Not the Chilcot Report - Hardcover

Oborne, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1784977969 ISBN 13: 9781784977962

Publisher: Head of Zeus, 2016

Synopsis

The defining calamity of the post-cold war era', in Peter Oborne's words, took place in 2003. The invasion of Iraq led to the collapse of the state system in the Middle East. Iraq is shattered, Syria will never be put back together again, and Lebanon hasn’t functioned as a unified state for a long time. And the great wave of refugees unleashed by this breakdown is threatening what is left of democracy in Turkey and the very existence of the European Union.

Oborne provides a forensic examination of the way evidence was doctored and the law manipulated in 2002 and 2003 in order to justify a war for regime change. The government bent facts to fit its determination to join the US invasion, Parliament failed to scrutinise evidence, the intelligence service was perverted, and the media lost its head.

This is a masterly account of the making of a disaster, written by a passionate British democrat.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Oborne is a columnist for the Daily Mail and former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph. One of Britain's most distinguished and independent political writers, his books include The Triumph of the Political Class and Wounded Tiger.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Not The Chilcot Report

By Peter Oborne

Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © 2016 Peter Oborne
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78497-796-2

Contents

Cover, 
Welcome Page, 
About Not the Chilcot report, 
Foreword, 
Abbreviations and Acronyms, 
Chapter 1. Iraq: The Defining Calamity of the Post-Cold War Era, 
Chapter 2. Iraq and the West, 1979–2000, 
Chapter 3. The Shift from Afghanistan to Iraq, 
Chapter 4. The Road to War, 
Chapter 5. The Failure of Parliament, 
Chapter 6. Was the Invasion Lawful?, 
Chapter 7. From Basra to Helmand Province, 
Chapter 8. How MI5 was Right About al-Qaeda and Iraq, 
Chapter 9. The Chilcot Inquiry and Its Antecedents, 
Chapter 10. Is Tony Blair a War Criminal?, 
Conclusion, 
About Peter Oborne, 
An Invitation from the Publisher, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

IRAQ: THE DEFINING CALAMITY OF THE POST-COLD WAR ERA

'We were with you at the first, we will stay with you to the last.'

Tony Blair

On 1 May 2003 President George W. Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, posing in flying gear on an aircraft carrier beneath a banner stating 'Mission Accomplished'.

In fairness to Bush, he was not responsible for the banner. But the image would haunt him, as it became obvious to the American people that his Iraq mission was not accomplished and never would be.

The Iraq War failed in both its immediate and its strategic objectives. Its promoters had depicted Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States and to the international world order.

In fact, Saddam's regime was little threat to any other country, was far from acquiring serious weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capacity, and was never remotely likely to supply such weapons to al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group. Al-Qaeda had no support from Saddam and no base in Saddam-controlled Iraq. His fall, however, allowed them to establish themselves in Iraq. They did not acquire WMD, because there were none to acquire, but they did acquire thousands of WDD – weapons of daily destruction – which cost thousands of lives, mostly Iraqi, but also American and British.

The Iraq War was part of an ambitious 'forward' policy in which the United States would use its power unilaterally to achieve American goals in the Middle East and throughout the world. Saddam Hussein would be replaced by a pro-American, pro-free market democracy (in a key oil producer with a major influence on the price of oil). This new Iraq would project Western values, counter the threat of Iran and underpin a new and stable order in the Middle East.

Instead, the fall of Saddam Hussein led to a long period of violent disorder. This in turn brought about the near-destruction of the Iraqi state, which escalated into a sectarian war between the country's Shia majority and a Sunni minority which felt dispossessed following the fall of Saddam. Iran, meanwhile, acquired new influence within Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Far from embracing Western values, parts of Iraq fell into the hands of terrorist groups who were even more fanatical than al-Qaeda.

Only one cause united militant Sunni and Shia opponents: a common hostility to the foreign occupier. British troops, never given the means to achieve their tasks as an occupying power, became onlookers in southern Iraq. In the summer of 2009 the majority were withdrawn, along with American combat troops, but several thousand allied troops remained as trainers and support for the Iraqi army until the final withdrawal in 2011. By that time, Britain had lost 179 soldiers in Iraq, the Americans over 4,000. Thousands more suffered permanent physical or psychological damage. The number of Iraqi casualties is beyond computation.

The war had some other unintended consequences. The neoconservatives – among whom the most eminent in the Bush administration were Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz – had sought to establish a doctrine of preventative self-defence whereby the United States would act against perceived threats on the basis of intelligence data. Instead the Iraq War gave the American people a strong aversion to preventative war and indeed any foreign intervention which involved the use of ground troops. Today, the United States and Britain prefer instead to intervene by means of air power, as in Libya, or unmanned drones, as against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. These are forms of warfare which inevitably kill innocent people, whose gains are always likely to be temporary and which give the Western powers no means of controlling events on the ground in the countries concerned. The Iraq War also discredited the intelligence services in both countries and made it harder, if not impossible, for future leaders to take their people into an intelligence-led war.

