Blair to Bush in July 2002 which began ‘I will be with you, whatever.’ It is taken to mean Blair promised to send British forces into action with the Americans by bamboozling the Cabinet, parliament and people.
It was, instead, an effort to express solidarity with the US after 9/11 and to influence America as it raged against those who had carried out mass murder and who would do so again in even larger numbers if possible. Blair conceded he couldn’t be sure of support from Parliament, Party, public or even some of the Cabinet and highlights the importance of the Middle East Peace Process. It assumes that Saddam had WMD.
Ah, those WMD. It is not a killer fact that they were not discovered. As the British-Iraqi academic Hayder al-Khoei put it: ‘whether or not Saddam Hussein actually had WMDs in his possession by 2003 is irrelevant because, for most Iraqis, Saddam was the WMD.’ The now Iraqi Prime Minister also told me in 2009 in Baghdad that he thought they had been taken to Syria. UN resolutions required Saddam to demonstrate WMD did not exist and he acted as if they did. The lie may well have been that they didn’t but it was Saddam’s deceit. Intelligence about a society where dissent and disclosure were capital offences was inevitably difficult.
Chilcot also cites the MI5 warning that action would increase Al Qaeda attacks. But if action was the right judgement, a Prime Minister who buckled under such a threat would have been condemned for cowardice.
Chilcot is not the Oracle but its judgements on those judgements deserve the calmest consideration if we are to uphold the principles of liberal intervention and the Responsibility to Protect. The danger is Chilcot chills necessary intervention.
Whither liberal intervention?
In his initial reaction to Chilcot, Jeremy Corbyn claimed that ‘military aggression’ created ‘a colonial-style occupation,’ although the UN endorsed the occupation, and the 2005 elections and referendum on a new constitution gave power to Iraqis. He was measured in urging ‘a foreign policy based on upholding international law and the authority of the United Nations, which always seeks peaceful solutions to international disputes.’
More elegant was the reaction in the Lords of its Labour Leader, Angela Smith who said that ‘This report is difficult and challenging, but it provides an opportunity to investigate decision-making processes about how as a country we should intervene, whether militarily or for humanitarian reasons, although they are not mutually exclusive.’
In reality, Corbyn and his followers are opposed to intervention almost whatever. UN support for military action may be preferable but is not always possible and would allow the Russian or Chinese veto to limit morality. We may have fewer Iraqs but more Syrias. We need a Chilcot-style inquiry into the consequences of non-intervention in Syria in which the judgements of President Obama, David Cameron, and Ed Miliband are forensically examined after Syrians have been killed or displaced in their millions.
Corbyn’s track record is part of the debate too. He opposed airstrikes in Iraq and their extension to Syria. The Kurds in Iraq are clear that without airstrikes they could have lost their capital to Daesh, and cannot now defeat Daesh which straddles the non-existent border between Iraq and Syria. Thankfully, America backed the Syrian Kurds in Kobane and Corbyn lost on both votes or we might also now be having an inquiry into why the Kurds were massacred.
Occupation errors
We must learn from Chilcot’s account of the incompetence of the occupation for which the Americans bear most blame but which the UK failed to prevent. Fewer British troops would have died if they had invaded via Kurdistan and been stationed there, as planned. But we got Basra at short notice.
The British Army was cocky about how it could better hold the ring than gung-ho Americans. British troops were initially welcomed but there was an understandable wariness too. Many Shia Basrahis remembered being left in the lurch when they heeded George Bush and John Major’s calls to rise up against Saddam in 1991. Many waited to see who was going to win while Iran lent a lethal hand to the militias whose power prospered in the vacuum. British soldiers were soon confined to base and had, as Chilcot remarks, undertaken a humiliating exchange of detainees for ending militia attacks on our forces.
Iraqis took the militias to task. My first visit to Baghdad in 2008 was just after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki took personal charge of routing the militia in Basra. I told him personally that he showed strength, courage and indefatigability, to coin a phrase, although his forces had to summon urgent American assistance. Our weekend in Baghdad also saw the last major mortar and rocket salvos from Shia militia before Maliki took control of Sadr City. Sadly, Maliki was later to become the central problem.
The difference between success and failure can be measured in weeks. Detailed State Department planning was abandoned and the Pentagon took charge with too few troops and proved incapable of protecting key institutions. The decision to formally dissolve the (disintegrating) Iraqi Army and to impose excessive Debaathification as well as the inability to capture or destroy the arsenals ringing the capital for such an eventuality created a lethal vacuum and boosted the planned Baathist backlash.
Iraqis also bear responsibility for this, chiefly those who murdered the vast majority of the 150,000 plus civilians killed from 2003-2009 as sectarian civil war took hold in the vacuum created by occupation blunders, Iranian intervention and resistance by Baathists who did not want to lose their privileges.
Given the repression of independent political activity and civil society and the exile of so many capable people, it was always going to take time to build a political class capable of making decisions. Yet Iraqis and the Americans eventually defeated Al Qaeda in 2008.
But the premature withdrawal of American troops in 2011 allowed the now sectarian Prime Minister Maliki to rat on Sunnis who had helped defeat Al Qaeda and set off a chain of events that created Daesh. It need not have happened and the crucial question is how to help stop political violence in Iraq.
Let’s learn the lessons via Chilcot but this is much more than a domestic matter. We should do much more to assist Iraqis and Kurds in defeating the Daesh murder machine and then reaching a new settlement. That would respect all those who died before and after the invasion.
I ask people to heed the plain views of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s High Representative here in London, who speaks for all Kurds. Karwan Jamal Tahir writes that ‘We must learn the lessons of Chilcot but we must not forget that a war is still being fought, that there is an imminent threat to us all. British soldiers need not sacrifice their lives anymore, for our Peshmerga are already fighting, bleeding and dying in this war. We seek financial support, arms, medical supplies and training and intelligence support. We Kurds are grateful for the freedom the 2003 invasion provided us with. We have embraced this freedom and will continue to fight for it.’
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Gary Kent is director of the all party parliamentary group on the Kurdistan region in Iraq and writes in a personal capacity. He tweets @garykent