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It took seven years of painstaking investigation, the examination of approximately 150,000 government documents and a 2.6 million word report extending over 13 separate volumes for a British committee of inquiry headed Sir John Chilcot, to reach the unremarkable conclusion most analysts already reached a decade ago. The British government of the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair committed the country to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 on \u2018flawed intelligence and assessments\u2019 and on a \u2018far from satisfactory\u2019 legal basis.<\/span><\/p>\n Nonetheless, the Chilcot Committee report, released in London yesterday, isn\u2019t wasted energy as it dispels some of the more lurid conspiracy theories surrounding the Iraq war, and provides a dispassionate and astute narrative of a military campaign which drew in many other nations and ended up being controversial in all of them.<\/span><\/p>\n The indictment of Britain\u2019s political, military and intelligence establishments is severe and relentless; they all stand accused of misjudgement and, occasionally, sheer ineptitude. British military commanders are likely to find the criticism particularly painful, in the immediate aftermath of the occupation of Iraq; London\u2019s generals tolerated and often connived in the creation of a publicity frenzy surrounding the allegedly superior British ability to administer occupied territories. Unlike the Americans, who apparently only moved around Iraq in menacing columns of armoured vehicles and never interacted with the locals, the plucky little Brits were, supposedly, all tact and cuddliness, fearlessly interacting with the \u2018natives\u2019, helping old ladies cross the road or organising football matches for local children. That dexterity was, we were told, due to centuries of accumulated experience in policing the far-flung corners of Empire, a honed talent which supposedly, passed through the genes to current generations of British soldiers and officers.<\/span><\/p>\n Sir John Chilcot exposes all that narrative as nonsense. Soon after Iraq\u2019s occupation was completed \u2018the UK\u2019s most consistent strategic objective\u2019, writes Chilcot, \u2018was to reduce the level of its deployed forces\u2019, and the search for an exit from Iraq turned into a frenzy. Officials, Chilcot writes, \u2018spent time and energy on rewriting strategies which tended to describe a desired end state without setting out how it would be reached\u2019. Ultimately, British soldiers abandoned any pretence of controlling southern Iraq and the city of Basra which were left under their care; they remained largely confined to barracks, as British spooks and intermediaries paid off various local militias so that the British contingent would be spared further attacks.<\/span><\/p>\n At the same time, the Chilcot report does dispel some of the more persistent myths surrounding the Iraq episode. There was no deliberate attempt by Prime Minister Blair to lie to Parliament and the public. Civil servants and political advisers didn\u2019t allow themselves to be used by the then prime minister; Chilcot documents a number of occasions when Blair\u2019s close advisers quite properly warned him about the potentially baleful consequences of his proposed actions. Nor was there a \u2018plot\u2019 to manufacture intelligence information, or a \u2018pact\u2019 between the intelligence services and Blair to generate evidence boosting the case for military action against Iraq.<\/span><\/p>\n Still, John Chilcot makes two critical observations which have been sadly ignored in the current media coverage, but are of great and enduring importance to any Westminster-style government.<\/span><\/p>\n The first is that even top ministers and senior officials in London appeared to have been largely unaware or disinterested in exercising their legal right to access privileged, classified information before making their fateful decisions. In his determination to obtain a legal justification for the Iraq operation, Prime Minister Blair leant heavily on the government\u2019s Attorney General to provide a positive legal opinion which \u2018ticked all the boxes\u2019 on the road to war. The Attorney General duly provided an opinion which found that although resort to arms was permissible; this right was of a qualified nature. But as the Chilcot inquiry found out, none of the nuances of that legal opinion were communicated to the British Cabinet, and not one of the senior ministers in charge of the relevant departments preparing for war showed the slightest interest in seeing the Attorney General\u2019s full legal opinion, as they were legally entitled to do.<\/span><\/p>\n The other major problem identified by Chilcot is, of course, the handling of intelligence material. Britain\u2019s security services stand accused not so much for providing faulty information<\/span>\u2014<\/span>that\u2019s a hazard of their trade<\/span>\u2014<\/span>but more for failing to insist that their material shouldn\u2019t be used by Blair to claim that the British government had established \u2018beyond doubt\u2019 that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. That wasn\u2019t the case, and Chilcot urges future governments to ensure \u2018a clear separation of responsibilities\u2019 between assessing intelligence and making a case for a policy choice.<\/span><\/p>\n There are also areas where the inquiry\u2019s report rekindles rather than settles old controversies. Sir John Chilcot relies heavily on a previously unpublished confidential British Government memo from July 2002, in which Blair tells US President George W Bush: \u2018I will be with you, whatever\u2019. That commitment, given without consulting Cabinet colleagues eight months before the March 2003 invasion, is deemed by Chilcot to have made it \u2018very difficult for the UK subsequently to withdraw its support’\u2019 from the Iraq adventure.<\/span><\/p>\n Without the benefit of hindsight, the prevailing view in London and other Western capitals was that the \u2018War on Terror\u2019 unleashed in the wake of the 9\/11 attacks had transformed the United States forever, and that those allies who ignored America\u2019s new-found obsession with destroying its enemies would simply relegate themselves to perpetual irrelevance. As Blair saw it at that time, going along with Washington\u2019s obsession to depose Saddam Hussein seemed a small price to pay in return for preserving Britain\u2019s special relationship with the US.<\/span><\/p>\n History will record a different verdict: the leader who was once one of Britain\u2019s most popular leaders is now one of the country\u2019s most divisive prime ministers. Much of what Britain did a decade ago will probably go down in history as sheer folly. But, as is often the case in such matters, most wisdom comes from hindsight.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It took seven years of painstaking investigation, the examination of approximately 150,000 government documents and a 2.6 million word report extending over 13 separate volumes for a British committee of inquiry headed Sir John Chilcot, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":528,"featured_media":27587,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[790,191,218,1523],"class_list":["post-27582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-britain","tag-iraq","tag-middle-east","tag-tony-blair"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n