Mick Hartley

At the Guardian's CiF, they are, naturally enough, in a state of post-Chilcot euphoria. The great stateswoman Diane Abbott even uses the occasion to proclaim the final death of Blairism and the rise of the new Corbyn politics. Oh yes. That's certainly going well.

There is one sensible piece, though, from Hayder al-Khoei: Iraq was destined for chaos – with or without Britain’s intervention

As a British-Iraqi, I look forward to reading more of the Chilcot report to learn about why my country invaded my country. As a Brit, I can understand the frustration with a government that launched a war based on “facts” that turned out to be no such thing. However, as an Iraqi, I think much of this debate is irrelevant.

For Iraqis, there is no debate to be had over WMDs. Iraqis know very well how WMDs work because they have been on the receiving end of them. It is not merely a political, legal or academic discussion but rather a brutal reality they faced. Also, whether or not Saddam Hussein actually had WMDs in his possession by 2003 is irrelevant because, for most Iraqis, Saddam was the WMD.

There is a lot of anger about the postwar descent into chaos, but much of that anger in Iraq is being directed towards the corrupt Iraqi political class who killed our dreams and aspirations, not the clueless, sometimes well-intentioned, foreign invaders. Here in Britain, there seems to be nostalgia for pre-2003 Iraq. People either do not know or have too quickly forgotten the horrors of the Ba’athist regime.

Saddam’s endless wars with Iraq’s neighbours and his genocidal campaigns against his own people are bizarrely seen by many in the west as part of an era of “stability” and “security” for Iraqis. Stability imposed with chemical weapons and security achieved with mass graves. We would need to stretch the definition of those words beyond reason and meaning before we could ever apply them to pre-2003 Iraq….

The warped sense of reality in Saddam’s Iraq was partly due to the fact that we did not have the luxury of social media and hashtags to show the world what was happening to us. Even mainstream journalists in Iraq would be accompanied by government minders to make sure stories could be controlled. Before 2003, Iraqis were being slaughtered silently and not inconveniencing anyone by being part of the news cycle.

Coalition occupation authorities made many mistakes in Iraq, the most glaring of which was not the invasion per se but the lack of postwar plans for the country they were going to control. That said, it is the Iraqis who should shoulder the main responsibility for their failures. The Iraqi opposition in exile spoke of transitional justice, human rights and equality. Empowered by the US-led coalition, the peaceful rhetoric soon turned into destructive policies of revenge, abuse and corruption.

Considering the recent history of Syria – another Baathist dictatorship, where having supposedly learned the lessons of Iraq we refused to intervene and are now looking at some 400,000 dead and a country completely devastated – it's hard to disagree.

With psychopathic sons Uday and Qusay waiting in the wings, and the legacy of over twenty years of one of the most blood-soaked and brutal regimes of recent history (see Ari Murad's short film for a reminder of his crimes), it was never going to be a smooth transition to a post-Saddam world. Julie Lenarz in the Telegraph, meanwhile, speculates on what would have happened had we not invaded Iraq.

But, as is the way now, history seems to have decided that everything bad that's happened since can be blamed on Bush and Blair. Only the West, it seems, has that kind of moral agency. At least with Syria we've pretty much kept out of it – so that's alright then.

Update: comment from Karwan Jamal Tahir, Kurdish Regional Government High Representative to the UK:

“It is a sign of the resilience and confidence of the British people that its government commissioned such a major investigation into its decision to join the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It’s not for me to comment in detail on domestic decision-making but I can say that the Kurds are eternally grateful for the British helping to overthrow Saddam Hussein, who committed genocide against us. I also send the most sincere condolences of the Kurdish people to the relatives and loved ones of the British soldiers who died and to those who were injured. Whatever conclusions are drawn from the Chilcot report, we remain allies of the UK in our joint efforts to defeat the common threat posed to us all by the so-called Islamic State.”