‘Actually our knowledge of Iraq was very, very superficial’, Sir Mark Allen, MI6 officer responsible for countering terrorism, told Chilcot. ‘We were small animals in a dark wood with the wind getting up and changing direction the whole time. These were very, very difficult days. None of us had experience of our work being so critical to major policy dramas, and I venture in an ignorant kind of way to suggest you would have to go back to the Cuban missile crisis to find something similar. We all knew perfectly well what a disaster for countless people a war was going to be. So there was no appetite. But there was a strong sense that that’s the way we were heading. ’ 1
‘What was astonishing was that so few people knew what was going on’, commented a source in the heart of government pointing to the evidence the Chilcot inquiry had heard about the way Tony Blair dragged Britain into the invasion of Iraq, the most damaging decision by a British government had taken in modern times. It was worse than Suez was the overwhelming view in Whitehall and, belatedly, in Westminster. (This was before Brexit.)
The report of the public inquiry,2 forced on a government which first opposed it and then tried to insist it should be conducted behind closed doors, was a searing indictment of Tony Blair, MI6 and the MoD. Though its content and conclusions were devastating, the report was published so long after the invasion of Iraq, and so soon after the unexpected result of the EU referendum in June 2016 that it did not have the impact it needed and deserved.
The inquiry was delayed for years by Chilcot’s disputes with Whitehall – specifically, with two cabinet secretaries, Sir Gus (now Lord) O’Donnell and his successor, Sir Jeremy Heywood.3 These guardians of Whitehall’s permanent government persistently prevented Chilcot from releasing into the public domain key documents they had reluctantly agreed to pass, little by little, to the five-member inquiry panel. Chilcot realized his credibility, reputation and indeed his legacy as a veteran public servant was on the line. In a series of sharply worded letters, he repeatedly demanded that notes of conversations between Tony Blair and George Bush in the run-up to the invasion should be published.
‘The material requested provides important, and often unique, insights into Mr Blair’s thinking and the commitments he made to President Bush, which are not reflected in other papers’, Chilcot insisted in one of his many exchanges with Whitehall’s top official. In a third letter within less than a month to O’Donnell, he wrote: ‘The question when and how the prime minister made commitments to the US about the UK’s involvement in military action in Iraq and subsequent decisions on the UK’s continuing involvement, is central to its considerations.’ Referring to passages in Blair’s autobiography, A Journey, and the writings of Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, and Alastair Campbell, his former head of communications, Chilcot observed bitterly that ‘individuals may disclose privileged information (without sanction) whilst a committee of privy counsellors established by a former prime minister to review the issues, cannot’.
Documents Chilcot said he wanted to publish included Blair’s notes to Bush, more than 130 records of conversations between the two leaders, and records of 200 cabinet discussions.
The content of documents Whitehall wanted to suppress were ‘vital to the public understanding of the inquiry’s conclusions’, Chilcot emphasized. He finally agreed to a deal whereby a ‘small number of extracts’ or the ‘gist’ of the documents’ contents would be published by the inquiry. None of the published material would ‘reflect’ Bush’s views.
Chilcot’s determination was rewarded. He persuaded Whitehall to release, in an unprecedented move, a British prime minister’s highly classified correspondence, including what was to become the inquiry report’s most quoted phrase: Blair’s private promise to George Bush in July 2002, eight months before the invasion: ‘I will be with you, whatever.’
The disputes between Chilcot and the Cabinet Office further delayed the inquiry’s report because Chilcot understandably said he needed to know what documents could be published before embarking on the so-called ‘Maxwellization’ process, named after a court case concerning the late Robert Maxwell, whereby individuals an inquiry intended publicly to criticize would be given an opportunity to see relevant draft passages and given a chance to respond to the proposed criticisms before a final report is published.
Chilcot took the view that he could not criticize individuals on the basis of documentary evidence which the public was prevented from seeing. While David Cameron chided Chilcot for taking so long, senior officials in Whitehall kept on sending new documents to former officials who had already given evidence to the inquiry, leading to further delays.
