{"id":27672,"date":"2016-07-14T06:00:10","date_gmt":"2016-07-13T20:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=27672"},"modified":"2016-07-13T13:01:42","modified_gmt":"2016-07-13T03:01:42","slug":"two-crucial-truths-chilcot-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/two-crucial-truths-chilcot-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Two crucial truths in the Chilcot report?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Edited<\/p>\n

The Chilcot report underlines two crucial truths that further undermine the Iraq War legacies of George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard. The first is that the invasion was unnecessary, precisely because the US-led policy of containing Saddam Hussein\u2019s regime was working. The second is that the invasion transformed Iraq from an al-Qaeda-free zone into an area where al-Qaeda and its progeny flourish. Neither point has attracted much attention in the past week.<\/span><\/p>\n

Start with containment. In 26 February 2003\u2014about three weeks before \u2018shock and awe\u2019 was inflicted on the Iraqi people\u2014<\/span>Howard took to the Wall Street Journal<\/em> opinion pages<\/span><\/a> to explain why Saddam couldn\u2019t be contained. Containment worked against the Soviet Union, he said, because \u2018the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction guaranteed the maintenance of the status quo\u2019 until the internal implosion of the old Soviet empire. Such a strategy couldn\u2019t work against the Saddam Husseins\u2019 of the post-September 11 world, the Australian Prime Minister warned, because \u2018the cost of doing nothing is infinitely greater than the cost of acting\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Howard and other hawks failed to grasp, however, was that the Iraqi threat could\u2019ve been contained as it had been contained since the 1991 Gulf War. The Iraqi dictator, far from being bent on religious martyrdom, was a cynical calculator whose overriding priority was to hold onto power and exercise it ruthlessly over the unfortunate people of Iraq. (Besides, as the anti-war conservative and ABC Boyer lecturer Owen Harries often quipped, what did Saddam ever do to Australia other than buy our wheat?)<\/span><\/p>\n

True, containment can\u2019t work against terrorists, who can run and hide. But Saddam wasn\u2019t in cahoots with Osama bin Laden and the perpetuators of 9\/11. Moreover, rogue states do have a mailing address; and it should have been clear that if Saddam smuggled weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to al-Qaeda or used banned weapons against US interests, his regime would have met \u2018national obliteration\u2019 from the US nuclear arsenal, as Bush\u2019s senior advisor Condoleezza Rice pointed out in<\/span> Foreign Affairs<\/em> in 2000<\/span><\/a>. Containment worked against nuclear-armed Joe Stalin and Mao Zedong at the height of the Cold War; it was working against Saddam Hussein, whose regime we soon discovered didn\u2019t even possess WMD.<\/span><\/p>\n

Granted, the sanctions, naval blockades, and no-fly-zone lacked the political sex appeal of \u2018liberation\u2019 after 9\/11. But at least such realist strategies avoided the unintended consequences that a liberated Iraq has delivered. As a 98-year-old George Kennan, the intellectual architect of the Cold War doctrine of containment in 1947,<\/span> warned six months before the invasion<\/span><\/a>: \u2018If we went into Iraq, you know where you begin; you never know where you are going to end.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Which brings us to the Islamic State. Few myths are as persistent as the argument that the Iraq invasion has no connection to the rise of the Sunni jihadist network. Washington neo-conservatives dismiss any links. So, too, does Howard.<\/span><\/p>\n

Writing in The Australian<\/em><\/span><\/a> after Chilcot\u2019s release, Greg Sheridan defended the former prime minister when he argued: \u2018It is utterly intellectually dishonest to attribute the terrible instability and conflict in the Middle East to Iraq.\u2019 Why? Because Islamic State emerged from Syria\u2019s civil war, in which the US coalition didn\u2019t intervene.<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, the taproot of today\u2019s mayhem was what the distinguished US conservative columnist<\/span> George Will has called<\/span><\/a> the \u2018ruinous grandiosity\u2019 of Bush\u2019s \u2018freedom agenda,\u2019 which Tony Blair, Howard and Sheridan himself enthusiastically supported.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018Liberation\u2019 didn\u2019t just amount to toppling a brutal tyranny that kept a lid on simmering ethnic and religious tensions. It meant toppling the minority Sunnis from power in Baghdad and replacing them with the majority Shia. As a result, the invasion upended the sectarian imbalance that had been in place for generations. It also created a power vacuum that was swiftly filled by al-Qaeda in Iraq.<\/span><\/p>\n

A Shia sectarian regime, supported\u2014perversely\u2014by both the Americans and Iranians, was more focused on revenge against former tormentors rather than building a nation. Meanwhile, Sunnis resented their new status as political losers in post-Saddam Iraq. As a result, many felt their only recourse was to tolerate, even support, the Sunni insurgency against the US-led occupation that morphed into a plethora of Sunni jihadist groups who were even more fanatical than al-Qaeda.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s no wonder virtually every scholar of the Middle East claim al-Qaeda in Iraq became the progenitor of Islamic State. Many IS commanders, including Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, learnt their fighting skills during the US-led occupation. They moved to Sunni Syria, because the \u2018surge\u2019 of 2007 had temporarily kept a lid on those age-old ethnic and tribal tensions. When those tensions resurfaced after the withdrawal of US troops in 2011, the jihadists returned to Iraq with a vengeance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those who continue to deny the link between the needless, foolish and ultimately catastrophic war and today\u2019s mayhem in the Middle East should heed the French philosopher Henri Bergson\u2019s musings that \u2018the present contains nothing more than the past\u2019, and that \u2018what is found in the effect was already in the cause\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chilcot report underlines two crucial truths that further undermine the Iraq War legacies of George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard. The first is that the invasion was unnecessary, precisely because the US-led …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":411,"featured_media":27673,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[155,1524,191,141],"class_list":["post-27672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-al-qaeda","tag-chilcot-inquiry","tag-iraq","tag-united-kingdom"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTwo crucial truths in the Chilcot report? | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/two-crucial-truths-chilcot-report\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Two crucial truths in the Chilcot report? | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Chilcot report underlines two crucial truths that further undermine the Iraq War legacies of George W. 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