The Chilcot report:Iraq’s grim lessons
Jul 6th 2016 | From the print edition
THERE has been no shortage of reports and inquiries into the Iraq war, which broke out in 2003. But after nearly seven years of toil, Sir John Chilcot and his fellow commissioners have published what future historians will regard as the definitive account of what happened and why. The lessons the Iraq Inquiry draws from 2.6m words of painstakingly accumulated evidence have almost as much relevance to American policymakers as they do to their British counterparts. The picture it paints, for all the familiarity of its main elements, is a devastating one of individual and institutional failure. The verdict on Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister at the time, is not that he is a liar and a war criminal (as many contend), but a man steered by a fatal combination of hubris, wishful thinking and moral fervour into an ultimately disastrous course of action.
The most damning of the inquiry’s conclusions is the overarching one that, based on Britain’s professed goal of disarming Saddam Hussein (it was never explicitly regime change), military action in March 2003 was not, as Mr Blair claimed, a last resort. The attempt to deal with Iraq’s putative weapons of mass destruction (WMD) without going to war was not yet over: the UN inspection team lead by Hans Blix was getting better co-operation from the Iraqis and was pleading for more time; there was no imminent threat from Saddam; there was strong UN Security Council backing for continued inspections. In short, the inquiry judges, although military intervention might have been required in the future, an adaptive strategy of containment had plenty of life left in it.
But Mr Blair was in thrall to the military timetable set by George W. Bush, and the promise the prime minister had made him in July the previous year to “be with you, whatever”. If Britain had decided on the eve of the invasion to withdraw its forces, the damage to the relationship with America would have been far greater than if Mr Blair had earlier exercised more caution in his commitment to the enterprise.
That lack of caution, combined with a disregard for process that bordered on the feckless, was a recurring theme in the run-up to the war. Mr Blair never had any doubts that the intelligence assessments of Iraq’s WMD and missile programmes were accurate. The belief that the Iraqi regime had chemical and biological weapons, was determined to preserve and enhance them, and had developed sophisticated methods of concealment was deeply ingrained. The intelligence was not fabricated, but nor was it questioned or challenged in the way it should have been, given how much was resting on it.
Regarding the “dodgy dossier” of September 2002, the inquiry does not suggest intelligence was improperly included in it or that the British government improperly influenced its text. The problem lay in the judgments made by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which assesses the output of the intelligence-gathering agencies, and “owned” the dossier, and Mr Blair’s use of the words “beyond doubt” in his foreword. By then, MI6 and Mr Blair were pumping each other up. When Mr Blix’s inspectors failed to find any WMD, the JIC, gripped by “groupthink”, put it down to the Iraqis’ talent for subterfuge. As the date of the invasion drew near, concerns about the quality of sources had crept in, but the spooks still reckoned the weapons would be found and they would be vindicated.
The report warns of the dangers of explicitly using intelligence to support a policy decision without repeatedly testing the assumptions underlying it, and of allowing a degree of certainty to be conveyed which such assessments rarely withstand.
On the still-vexed question of the legality of the war after the failure to obtain a resolution from the UN Security Council authorising the use of force, the inquiry demurs from expressing an opinion. But it is scathing about the contortions performed by the then-attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, to come up with the goods. When the armed forces said that they needed more than just his view that a “reasonable case” could be made that resolution 1441 revived the authorisation in a previous resolution dating from the first Gulf war in 1990, he swiftly came up with what he called a “better view”. This was based on little more than Mr Blair assuring him that Iraq had committed further material breaches of resolution 1441.
After determining that it was neither right nor necessary to invade Iraq in March 2003, the main focus of the inquiry is on the preparations for what followed. It is hard to exaggerate the sheer awfulness of what emerges from the report. Everyone in government, not least Mr Blair, paid constant lip-service to the need for proper planning for the aftermath of the invasion. The Ministry of Defence declared in December 2002 that the post-conflict phase of operations would be “strategically decisive”; the military planners made the case for a major civilian component in the post-conflict deployment. But nothing happened. Both the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development looked away. No individual or department was assigned even to look at the issues or suggest ways of mitigating known risks.