Though the Chilcot inquiry had a legal adviser, Dame Rosalyn Higgins, a former British member of the International Court of Justice, it had no judge on its panel and did not pronounce on the legality of the invasion. Chairmen of other public inquiries, including the Scott inquiry, had been judges and independent figures who could publish whatever they considered relevant and necessary.
The Chilcot report was not published until 6 July 2016, seven years after it was set up and two weeks after the EU referendum. It is a resounding indictment of a British government in modern times and must not be forgotten.
It heard the head of MI5 contradict Blair’s claim that his foreign policy had no effect on British Muslims and accused the Blair government of undermining the authority of the UN Security Council. It showed that the invasion left Britain at greater risk of a terror attack.
Downing Street called on Sir Mark Allen for urgent advice when Blair first began seriously to contemplate supporting a US-led invasion of Iraq. Allen told Chilcot how in November 2001, out of the blue, he was asked by Sir David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, to draw up a paper on what he described as ‘key issues that we need to bear in mind to keep our balance and our perspective in considering Iraq as a rapidly expanding threat.’
In evidence heard in private and released in part only later, Allen told Chilcot: ‘I do remember very clearly, about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, getting a telephone call from Number 10, “David Manning wants to speak to you”, and David coming on the line and saying, “look, this Iraq stuff is building up apace. Can you just do me a quick paper, a sort of Anglican thirty-nine articles or whatever it’s called, just bullet points, of key issues that we need to bear in mind to keep our balance and our perspec tive in considering Iraq as a rapidly expanding threat”. So he wanted a sort of sedative paper, and he wanted it by 6 o’clock. So I had to cancel everything else I was doing and knock that up in about an hour. It was sent off. The quickest communications between us and Number 10 would have been the Chief’s driver. So yes, it would have gone through the Chief [Sir Richard Dearlove].’
Sir Rodric Lyne, a former British ambassador to Moscow and the most effective interrogator on the Chilcot panel, noted that Allen had begun his paper with the question: ‘What can be done about Iraq? If the US heads for direct action, have we ideas which could divert them to an alternative course?’
Allen responded: ‘I think what I was trying to bring out was the hazards, the experience to date with Iraq, something about the nature of Iraq as a country. I wanted to arm David with background reminders that this is not going to be simple or straightforward. I don’t think I had in my mind particular wheezes, schemes or policy programmes which could be followed up, simply to argue for caution and awareness of what a heavy matter Iraq could prove to be because it had been in the past.’
Lyne then asked Allen about one issue he had raised which the Chilcot panel considered to be extremely important. ‘You state that the government law officers are going to have to provide assurances of legality, and you say there has been a serious problem here. What problems had there already been with regard to legality of these concepts?’, asked Lyne.
In a reply likely to have provoked anguish in Whitehall and one that would have provoked a hostile response in the wider public had it been reported at the time, Allen told Lyne: ‘This was a considerable point of concern, not because we aimed to do something we knew was illegal, though of course, by definition, all MI6 activity was illegal, but because we didn’t want to put our feet in the wrong place or get snagged.’
In December 2001, Allen wrote further memos which his boss, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, passed on to Downing Street. Allen noted that ‘the removal of Saddam remains a prize because it could give new security to oil supplies.’ However, he also warned that an attack on Iraq would mean ‘increased distrust of US motives throughout the Islamic world. Confidence in HMG (the UK government), as a close US ally, also damaged’.
Allen further warned in a hurried note: ‘Terrorists’ motives and grievances reinforced … . Anger and resentment in the Arab Street. The bombings will be seen as an attack on ordinary Arabs, rather than Saddam’. There would be ‘accusations of double standards (one law for the Israelis; another for the Arabs).’
Lyne then asked Allen what were the ‘attractions’ of removing Saddam Hussein? ‘What was the case that you were making here for regime change?’
