Mick Hartley

More post-Chilcot reflections. Terry Glavin:

To fans of British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, the Chilcot report should be read as a kind of Rorschach test…. If you are virtuous and righteous and of upstanding progressive character, you are expected to see one thing — and one thing only. Blair is an unpardonable villain; a war criminal. Corbyn is a matchless anti-war hero….

There is much in the result of John Chilcot’s seven-year inquiry into the decision-making that led to Britain’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq that can be cited to excuse headlines that refer to his findings as “scathing” and “damning.” Blair overestimated his ability to influence American decision-making, attached a greater certainty to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein than was justified, committed nowhere near the resources necessary to stabilize a post-Baathist Iraq and didn’t adequately consider the possibility that the intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were faulty.

Fair enough. It is not as though Chilcot’s mandate included any contemplation of the circumstances that would have prevailed had the Iraqi strongman been allowed to remain in power. And Chilcot certainly wasn’t asked to wonder aloud about how much blood is on the hands of Blair’s fiercest political enemies for having succeeded in ensuring that the U.S. and Britain and the rest of the NATO alliance permitted Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to carry out relentless massacres of his own people for six long years.

In the narrower confines of his mandate, Chilcot concluded that Blair failed to fully exhaust “peaceful options for disarmament” before deciding to sign up with the American adventure. “Military action at that time was not a last resort,” states the report. Well, if you say so. But that requires ignoring quite a few subjects Chilcot wasn’t admonished to address himself to, sensationally or otherwise. Not least: the reasonable apprehension among Iraqi Kurds well before 2003 that anti-war sentiment was already weakening the Anglo-American resolve to continue enforcing a no-fly zone in northern Iraq, which was the only thing standing in the way of a revival of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal war against them.

Look away from Chilcot’s inkblot for a moment and you’ll notice the gaping wounds in Kurdistan that remain from what transpired in the 1980s: the 4,500 emptied villages from the days when Baathist forces slaughtered as many as 180,000 Kurds, most notoriously the 7,000 civilians who were suffocated to death by poison gas dropped by Saddam Hussein’s warplanes in 1988. You would need to expunge such things from your memory to wash the stain of guilt out of the triumphant anti-war faction of the British Labour Party for having had its way in the matter of Syria so thoroughly that roughly half a million innocents have been slaughtered, while NATO has stood by and watched since 2010.

This is what anti-war politics looks like to Syrians. Nobody is in the dock for that. The anti-war politicians who have risen to power in Washington, London, Ottawa and Brussels have never had to explain why they were offering the persecuted people of Iraq nothing that was in any way more useful to them than the shoddy, outrageously ill-planned intervention that was on offer from Blair and Bush back in 2003.

This is one of the main reasons the Chilcot report and the lies making the rounds about its contents are such a boon to Corbyn and his supporters. They have been salivating about the report’s release. Now they rail against the “Blairite vermin” they are so successfully driving from positions of influence in the party. It is the perfect distraction from Corbyn’s moral and intellectual vacuity and his catastrophic leadership, which only a few days ago resulted in his loss of a confidence vote among his fellow Labour MPs, 172 to 40.

Corbyn can now be cast by all his friends in the “progressive” press as having been right all along, as if his chairmanship of Britain’s Stop The War Coalition, which he vacated only two years ago to take up Labour’s top post, is something to be proud of, as if any association with that cesspit of Assad supporters and fanciers of Russian President Vladimir Putin is not something a proper socialist would be rightly ashamed about.

While we’re all seeing whatever we want to see in Chilcot’s Rorschach test, our gaze is conveniently averted from Corbyn’s abdication of leadership on every file — sometimes through sheer incompetence and sometimes on purpose — from his milquetoast advocacy of Labour’s “Remain” policy in the recent referendum, to his catastrophic indifference to the anti-Semitism that has been prominent in the party since the Corbynites took over in 2015.

Don’t worry about the thousands of pounds Corbyn has been earning through his gig with Press TV, Iran’s English-language propaganda channel. Let’s keep on telling ourselves comforting lies about how much we care about the deaths of Arab innocents, of Kurdish innocents, of gay Iranian men hanged from cranes. Let’s not even think about the hospitals Putin’s bombers have demolished — after all, we “provoked” him to annex Crimea, didn’t we? — or the millions of refugees pouring out of Syria, the tunnels our “friends” in Hamas (as Corbyn has described them) are digging in preparation for another wave of terror attacks against innocent Israeli civilians, which we will of course hail as heroic resistance.

Let’s talk about Tony Blair the war criminal instead.

And James Bloodworth:

In using 'flawed intelligence' (as Chilcot puts it) to make the case for war, and in failing to make any adequate plan for post-invasion, Blair will be damned by history. However it is worth remembering, beyond today's thunderous denunciation of the former PM, that the alternatives to war came with their own deadly cost.

There was never an option to keep one's hands clean over Iraq. Hussein's regime was, as Blair correctly pointed in the lead up to war '"..with the possible exception of North Korea, the most brutal and inhumane in the world".

Thus the choice before the British and American governments in March 2003 was not between good and evil, as the placard-wielding 'anti-war' protesters like to scream. It was between two evils. You either acquiesced in the continuation of one of the world's worst dictatorships, or you got rid of it with violence.