#dnaEdit: Ruins of the Iraq war

The John Chilcot-led committee’s inquiry report on the United Kingdom’s role in the Iraq invasion is a damning critique of the actions of former Prime Minister Tony Blair that led the country into a wrongly conceived, poorly executed war effort. The report reveals that while US President George Bush was the prime mover of the plan to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime, Blair played the sheet anchor role despite initial reservations. Blair’s secret note, in which he tells Bush “I will be with you, whatever”, explains many of Blair’s actions in the 2002-03 period when the plot to invade Iraq was hatched and set in motion. The report concluded that the UK joined the invasion effort before peaceful options were exhausted and that military action was not the last resort at that time. The report also states that there was no imminent threat of Saddam being involved in proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and that British intelligence agencies produced “flawed” information on Saddam’s capabilities that became the basis for going to war.

Blair appeared to have headed on this course of unqualified support to Bush’s plans on the assumption that it would affect ties between the two traditional allies. However, the report points out that the US-UK relationship could weather the differences of opinion during earlier periods of conflict like the Suez invasion and the Vietnam and Falkland wars. The UK’s failure to see that Bush was up to no good in Iraq contrasts with neighbouring France, another NATO member, which was presented with the same evidence of WMD build-up by Iraq, but refused to be convinced. If the run-up to the war involved trumped-up reasons to pick a fight, the report reveals that the shortcomings in the post-war effort were no less criminal. It reveals that Blair ignored warnings on sectarian violence in Iraq after the invasion and that he failed to extract a concrete post-war strategy from the US. More embarrassingly, the report reveals that Blair, despite committing troops and resources on the ground for the invasion, had no stake in the decisions taken by the provisional post-Saddam Iraqi government, which took decisions that fuelled the insurgency.

In the end, the Chilcot report does not draw conclusions on the legality of the Iraq war but offers enough material that the Iraqi victims of the war and the families of British soldiers killed in the conflict can rely on to build a case against Blair and Bush for throwing them into a war that destroyed lives and livelihoods. Over 150,000 Iraqi lives were taken and nearly two million have been displaced since 2003. The report states that the legality of the war is for a “properly constituted and internationally recognised court” to consider. War criminals cannot be only those who inflict genocide on civilians. It should also include those who wantonly resort to wars of the kind that Bush and Blair plunged Iraq into. Even when we hope that such a court is constituted it is unlikely that Bush or Blair will be subjected to the ignominy of war trials. In a two-hour press conference on Wednesday, Blair staunchly defended his decision to go to war even when he expressed sorrow for those who lost their lives in Iraq. The high-strung emotions and the eloquence Blair put on display will not alter the fact that his reputation has been irreversibly shattered by the Chilcot report. A certain Jeremy Corbyn, an avowed opponent of Blair’s Iraq war, but a backbencher then, is today the Labour Party’s leader and he has apologised for the party’s role in the war.

With an extreme form of Jehadi terrorism —  the Islamic State — emerging out of the ruins of the failed Bush-Blair Iraq project, these two leaders have stamped their legacy on world history. It will be an uncharitable reference.