Allen replied:
I remember saying to somebody at that time that the lack of our response to the re-emergence of Iraq as a serious regional power was like having tea with some very proper people in the drawing room and noticing that there was a python getting out of a box in one corner. I was very alarmed at the way that Iraq was eroding the sanctions regime and evading it. The idea of putting an end to this problem was not something that I would advocate, but I could see the force of the desire to do it, to be decisive. The Foreign Office position, well into 2002, was ‘there’s not going to be a war because there had been no second [UN] resolution, and the international community won’t stand for it’.
Allen said a possible invasion of Iraq ‘came out of the ground like a mist following the change of temperature on 9/11’. He added: ‘I think it became clear to all of us that nothing short of decisive intervention in Iraq was going to satisfy the Americans.’
Allen’s comments quoted at the opening of this chapter came when he was asked about his personal assessment of the government’s pre-invasion knowledge of life in Iraq under Saddam, for example the country’s cultural and ethnic divisions. There was a sense, he said, that Britain was heading towards a tough war that was not something that anybody welcomed.
It was tantalizing evidence. In common with the evidence by all MI6 officers, it was given in private with the transcripts released later. They were heavily redacted, and the MI6 witnesses were identified only as SIS1-SIS6. Allen was first identified as SIS4 by a number of clues, notably his
confident manner and elegant, and at times pointed, turn of phrase. The Chilcot inquiry never confirmed that SIS4 was Allen. Nor did it deny it.
In their evidence to the inquiry, witnesses painted a picture of an MI6 in turmoil. In a comment all the more devastating since it came from a former director of GCHQ, Sir David Omand told the inquiry: ‘There was a sense in which, SIS [MI6] overpromised and under-delivered.’ A senior MI6 officer identified as SIS2, said: ‘I absolutely agreed with that judgment. It’s precisely what we did’. Other MI6 officers said Omand had been unfair.
SIS2 described how MI6’s board of directors faced ‘a fait accompli in terms of some decisions that were made, rather than having the opportunity fully to debate them before they were made.’
Asked by Lyne what sort of decisions he meant, SIS2 replied: ‘I’m talking predominantly about conversations that the then Chief of the Service [Dearlove] had with the prime minister and others in Number 10.’ The MI6 officer replied that he did not want to criticize his then boss. However, he told the inquiry: ‘It did mean that occasionally we would find ourselves being told, well, I have spoken to the prime minister and this has happened or that has happened, we are going to do this, we are going to do that.’
SIS2 spoke of ‘undue haste’ in making intelligence reports available to policy makers. Referring to discussion in 10 Downing Street, he described MI6 as ‘flying too close to the sun … a fair criticism would be that we were probably too eager to please’.
Another MI6 officer, SIS1, described one of the agency’s Iraqi informants as ‘a chap who promised the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow’.
He explained: ‘SIS was under quite extraordinary pressure to try and get a better view of Iraq’s WMD programme, and I think we marketed that intelligence – I think this is not original comment – before it was fully validated.’
The MI6 witness identified only as SIS3 told Chilcot that MI6 officers were ‘genuinely annoyed and concerned’, about the way trying to get intelligence on Iraq was handled. He added: ‘It soon became an issue that there was a public portrayal, if you like, of senior intelligence officers, a public portrayal of them as Whitehall courtiers’.
The FO, meanwhile, ‘to all intends and purposes elected to sit things out’, SIS2 told the inquiry.
The FO has a lot to answer f or. So does Dearlove. SIS1 told the Chilcot inquiry: ‘I think the relationships with Number 10 had become quite personalised.’
‘You mean SIS’s relationships at the top?’ asked Sir Roderic Lyne, a member of the Chilcot panel. ‘Yes’, SIS1 replied.
Allen did not entirely agree. Asked if he thought MI6 got ‘too close to the policy making, too involved in Number 10?’, he replied: ‘I think that we may not have been as wise as we would like to have been in retrospect, collectively. I don’t think … that we got too close to the sun. The Icarus metaphor is used time and again. It has limited applicability because Tony Blair was not the sun and Dearlove was not a child with wax wings. They were consenting adults, wrestling with unprecedented policy riddles.’
