Mick Hartley

Some more reflections. David Aaronovitch in the Times (£):

[H]owever valid Chilcot’s criticisms may be, where do they take us? No one can argue with his conclusion that if something like this were to be done again it should be done much better. But this feels like an elaborate self-deception. There is no perfection to be had. Intelligence will only ever be able to reach conclusions based on what it sees or hears. It did in this case but it turned out to be wrong. Plans are made for what the planners imagine will happen, not for what they don’t. You can always have more expertise, more discussion, more debate, more voices, more time. None of that guarantees that you, or your allies, will get it right….

What does this all leave us with? Dynastic tyrannies don’t reform. They create a shell held together by fear and when it cracks all sorts of terrible things emerge. Doing nothing, dressed up as Chilcot-approved carefulness, won’t save us because the world won’t go away; it comes to us in overfilled boats or airport bombs. It doesn’t wait.

Intervention in our far-from-perfect world, as Chilcot proves, is risky and compromising and leaves lots of young soldiers dead. That’s one reason why current western policy is all about drones and special forces. No new state gets built, no democracy is imported, but at least some of the bad guys get killed.

Maybe that’s all we can do now. Looking back, I wish we could have avoided going into Iraq. Not just because I’m squeamish about the consequences but because it would have meant we wouldn’t have lost our appetite for intervention when we needed it most — to stop Syria descending into hell and becoming the true disaster of our era.

Some good comments, including this from Nick Simpson:

Like you, dear reader, I haven't read Chilcot; just the words of those who haven't read it either, or only part of it. But I think we get the gist.

Blair probably committed himself too early; the intelligence on WMD was not wholly watertight; our troops didn't always have the right gear; there was no adequate plan for afterwards; military action should have been a last resort; hundreds of thousands of people died; ISIL rose out of the ashes.

And yet there are counterarguments. 

Even if Blair did make a personal decision months in advance, Parliament was free to overrule him.  It did not.

The intelligence on WMD may have been flawed (although Chilcot clears Blair of the sexing up allegation), but even so we all believed Saddam had such weapons because we knew he'd gassed the Kurds and because he had obstructed the UN weapons inspectors at every turn.  The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming.

As for the absence of an adequate plan, we were going into coalition with a much larger ally, the United States.  Diplomats and soldiers suggest we tried to influence the US approach (itself riven by factionalism) but were often rebuffed.  And what plan could conceivably cover every eventuality on the ground?

At the time he was trying to prevent war, Hans Blix said that completing his work would take "not weeks, but months".  Given that Saddam's cooperation had only been secured by massing forces on Iraq's borders, how long did Chilcot suggest we should have paid for our armies to remain there?

It's true that many of ISIL's early leaders served time in post-invasion prison camps, but, aside from the generality that removing Saddam was bound to take the lid off the sectarian pot, no-one predicted the rise of ISIL, a phenomenon which owes its emergence as much as anything to the Arab spring revolution in Syria.

In the 13 years since the invasion Iraqbodycount.org has counted about 160,000 violent civilian deaths.  That's a little over 10,000 a year.  Iraq is still a violent place, but not remotely comparable to the scale of the Saddam Hussein years.  Iraqis have had an opportunity to remake their country, whereas without the invasion Saddam would still have been in power, or one of his sons, or some other Ba'ath party hard-man. 

Chilcot is a luxuriant wallow in hindsight.  Shame it didn't look forward and consider the counterfactual a bit more.

A letter from Colonel Richard Kemp:

Sir, The Chilcot report is wrong to say that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was unnecessary. Saddam’s regime had to be brought down immediately. He was a long-term supporter of terrorism. He had links to al-Qaeda that could easily have developed into full blown co-operation. The potential threat posed by a terrorist organisation that had proven its intent to kill our citizens without restraint, supported by a state’s resources — with or without weapons of mass destruction — had to be prevented at all costs. The invasion of Iraq was not just reasonable action by George W Bush and Tony Blair, it was their duty.

I agree with the report, however, about the shortcomings in military equipment and advice and the inadequate planning for post-invasion Iraq. These are linked and resulted in inadequate and ill-equipped British military forces being deployed to contain the situation in southern Iraq and ultimately failing to do so.

This was certainly not a failure of troops on the ground but of their political and military leaders in the UK who still thought they were fighting the last war — Northern Ireland — with the tactics and priorities used against the IRA.

And – again – Julie Lenarz:

The post-Iraq intervention fatigue has left its mark. The appetite to involve ourselves in conflicts in far-flung places is at a decades-long low, shared by the disenchanted general public and the political elites that have returned to pre-9/11 thinking, characterised by a new doctrine of isolationism spearheaded by the Obama administration.

Whilst the concept of humanitarian interventionism gained prominence throughout the bloody 1990s on the back of our failure to stop large-scale ethnic cleansing campaigns in Africa and eastern Europe, it has now become a dirty word associated with unilateralism and neo-imperialism.

The shortcomings of recent interventions are an explanation for the hostile environment proponents of a robust foreign policy find themselves in. They are, however, no excuse for the moral apathy and nihilistic complacency with which the majority of our political leaders have met the greatest humanitarian crises of the 21st century….

We cannot "police the world", opponents of an interventionist foreign policy like to say, and there is a kernel of truth in it. If we were to intervene all the time in places where human dignity is being squashed by oppression, we would do little else.

But acts of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide must never be ignored as purely internal matters under the smokescreen of national sovereignty. Britain has signed the Responsibility to Protect — the principle that if a government is no longer willing or able to protect its own population from harm, it becomes the responsibility of the international community to safeguard their welfare.

Look no further than Syria if you want to see how the new doctrine of isolationism has nullified the Responsibility to Protect in the absence of a normative foreign policy that combines national interest with values-based principles.

For over five years, Bashar al-Assad has now been waging an unremitting and merciless war against his own population. At least 400,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands more wounded, according to the latest UN figures. Of the millions who fled, some linger in refugee camps in neighbouring countries under often appalling conditions; others lie forever buried under the waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

That alone should have triggered the implementation of a policy of muscular containment. But Assad was allowed to continue to murder with impunity even after the use of chemical weapons — President Obama's self-declared "red line". The bloodshed increased and with it the rise of Islamist outfits, including the Islamic State.

It was only after the jihadists took large swathes of land in the summer of 2014, that the international community eventually half-heartedly intervened. However, this was not before the mass murder and enslavement of the Yazidi community, the expulsion of Christians from their ancient home, and the brutal persecution of other minorities.

Syria is a symbol of the erroneous nostalgia for withdrawal from the complexities of today's world. Insularity has been mocked by reality. The defining character of the 21st century is its interdependence. We cannot turn our backs on conflicts the scale of Syria if we want to still be secure. The cancer that started in Syria has metastasised from the mass graves in Iraq to the streets of Paris, Istanbul, Brussels, Copenhagen and Dhaka.

With the end of the Chilcot Inquiry a painful chapter in British foreign policy has been closed. It provides us with the opportunity to contemplate again the strengths and shortcomings of military intervention. It has, is, and will be an imperfect instrument to right wrongs. It must always be the last resort. 

However, if we define it not as a rigid code of principles, but rather as a flexible tool responsive to different conflicts, it can save lives.