Chilcot report vindicates the world

All humanity’s warnings back in 2003 that the world’s military powers should not start wars on flimsy grounds were vindicated last week by the Chilcot Report released in London. The 6,000 page, 2.6 million words report took seven years to produce by a team headed by ex-civil servant Sir John Chilcot.  The report’s main findings, […]

All humanity’s warnings back in 2003 that the world’s military powers should not start wars on flimsy grounds were vindicated last week by the Chilcot Report released in London. The 6,000 page, 2.6 million words report took seven years to produce by a team headed by ex-civil servant Sir John Chilcot.  The report’s main findings, as summarised by The Guardian of London, include Prime Minister Tony Blair “chose to join the invasion of Iraq before peaceful options for disarmament were exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
Chilcot said Blair “deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public” and “disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action, and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services.” Blair, Chilcot said, wrote to the belligerent US President George W Bush eight months before the Iraq invasion and said, “I will be with you, whatever.” Tony Blair’s cabinet, Chilcot said, made the decision to join the Iraq invasion “in circumstances that were far from satisfactory.” Its decision on the war’s legality under international law was “perfunctory” and “the precise grounds on which it was made remains unclear.”
Similarly, the report said the Bush administration repeatedly over-rode Blair’s advice on how to oversee Iraq after the invasion, including involvement of the United Nations. It said the whole invasion was “a strategic failure,” particularly the US decision to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s army. It said Saddam Hussein posed “no immediate threat” to Britain and UK’s joint intelligence committee believed it would take Iraq five years, after the lifting of sanctions, to produce enough fissile material for a weapon. It also said British intelligence services made “a series of major blunders” and produced “flawed” information about Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction as the basis for going to war. Chilcot also said UK’s military forces were “seriously ill-equipped”, its planning was “wholly inadequate” and that it ended up making a “humiliating” decision to strike deals with enemy militias.
Tony Blair, it also said, ignored predictions by US Secretary of State Colin Powell that there will be “terrible bloodletting of revenge after Saddam goes.” UK’s Ambassador to the US Sir Christopher Meyer also predicted that Iraq “will probably make pacifying Afghanistan look like child’s play,” so Chilcot rejected Blair’s claim that the chaos and sectarian conflict were not predicted. The UK also had no post-invasion strategy, Chilcot said, and UK “had practically no input into subsequent decisions taken” by the US, including dissolving Saddam’s army. Overall, Chilcot said, Britain achieved “meagre” results for its costly six-year occupation of the Basra area. Even though Blair said before the invasion Iraqi civilian casualties would be minimised, Britain later made no effort to establish exact Iraqi casualties and only made “broad estimates.”
For all those terrible blunders, Iraq and the whole Middle East region have paid and are still paying a very high price in human lives, material losses and essential stability. Even though the invasion’s chief architect George Bush unconscionably insists that “the world is better off without Saddam,” Iraq and the entire region are much worse off. Up to a million lives may have been lost, deep sectarian divisions were revived, bombs explode all over the place and the country is fragmented into Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and IS controlled areas permanently at war with one another. The Western powers too are paying a high price because no one heard of IS when Saddam was around and it sure could not have occupied any piece of land in Saddam’s Iraq or even in neighbouring Syria when Basher al-Assad was in full charge.
It is not as if these rulers were not told at the time that their planned misadventure would bring grief to Iraq and the world. In Britain alone one million people took to the streets in anti-war protests, as did millions of others in Europe and the rest of the world. Since then they have replicated the misadventure in Libya and Syria, with similar consequences on hapless civilians. The way Western leaders such as George Bush, Tony Blair and some of their successors  and stable mates went about ruining nations and ancient civilisations on trumped up charges was a veritable crime against humanity and it is time the culprits are brought to book, lest other rulers wish to repeat the misadventures in future.
Have they learnt their lessons? Hardly. In his reaction to the report, Blair said the decision to commit troops was the “most agonising and momentous” decision in his decade as prime minister and that he would “carry it with me for the rest of my days.” Better if he carries that burden behind bars at The Hague.  Prime Minister David Cameron also said “whatever else we learn from this conflict, we must all pledge this will never happen again.” His main concern however was not that they killed a million Iraqis and ruined one of the world’s oldest civilisations but that 179 UK soldiers died in vain.
Jeremy Corbyn, current leader of Blair’s Labour Party, however said the report proved the Iraq War had been an “act of military aggression launched on a false pretext” and was “long regarded as illegal by the overwhelming weight of international opinion.” He apologised on his party’s behalf and said the UK should back moves to give the International Criminal Court “the power to prosecute those responsible for the crime of military aggression.” It is unfortunate that the US is not undertaking a Chilcot-style soul searching. It should. George Bush and Tony Blair should be hauled before a Nuremberg type international tribunal to face charges of war crimes and launching aggressive war.