Allen distanced himself from his then boss, however. ‘This is something which individuals manage in a very individual way. I would have done it differently’, he told the Chilcot inquiry. Referring to Vauxhall Cross, MI6’s headquarters, he added: ‘I believe in a Chief who stays south of the river and is not so easy to get hold of.’
Dearlove, who had been subjected to criticism in the media as well as at the inquiry for being too eager to please Blair, was on the defensive. ‘I’m well aware of the criticisms of me, that I had too close a relationship with the Prime Minister and all this. This is complete rubbish.’ He went on: ‘SIS generally doesn’t “do ministers”. If you are looking up from underneath, you have no idea what the job of Chief is like, particularly when the world is in crisis, which it was, and you are cast in a role where you become a key interlocutor with ministers.’ The following passage in the transcript is deleted.
MI6 officers were also questioned about a claim that Saddam was trying to buy uranium yellowcake from the West African state of Niger for his nuclear weapon programme. The claim was based on forged documents and encouraged by mistaken accounting by a Niger company that supplied uranium to the French nuclear industry.
‘I think the Niger uranium thing was pretty unfortunate really, and I think if desk officers in the Service had had their way, probably would never have seen the light of day’, an MI6 officer told Chilcot, further pointing the finger at Dearlove.
Another MI6 officer told the inquiry that after the invasion ministers were not given ‘the accurate harsh ground truth’. Asked whether ‘we were robbing Iraq to pay Afghanistan’ – British troops were deployed in southern Afghanistan while they were still heavily engaged in Basra – yet another MI6 officer replied: ‘Certainly.’
In devastating, but largely ignored evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, said the invasion of Iraq had confirmed her agency’s worst fears.
Asked whether, in her judgment, the effect of the invasion was ‘to substantially increase the terrorist threat to the United Kingdom?’ she replied: ‘I think because of evidence of the number of plots, the number of leads, the number of people identified, and statements of people as to why they were involved, I think the answer to your question [is] yes.’
She continued: ‘We regarded the threat, the direct threat, from Iraq as low but we did not believe he [Saddam Hussein] had the capability to do anything much in the UK. That turned out to be the right judgment.’
Manningham-Buller added: ‘To my mind Iraq, Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind.’
She was then asked how significant a factor Iraq was compared with other situations that were used by ‘extremists, terrorists, to justify their actions’, Manningham-Buller replied:
I think it is highly significant … . By 2003/2004 we were receiving an increasing number of leads to terrorist activity from within the UK and the – our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – some British citizens – saw our involvement in Iraq as being an attack on Islam. So although the media has suggested that in July 2005, the attacks on 7/7, that we were surprised these were British citizens, that is not the case because really there had been an increasing number of British-born individuals living and brought up in this country, some of them third generation, who were attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and saw the West’s activities in Iraq and Afghanistan as threatening their fellow religionists and the Muslim world. So it undoubtedly increased the threat.
Lyne asked her whether there were other attacks or planned attacks in which she had evidence that Iraq was a motivating factor. Manningham-Buller said:
Yes. I mean, if you take the videos that were retrieved on various occasions after various plots, where terrorists who had expected to be dead explained why they had done what they did, it features. It is part of what we call the single narrative, which is the view of some that everything the west was doing was part of a fundamental hostility to Islam, which pre-dated 9/11, but it was enhanced by those events. Arguably we gave Osama bin laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he wasn’t before.
Lyne pursued his line of questioning. ‘To what extent’, he asked, ‘did the conflict in Iraq exacerbate the overall threat that your Service and your fellow services were having to deal with from international terrorism?’
The reply was clear: ‘Substantially’, said Manningham-Buller. She continued: ‘The fact is that the threat increased, was exacerbated by Iraq, and caused not only my Service but many other services round the world to have to have a major increase in resources to deal with it.’ Sir Lawrence Freedman, military historian and member of the Chilcot panel, asked whether her view was that a war in Iraq ‘would aggravate the threat from whatever source to the United Kingdom?’ ‘Yes,’ she replied.