Notwithstanding its terrible aftermath, George W. Bush and Tony Blair – the two leaders who had ordered the invasion – continue to justify their decision on the basis that it dislodged Saddam Hussein, the bloodthirsty dictator of Iraq, and removed a serious threat to their nations and all the Western states.

Like the Bourbons, they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Every year that passes, it becomes clearer that the invasion of 2003 was the defining calamity of the post-Cold War era.

The scale of the disaster can be measured not only by its direct victims – American, British, and above all, Iraqi. It must also be measured in the destruction of Iraqi society and the unleashing of new threats to the world order, threats much more real than Saddam's quite ordinary weaponry. Iraq's decade of civil war has had an appalling effect on the country's many minorities, some of which had been protected under Saddam. The number of Christians in the country, for instance (Iraq contains one of the oldest Christian communities in the world), has fallen from approximately 1.5 million in 2003 to perhaps 250,000 or fewer today.

We can now see that the toppling of Saddam Hussein created a power vacuum that was swiftly filled by al-Qaeda in Iraq. Al-Qaeda in due course became the progenitor of Islamic State (IS). Although IS has drawn its mutant Islamist ideology from Saudi Arabian sources, its military and organizational strength evolved in al-Qaeda's war against US occupiers in the aftermath of 2003. Many Islamic State commanders, including its emir, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, learnt their fighting skills during the US occupation.

Spawned in Iraq, Islamic State has now spread across the Middle East and North Africa. As IS and its supporters carry out atrocities in Europe and around the globe, it has become the most feared terror threat in the world.

This book maintains that the invasion of Iraq was responsible for launching a new epoch of horror, instability and violence across the globe. It asks how and why did Britain get involved in such a mistaken enterprise.

Crucially, this was a war of choice: there was no threat to Britain worthy of the name from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

At the prime minister's private meeting on Iraq on 23 July 2002, Jack Straw was minuted as saying: 'It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.'

Despite such reservations Britain chose to support the US. We could have stood aside, as did France and Germany, on the grounds that al-Qaeda was the real enemy – an enemy that was also opposed by Iraq.

That, of itself, might have persuaded the US at least to pause before invading Iraq. The invasion faced significant opposition from American voters, within Congress and within the US military and even the Bush administration itself. Tony Blair had high influence in the United States after 9/11 because of his warm expressions of solidarity with Britain's ally. As an opponent of invasion, he might have made a difference. Instead, he signed up to the neoconservative agenda of regime change through military force. In fairness, he did persuade the Bush administration to try to achieve this in an international coalition backed with the authority of the United Nations. But the UN process had an unexpected result. It gave no pretext to invade Iraq and demonstrated the absence of any international consensus to overthrow Saddam. When finally compelled to choose between the UN and the US, Blair chose the US. He insisted on Britain actually joining the invasion and the occupation, which transformed Iraq from an al-Qaeda-free zone into an area where al-Qaeda and its progeny flourish.

THE CHILCOT INQUIRY AND THE BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT

Why and how did Britain get this all so wrong? In 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that Sir John Chilcot, a retired civil servant, would chair an inquiry into the Iraq War with a view to learning lessons that could be applied in future conflicts.

Brown told the House of Commons that it would take a year for Sir John to carry out his work. In the event the inquiry has taken more than six years and, in the spring of 2016, there was still no certainty when it will publish its report. Sir John and his colleagues became bogged down in arguments about which documents could be cited and published.

As his inquiry has dragged on, British forces have been involved in fresh foreign engagements in Libya and Syria, carrying out bombing missions in both countries, as well as being drawn back into Iraq. The lessons of Iraq would have been relevant in all these cases.

The delay in completing the Chilcot Inquiry, combined with obvious defects in previous inquiries – four inquiries into these matters have come and gone – suggest that the British Establishment may be structurally incapable of addressing the very serious questions emerging from the invasion of Iraq. This is because the scale of the calamity raises existential questions that are too subversive to address.

The most important of these heart-of-the-matter issues concerns Britain's alliance with the United States. This has been at the core of our foreign policy since the Second World War. More than anything else, Tony Blair's determination to stick with the American president of the day, whoever he is and whatever he stands for, explains his willingness to follow the United States all the way into the Iraq morass.

Despite what his critics have claimed, Mr Blair's allegiance to the United States was by no means dishonourable. Britain is a nuclear power that depends heavily on US-supplied technology and operational support. Our place on the United Nations Security Council ultimately depends on US patronage. The foreign intelligence service MI6 – deeply implicated in the Iraq invasion – intensely values its status as the closest and most trusted partner of its much better-resourced and far more powerful American counterpart, the CIA. Meanwhile, almost all rising British politicians take care to develop transatlantic connections. It has become axiomatic that the British military, diplomatic, political and intelligence establishments should support this 'special relationship' with the United States. The British state is ready to surrender its freedom of action on the international stage in return for the enhanced status and capability we derive as a result of our close US ties.

It is for this reason that the British military, Whitehall and the Secret Intelligence Service supported Tony Blair as Britain joined the United States' invasion of Iraq.

