{"id":27626,"date":"2016-07-12T14:30:26","date_gmt":"2016-07-12T04:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=27626"},"modified":"2016-07-11T16:05:26","modified_gmt":"2016-07-11T06:05:26","slug":"invading-iraq-tony-blairs-real-motivation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/invading-iraq-tony-blairs-real-motivation\/","title":{"rendered":"Invading Iraq: Tony Blair\u2019s real motivation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Image<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t read the dozen-odd volumes of the full Chilcot Report, but I can recommend the 150-odd page<\/span> Executive Summary<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/i>It\u2019s a valuable document and a welcome affirmation, in troubled times, of the principles of accountability on which representative government must be built. But it has serious flaws.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Executive Summary suggests that in the 12 volumes of seemingly obsessive detail, Chilcot and his colleagues have missed arguably the four most important points about the whole sad story of Britain\u2019s decision to help America invade Iraq.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first concerns Britain\u2019s, and especially Blair\u2019s, prime motivation. The Report takes more or less at face value, and never seriously contests, the Blair Government\u2019s position that their fears about Iraq\u2019s WMD were indeed the primary reason for deciding to invade Iraq. This is at least highly contestable, and I think almost certainly false. It is not that they did not genuinely believe Iraq had WMD: all the evidence seems to confirm they did, and hence did not lie about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Chilcot doesn\u2019t convincingly explain why Blair might have decided that the risks posed by Iraq\u2019s WMD had suddenly become so serious as to warrant the extraordinary costs and risks of invasion and regime change. It isn\u2019t enough simply to say that 9\/11 had changed perceptions of risk, because there never was significant evidence of connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda. If nuclear terrorism was the fear, the danger of al-Qaeda getting WMD was much higher in Pakistan. So why suddenly turn on Iraq?<\/span><\/p>\n

The best and simplest explanation is that the WMD were merely a pretext, not a reason, to invade Iraq. That explains why Blair and others were so insouciant about the intelligence gaps: the intelligence was not driving their decisions. It was just being used to explain those decisions to the rest of us.<\/span><\/p>\n

So what was the real reason? My hunch is the truest answer for Britain is that Blair invaded Iraq in order to assert, in the curiously edgy post-9\/11 world, his view of the way the world should work, and of America\u2019s, Britain\u2019s, and his own role in it. He wanted to assert a triumphalist vision of a post-Cold War world order framed by American power, with Britain in a central role as its primary helper, and with he, Blair, providing the moral courage, intellectual heft and inspirational leadership.<\/span><\/p>\n

If so, then Chilcot lets Blair off far too lightly, because his failure wasn\u2019t, as Chilcot suggests, to pursue what might under other circumstances constitute a legitimate strategic objective in a muddled and incompetent way. It was to launch a war in pursuit of a vain delusion of national and personal power.<\/span><\/p>\n

Second, Chilcot doesn\u2019t clearly recognise how vain that delusion was, because the Report doesn\u2019t face up to the nature of Britain\u2019s and its allies\u2019 failures. It suggests that with better planning and policies, and a few more resources, things might have gone much better; and that Blair\u2019s vision of rebuilding a stable pro-Western Iraq might then have been realised. In other words, Chilcot shares Blair\u2019s own view that failure in Iraq was a matter of poor execution, not of a fundamentally flawed conception. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That is, in a sense, to share Blair\u2019s central delusion: that the West, underwritten by American power and guided by British statesmanship, has the capacity to take over a country the size of Iraq and transform its national life and political institutions to match our interests and values, at a price we\u2019re able and willing to pay. The most important lesson of Iraq, and of Afghanistan, and Libya, and Syria, is that this is false. Such massive efforts of political transformation require resources on a scale and over a timeframe that no country in the West, including America and Britain can or will commit.<\/span><\/p>\n

Third, Chilcot gives a lot of attention to Blair\u2019s epic struggle, and failure, to achieve a UN mandate for the invasion. But is doesn\u2019t seem anywhere to address the deeper question: what difference would a UN mandate have made? \u00a0The invasion and occupation didn\u2019t fail because it was illegal without a UN mandate, and it wouldn\u2019t have succeeded any better if the elusive second UNSC resolution had been secured.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, in so starkly blaming Blair for poor decision-making, Chilcot seems to let many others off too lightly. Blair must of course be held responsible for the many failures\u2014and as I have suggested, those failures were even deeper than the report suggests. But he wasn\u2019t the only person in Whitehall responsible for British policy. Under the time-honoured principles of Westminster-style cabinet government, his Cabinet colleagues shared that responsibility.<\/span><\/p>\n

So it\u2019s their fault\u2014as well as Blair\u2019s\u2014if they went along with him, just as it\u2019s their fault as well as Blair\u2019s if they didn\u2019t demand and exercise their right and responsibility to dissent if they did not. They shared his responsibility and they must all share the blame. Some might say that that isn\u2019t how things are in the contemporary \u2018presidential\u2019 model of Westminster government that operated under Blair. But Iraq shows why that model doesn\u2019t work, and needs to be fixed. Chilcot fails to draw that vital conclusion.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the blame should be spread beyond Cabinet too. Blair\u2019s senior civil and military advisers didn\u2019t share his and his cabinet colleagues\u2019 responsibility for the final decisions, but they did have a plain duty of their own to give prudent, carefully-considered and well-informed advice, and to give it as forcefully as necessary to make sure the message got through.<\/span><\/p>\n

And what of Australia? We seem content to assume that there are no lessons to be learned from the decisions for war made in the decade after 9\/11 by our Governments, Labor and Coalition, both in Iraq and Afghanistan. But all of the failings in British policy-making had their echoes in Australia, and we\u2019ve taken no steps to recognise and understand them. So don\u2019t be surprised if we repeat them.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven\u2019t read the dozen-odd volumes of the full Chilcot Report, but I can recommend the 150-odd page Executive Summary. 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