The Iraq Disaster

Exactly 20 years ago, on 18 March 2003, the UK House of Commons voted in favour of Tony Blair’s motion for war against Iraq - although 139 Labour MPs, along with every Liberal Democrat and a few Tories, voted for the contrary amendment, which said that “the case for war against Iraq has not yet been established”, words now hard to argue with. Robin Cook - who had been Foreign Secretary for four years and was now Leader of the House - had just resigned in protest and made what most regarded as the most powerful resignation speech in half a century (the link gives the speech in full). Alastair Campbell was, at the time, Blair's notoriously belligerent press secretary and at the heart of the small policy group around Blair until 2003 (the character of Malcolm Turner played by Peter Capaldi In The Thick of it in the TV series is based on Campbell).

Campbell has now transformed himself into a serious commentator and, for the past year, has run a highly successful podcast with an eccentric centrist Conservative politician Rory Stewart who had taken two years off from Foreign Office duties to walk across central Asia in 2002-4 and then resumed duties – as a Governor in one of the Iraqi Provinces and duly produced a book about that experience "Occupational Hazards – my time governing Iraq" (2006). This week the two came together for an amazing double episode of the podcast to explore their very different perspectives on the war – Campbell from the control centre and Stewart from an increasingly disillusioned periphery. As you can imagine, it's one of the best bits of broadcasting I've ever heard!

Updates; 

Chris Hedges has been a Pulitzer prizewinner and war correspondent for almost two decades which has made him one of the US's strongest critics of their military aggressivness. In his latest article, he recalls the death threats he and the few other sane journalists receiived on the outbreak of the Iraq war.  

3 hour BBC radio podcast – starting with https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001k0cg

This week's "New Statesman" (which had what we might call a "good" war) marks the 20^th anniversary of the war with a special feature (behind a paywall) but let me offer some excerpts -

How did it happen? Twenty years on it’s obvious that the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was a catastrophic failure. It was the most damaging adventure by any British government since 1945, far worse than the Suez fiasco in 1956. In fact, the Iraq War now seems for us what the American grand strategist George Kennan called the world war of 1914: “the great seminal catastrophe of this century” from which all subsequent calamities have flowed.

Not only were the consequences of the Iraq War wretched, the reasons given for the invasion proved to be false. There cannot be many, even among Blair’s dwindling band of admirers, who still pretend that those claims for war were made in good faith. In the summer of 2002, when George W Bush told Blair that Britain didn’t need to participate, the Labour leader insisted: “I will be with you, whatever.”

Far more than with Suez, British action in Iraq was in defiance of popular opinion. On 15 February 2003 more than 1.5 million people protested against the war in London, and opposition was expressed in the opinion polls in the weeks before troops were deployed.

So how did it happen? Despite public sentiment and the weakness of his case, Blair was counting on the corrupt servility of his cabinet and Labour MPs, as well as the supine credulity of the media. His estimation of both proved correct. British participation in the Iraq War was a dismal failure of British politics and journalism, which have barely recovered…….The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee was ecstatic. Writing under the revealing headline, “He promised to take on the world. And I believed him”, she said the speech “will stand as a moment British politics became vigorously, unashamedly social democratic. The day it became missionary and almost Swedish in pursuit of universal justice.”

A group of American neoconservative ideologues, including Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, along with the right-wing militarists Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, regarded Saddam Hussein as the greatest enemy of the US and of Israel and had wanted to overthrow him since the Gulf War of 1990-91. In 2000, those men came to power when Bush won the presidential election. As soon as he was inaugurated, the White House began planning the destruction of Saddam, and less than nine months later the 11 September attacks in New York City gave Bush and his cabal an excuse for enacting those plans.

In August 2002 the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, who was then chair of the Culture Media and Sport Committee, wrote an essay in the Spectator entitled “Why I oppose an attack on Iraq”. He lucidly explained why such a war would be unjustified and likely calamitous. But at the end Kaufman declared that, if it came to a vote in parliament, “my loyalty to Blair would lead me to vote with him”. In March, like Mandelson, Kaufman voted in favour for what he knew to be an unjustified war – out of loyalty. Kaufman was just obeying instructions. Is it any wonder politicians have fallen into such disrepute among the public?

The media’s record over Iraq was just as dismal. Rupert Murdoch warmly supported the war, not least because he said that the best result of invading the oil-rich country would be“$20 a barrel for oil”. All of Murdoch’s London papers supported military action. Individual columnists such as Simon Jenkins and Matthew Parris were allowed to voice their opposition in the Times, but Murdoch has never minded dissenting voices as long as they don’t affect the main tendency of his titles. Murdoch always saw th  Sun as his most important paper, and it was gung-ho for war: “He’s got ’em, let’s get him”, it declared on its front page on 25 September 2002. At one time the Daily Telegraph might have expressed reservations about the war, and seemed that the Iraq adventure was worse than Suez, when Britain and France colluded with Israel to attack Egypt and remove another dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, before the US stopped them. More than 40 years later, the British now conspired with the Americans, against French and German opposition.