This book will show how the Iraq catastrophe has had a ruinous effect on these powerful and hugely respected institutions. The British army, having suffered two of the most damaging defeats in its history, has been left bereft of purpose. Giant questions surround the integrity, and even the patriotism, of the Secret Intelligence Service, an organization whose loyalty has never before been seriously called into question, even during its lowest point in the Cold War with the defection of the Cambridge spies in the 1950s.

The Iraq invasion damaged the core institutions of the British state. This in turn has led to basic questions about the British system of government itself. According to the textbooks the British state is a constitutional monarchy. This bland formula conceals the fact that the British state contains pre-modern elements, which enable a great deal of government to be carried out in secret.

Parliament had wrested away power from the monarchy over the centuries. But the precise nature of these powers has never been codified, as it would in a country with a written constitution. In practice this means that the executive branch of government inherited very significant residual powers from the monarchy.

As a consequence, there has always been an unresolved contradiction between an essentially medieval system of government and Britain's democratic tradition as it evolved over the last two hundred years. Prior to Iraq this contradiction had rarely become a live political issue – the British governing elite had hitherto been assumed to be honest, decent and disposed to act in the national interest.

The Iraq invasion, however, showed British officials in a different light. When the spotlight was turned on them in the aftermath of the invasion, it emerged that many of Britain's most senior officials had not conducted themselves with the integrity expected of public servants. Many were exposed as cheats or incompetents whose loyalty was given not to the British state, but to a partisan group of politicians and to their own careers.

It is depressingly clear that no key decision-maker in the British state was rewarded for making a correct judgement about Iraq, and that no one who made a bad judgement, or colluded with one, has suffered any penalty. In the chapters that follow we will forensically examine the accuracy of public statements made by British officials and politicians about Iraq's so-called weapons of mass destruction. This book will make a judgement about the legality of the war. It will then go on to calculate the political consequences of the decision to go to war. In order to understand these grave issues, we need to go back in time and provide a brief history of Iraq and its relations with the West, and why the United States and Britain felt it was so important to intervene in 2003.

CHAPTER 2

IRAQ AND THE WEST, 1979–2000

'I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into Iraq.'

Dick Cheney

Like so many Middle Eastern countries, Iraq is a British invention. We drew the boundaries of the country in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, and thereafter kept an eye on it, mainly because of the oil.

The 1979 coup d'état formalized the power that Saddam Hussein had in truth been wielding from behind the scenes for more than a decade. Saddam's regime was always a ruthless one-party dictatorship with an intense personality cult, and appalling human rights abuses. It cracked down especially hard on the Kurds in the north and on Iraq's Shia majority. However, Saddam's internal repression did not prevent the Western powers from doing business with him – particularly France, which helped him build a nuclear research reactor at Osiraq, which was subsequently knocked out by the Israelis in June 1981 in a daring bombing raid.

Saddam was initially estranged from the United States after President Carter negotiated the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978. Seeking influence in the Arab world, he gave ostentatious leadership in the Arab League to the rejectionists, and secured Egypt's expulsion. Saddam played host to the ruthless Palestinian group led by Abu Nidal, and used it as a team of mercenary assassins to strike at the mainstream PLO and other targets. But after the Iranian revolution in 1979 the US and Saddam drew much closer, both governments identifying Ayatollah Khomeini as the enemy.

In September 1980 Saddam invaded Iran without condemnation or intervention from the Carter administration. After initial successes, Saddam's assault was beaten back and the Iranians counter-attacked. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard was far better motivated than Saddam's conscript armies and was willing to take heavy losses in human wave attacks. By July 1982 the Iranians had reconquered all their lost territory and launched a counter-invasion.

Saddam's forces used poison gas in desperate efforts to repel them. While the new Reagan administration made no public response, covertly it supported Iraq, especially through intelligence and logistics. It also authorized the sale to Iraq of items usable in chemical or biological warfare. The Iraqis continued to do badly on the ground and in November 1983 Reagan issued a secret directive for his administration to take any measures necessary to prevent Saddam from losing the war.

Reagan even sent a special envoy to Saddam to offer further assistance and a pathway to full diplomatic relations (suspended since 1967). Of all people, this was Donald Rumsfeld, later the US defense secretary who would come to promote and organize the eventual overthrow of Saddam. The State Department removed Iraq from its list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, paving the way for diplomatic relations to be restored in November 1984.

In the same year, President Reagan promoted a one-sided arms embargo against Iran. In the UK, the Thatcher government officially supported the UN embargo on arms supplies to both sides, but Mrs Thatcher's foreign secretary announced the 'Howe guidelines' distinguishing between lethal and non-lethal supplies. In practice, these allowed the export of some important secret supplies to Iraq, including agents for the manufacture of chemical weapons.

The war settled into a terrible bloody stalemate, causing hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties on both sides, but US–Iraq relations continued to improve, seemingly regardless of events on the ground. In March 1988 the Iraqis attacked the Kurdish town of Halabja with poison gas and nerve agents, as part of a parallel war against Kurdish insurgents. The attack killed up to 5,000 people and another 10,000 were seriously injured or maimed.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1784977969
• ISBN 13: 9781784977962
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208