The Chilcot report
Iraq’s grim lessons
The official inquiry into the war delivers a scathing verdict on its planning, execution and
aftermath
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.
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.
Too good to check
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.
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