Mick Hartley

Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's former chief of staff – last seen in North Korea – has his say prior to the Chilcot Report release next week. In the Times [£] – I’ll take my share of the blame for what went wrong in Iraq but doing nothing can have even worse consequences:

The point of the long-awaited Chilcot report to be published next week is not just to dole out recriminations but to draw lessons for the future, just as the Franks report did after the Falklands war. There are plenty of lessons to be learnt from the mistakes of Iraq. But I hope one lesson people do not try to draw is that intervention in itself is wrong.

While the Chilcot report will presumably show that there are serious consequences when intervention goes wrong, we know that we also face severe consequences when we don’t intervene. Failure to act on ethnic massacres in Rwanda, when we knew we should have done so, left more than a million dead. Failure to act in Bosnia until too late led to more than 100,000 dead and catastrophes such as the Srebrenica massacre.

Now our failure to act in Syria has led to 400,000 dead and perhaps the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with nearly five million refugees. We may have thought we could turn a blind eye to the suffering inside Syria and pass on by but now that failure to intervene has had a severe impact on us directly, rather than just morally. First, the wave of humanity desperate to escape the barrel bombs and starvation imposed by the murderous Assad regime has cascaded into Turkey, Greece and on to the rest of Europe, causing domestic panic about migration. Perhaps even worse in the long term is the threat of Islamic State based in Raqqa — able to flourish in the vacuum left by a failed state and to inspire attacks in Paris, Brussels and, before too long, London. We may have thought we were smart, learning the lessons of Iraq by avoiding involvement. Instead we have realised painfully that not intervening in humanitarian crises and dictatorships may have an even more severe impact on our lives than doing so….