Public inquiries into catastrophic failures of government decision-making are often regarded as little more than exercises in white-washing.
But few are saying this about the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War. The two and a half million-word report was published this week, seven years after the inquiry was set up. The press’s summary talks of a ‘harsh verdict’, and of Tony Blair being ‘crushed’ by it. Yet Mr Blair continues to defend the decisions he took, at the same time as expressing regret, sorrow and apology for the consequences. What are we to make of Chilcot’s verdict and Blair’s response?
Sir John Chilcot and his colleagues are coldly scathing about almost every aspect of the Iraq war, from the way Britain got itself involved, through the conduct of the war itself and the failure to secure the peace of Iraq after it was won, to the consequences that remain such a threat to the wider world today. At the centre of its criticisms, inevitably, is the conduct of the man who led Britain into the war, Tony Blair.
It will take time for readers to digest the twelve volumes of the report – assuming they even make the attempt - but it is already clear what the main elements of Sir John’s indictment are. In the first place, he says that the war was unnecessary, or at least that it was unnecessary to fight it in March 2003 since peaceful options for the disarmament of Saddam Hussein’s regime still existed, as critics of the decision to go to war argued passionately at the time. United Nations weapons inspectors, under Hans Blix, pleaded for more time and there was, in any case, mounting evidence that Saddam did not possess the weapons of mass destruction that were ostensibly the casus belli. He did not pose the imminent threat the British government claimed he did.
Chilcot says the decision to go to war was based on ‘flawed intelligence’ and he castigates Mr Blair for not having challenged it, though he stops short of saying he lied to the House of Commons. Sir John’s report does not adjudicate on whether or not the war was illegal (he says it was not a court of law) but very firmly concludes that the circumstances in which the British government decided it was legal were ‘far from satisfactory’, depending solely on Mr Blair’s ‘unequivocal’ assertion that Iraq was in breach of UN resolutions without adequate evidence to back it up.
The report confirms that British troops, 179 of whom died in the conflict and its aftermath, were sent to fight inadequately equipped. And it is utterly scathing about the failure of planning about what to do with Iraq once Saddam had been overthrown. We now know that civil war ensued, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis lost their lives, and that the Middle East has been a scene of carnage and the breeding ground of international terrorism ever since.
It is obviously true that many others bear responsibilities for all that happened, but perhaps the most telling criticism of the report is of the degree to which Mr Blair took upon himself the power and responsibility to take decisions and to bypass collective decision-making in government. That criticism was encapsulated in the Times headline the day after the report was published: Blair’s Private War.
Central to this charge was the publication for the first time of a private memo sent by Mr Blair to the American president, George W Bush, in July 2002, eight months before the war was launched. Its first sentence read: ‘I will be with you, whatever’. This has been interpreted as the British prime minister giving a secret, personal commitment that Britain would join the US in waging war against Iraq even though he was claiming at the time, not just to the public but to his own cabinet colleagues, that he was seeking other means to resolve the crisis.
Chilcot cited evidence given to the inquiry that both Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair’s chief of staff, and Sir David Manning, his foreign policy adviser, had pleaded with him not to use the phrase on the grounds that it would be interpreted by the Americans as a firm commitment to go to war. That Mr Blair rejected their advice is seen as clear evidence that he was determined to overrule both official advice and to act virtually on his own. It is regarded by many as the supreme example of Mr Blair’s brand of ‘sofa government’, bypassing established methods of collective decision-making intended precisely to prevent prime ministers from taking rash decisions on their own.
In response to Chilcot Mr Blair argues that this is a misinterpretation of the phrase he used in his memo to President Bush. In a lengthy interview with me on the Today programme, he suggested it was a token of his commitment to dealing with the problem of Saddam and as a means of opening up dialogue about the difficulties of how to do so, rather than as a firm pledge to commit British servicemen and women to war. But Chilcot condemns him for overestimating his ability to influence the American government. The consequence was that by March 2003 Mr Blair had so committed Britain to President Bush that it was virtually impossible for him not to go along with the President’s decision to fire the gun even though much of the rest of the world was pleading that it was premature.
In general, Mr Blair’s defence of his decisions rests on his belief that the world would have been a more dangerous place if Saddam Hussein had been left in power. He argues that Saddam would have started once again to develop weapons of mass destruction and that once the Arab spring had broken out Iraq under Saddam would have reacted much as Assad has done in Syria, with untold consequences for the whole region.
He does not resile from his ultimate responsibility for all that happened as a consequence of his decisions and his behaviour. He said he harboured more ‘sorrow, regret and apology’ than the public ‘may ever know or believe’. But he defiantly declared: ‘If I was back in the same place with the same information I would take the same decision.’
The current Prime Minister, David Cameron, said that all those who voted for the war (including himself, as a backbench Tory MP) must share the responsibility for what happened but claimed that safeguards had already been put in place so that no prime minister could again take such far-reaching decisions unilaterally. He said: ‘It is inconceivable today that we could take a premeditated decision to commit combat troops without a full and challenging discussion in the National Security Council on the basis of full papers, including written legal advice prepared and stress-tested by all relevant departments with decisions formally minuted.’
Some, however, still question whether government has indeed now become immune to taking decisions whose consequences may be catastrophic because they are not properly foreseen. Some even cite Mr Cameron’s own decision to call a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union as a case in point.
No doubt more will emerge about the catastrophe that was the Iraq War as the details of the huge Chilcot Report are pored over. In the meantime we have the summary elements of its castigating verdict and Mr Blair’s appeal for a different one. Whose case do you find more convincing?
