It took Britain’s Iraq Inquiry Committee seven years and 2.6 million words arranged in 12 volumes to lay out its investigation of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to join the United States in the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. The profoundly denunciatory report was released Wednesday morning. The authors made no judgment about legal culpability.
There’s no expectation the report will change any big-picture perceptions of the Iraq invasion, but the details will provide megatons of fodder for critics and activists hopeful of avoiding a repeat of that bloody catastrophe wrought by neoconservative ideologues and their lickspittle enablers on this side of the Atlantic.
No U.S. counterpart of the report—neither devastating nor mealy-mouthed—has been produced or is underway, of course. But the Bush/Cheney administration is the lurking shadow on page after page of the British investigation and its conclusions.
The report was nicknamed after the retired civil servant who led it, Sir John Chilcot. With an executive summary of 145 pages, it heightens the widespread view, as The New York Times puts it this morning, that Blair was “Washington’s poodle.” In a six-page memo to President Bush in July 2002—long before the U.N. inspectors had completed their investigations into whether Saddam Hussein was producing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction—Blair said “I will be with you, whatever.”
Eight months later, six days after the airstrikes of “shock and awe” were launched against Iraq, Blair wrote to Bush:
“This is the moment when you can define international politics for the next generation: the true post-cold war world order. Our ambition is big: to construct a global agenda around which we can unite the world, rather than dividing it into rival centres of power.”
Early on, the report stated, Blair made an effort to persuade Bush to take action under U.N. auspices. But when it became ever more clear that Washington was determined to take out Hussein, the prime minister folded, having failed to exhaust “peaceful options for disarmament.”
After Chilcot made his remarks about the report to the press Wednesday, Blair said he took “full responsibility” for his actions. He said he had made the “most agonizing decision” of his life in hopes of freeing Iraqis from a brutal dictator. Instead, he conceded, the consequences of the invasion and occupation included a murderous sectarian war. “For all of this I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you can ever know or believe.”
Label that genuine sentiment or mere boilerplate, but it’s more than we’ll ever get from Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or any of the other leading figures who took us to war based on exaggerations, half-truths, quarter-truths, and outright fabrications while a compliant national media failed to be much more than a conduit for propaganda.
Luke Harding at The Guardian reports that Chilcot:
...was withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. 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 suggests that Blair’s self-belief was a major factor in the decision to go to war. In a section headed Lessons, Chilcot writes: “When the potential for military action arises, the government should not commit to a firm political objective before it is clear it can be achieved. Regular reassessment is essential.”
The report also bitterly criticises the way in which Blair made the case for Britain to go to war. It says 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.
Ultimately, what the report concludes is that Saddam Hussein presented no immediate threat outside Iraq’s borders, that claims the dictator was building WMDs were presented with unjustified certainty, that planning for what would happen in Iraq after the invasion was lame and incomplete, that warnings were ignored and potential consequences of the invasion were sugarcoated, and that the stated objectives of the invaders ultimately failed.
Said Chilcot in his statement Wednesday:
Mr Blair told the Inquiry that the difficulties encountered in Iraq after the invasion could not have been known in advance.
We do not agree that hindsight is required. 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.
Ministers were aware of the inadequacy of US plans, and concerned about the inability to exert significant influence on US planning. Mr Blair eventually succeeded only in the narrow goal of securing President Bush’s agreement that there should be UN authorisation of the post-conflict role.
Furthermore, he did not establish clear Ministerial oversight of UK planning and preparation. He did not ensure that there was a flexible, realistic and fully resourced plan that integrated UK military and civilian contributions, and addressed the known risks.
The failures in the planning and preparations continued to have an effect after the invasion.
The outcome of this? We know it all too well: Trillions of dollars wasted, more than 5,000 Americans, British and allied troops dead, tens of thousands of them maimed for life, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, millions in exile or internally displaced, the spread of extremist jihadis in the Middle East and elsewhere, with no end in sight for turmoil and the death toll.
And 13 years down the road, whether in Britain or America, no official obstacles in place to keep the same thing from happening again and again and again.