The assumption was that America would draw up the plan and that the UN would have a big post-conflict role, bringing in other countries to share the burden of peacekeeping and reconstruction. Even in the face of strong resistance from Washington to the idea of the UN taking over (matched only by the UN’s disinclination to do so), the British government sat on its hands, reluctant to contemplate the warning from officials that it could soon find itself “drawn into a huge commitment of UK resources for a highly complex task of administration and law and order for an uncertain period”.
What made matters worse was the very late decision for British forces to enter Iraq with the Americans from the south, after Turkey said it would not allow the coalition to enter from its territory. The British, who had expected to find themselves working with their old friends the Kurds, were landed with Basra and three other mainly Shiite south-eastern provinces, while the Americans stormed on to Baghdad. There were several consequences, all bad. The larger-than-planned-for force (three brigades) needed for the south had to be cobbled together at the last moment; there was only patchy understanding of the place they would be going to and little time to analyse the risks; and Basra was a long way from Baghdad, where all the post-invasion decisions would be made.
Astonishingly, despite acceding to British generals’ demand to “go in big” (Britain contributed about 30% of the tanks for the invasion), Mr Blair extracted no promise from Mr Bush about joint decision-making. The result was that the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad was an almost wholly American show and the junior occupying power had virtually no ability to influence policy decisions, such as the disbandment of the Iraqi army and “de-Baathification”, which were to have terrible results. The inquiry leaves it an open question whether a stronger British voice would have made things better.
It might not have if the performance of the army, once the successful initial military campaign was over, is any guide. Like their American counterparts, British generals were complacent about what they expected to be a fairly benign security environment and were taken by surprise when it deteriorated precipitously after the invasion. A shortage of the right equipment quickly became evident when British soldiers started being blown up by local militias. Yet little was done to improve matters, not because of a lack of money but because the army had not prepared itself psychologically for a long occupation.
The issue of the lightly armoured Snatch Land Rover illustrated the generals’ thinking. Serviceable in Northern Ireland, they became “mobile coffins” in Iraq because of their lack of resistance to improvised explosive devices. Yet the army resisted replacing them with something better: it thought it would be leaving in a year or so, and wanted to preserve a costly new armoured fighting-vehicle programme which was later cancelled.
A lack of helicopters was exacerbated when the generals succeeded in pushing for the ill-fated deployment of 3,300 troops to Helmand, one of Afghanistan’s most volatile provinces. Less than a year after the invasion of Iraq, they had concluded that there was little more they could achieve there and that Helmand offered the prospect of doing some proper soldiering. The inquiry says that from the middle of 2005, decisions on resources in Iraq were being shaped by the anticipated demands of the campaign in Afghanistan.
A direct result of this policy was what the report describes as the “humiliating” decision in 2007 to acquiesce to militia dominance in Basra by exchanging detainees in return for an end to the targeting of British forces. Just as the ultimately successful American surge was getting under way, the remaining 4,000 British troops were holed up at Basra airport, preparing to quit. It was a shaming and miserable end to Britain’s involvement in Iraq.
In a 6,500-word statement issued after the report’s publication, Mr Blair claims that it makes clear “there were no lies, Parliament and Cabinet were not misled, there was no ‘secret deal’ with America, intelligence was not falsified, and the decision was made in good faith.” True, up to a point. But Mr Blair forfeits sympathy when he continues: “The aftermath turned out more hostile, protracted and bloody than we ever imagined.” Hindsight is not an excuse that the inquiry accepts. Before contemplating any similar undertaking, it advises, there must be a clear understanding of the theatre of operations; a hard-headed assessment of risks; realistic objectives; and sufficient resources. It concludes: “All of these elements were lacking in the UK’s approach to its role in post-conflict Iraq.”
http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21701749-official-inquiry-war-delivers-scathing-verdict-its-planning-execution-and