Parliament and the public were never made aware of MI5’s concerns. It remains unclear how forcefully its officers warned ministers though Home Office, and FO reports that were later leaked showed they shared MI5’s anxieties.
The view from the MoD was different, the Chilcot inquiry heard. The prospect of the army having a significant role in the invasion was described in a note to Blair, hidden in the depths of the Chilcot report, as ‘militarily mouth-watering’. Yet British soldiers were deployed to Iraq with thin-skinned, vulnerable ‘Snatch’ Land Rovers designed for the conflict in Northern Ireland, without appropriate boots, without tanks adapted for desert conditions, without enough body armour and without enough helicopters.
Describing the mindset in the highest reaches of the government, Admiral Boyce, chief of the defence staff at the time of the invasion, told Chilcot: ‘What we lacked was any sense of being at war. I suspec t if I asked half the Cabinet were we at war, they wouldn’t know what we were talking about. So there was a lack of political cohesion at the very top. In Iraq’s case, possibly because some people were not happy about what we were doing anyway.’
The problem before the invasion was compounded because Blair and his closest advisers did not want military preparations to be revealed because it would have alerted parliamentary and public opinion that he was committed to military action even though UN talks designed to avoid a conflict were continuing.
Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, admitted as much. He told the Chilcot inquiry how he went with Boyce ‘to meetings in Downing Street saying, “Look, you have got to get on with this”’. Hoon continued: ‘Equally we were told in a sense, “Calm down, we can’t get on with it whilst the diplomatic process is underway” – we were both made very well aware of the attitude in Downing Street towards the requirement for minimizing publicity and for avoiding the visibility of preparations. So there was no doubt of the fact that we could not go out, either of us, and overtly prepare.’
Boyce told Chilcot: ‘It is important to realise that I was not allowed to speak, for example, to the Chief of Defence Logistics – I was prevented from doing that by the secretary of state for defence because of the concern about it becoming public knowledge that we were planning for a military contribution which might have derailed the activity going on in the United Nations. Why is that important? Because if you are doing an armed operation, you are going to have to take up ships from trade to get your forces out there, you’re going to have a huge amount of logistic planning and to start buying in equipment, which the armed forces didn’t have because they weren’t funded to have ourselves the right level of preparation. Drawing money out of the Treasury is like getting blood out of a stone anyway. That just provided another impediment to fast process.’
Yet Boyce told the Chilcot inquiry he was ‘confident’ that by the time of the invasion, his troops were ‘properly equipped’. Many disagreed. An study led by brigadier Ben Barry sent to the Chilcot inquiry concluded that there were not enough troops, armoured vehicles, helicopters or drones in southern Iraq, the area which Britain was responsible for stabilising. More than three years after the invasion of Iraq, the MoD was still ‘incapable’ of delivering equipment badly needed by UK troops there, Major General Sir Richard Shirreff, commander of British forces in southern Iraq in late 2006, told Chilcot. The failure to provide troops with the resources they needed, specifically, unmanned drones ‘beggars belief’, he said.
In a further damning passage the Chicot report states: ‘It was not sufficiently clear which person or department within the MoD had responsibility for identifying and articulating capability gaps.’
An internal MoD document passed to the Chilcot inquiry bluntly stated: ‘In comparison with the US, the UK military was complacent and slow in recognising and adopting to changing circumstances. It took too long to update our thinking on how to counter the type of insurgency encountered in Iraq, following a relatively benign decade of peacekeeping in Northern Ireland and the Balkans’. The document concluded: ‘MoD is good at identifying lessons, but less good at learning them.’
The Chilcot panel deliberated at length about how they should launch the report. They knew that Blair would respond immediately to criticism laid at his door. The Chilcot team was canny, however. It would be difficult for Blair to get his retaliation in first because of the blanket embargo imposed on the report preventing anyone, including the protagonists, from commenting on it.
Curiously, Blair decided to give a long briefing as soon as the report was released on the morning of 6 July 2016. It did not attract the attention he wanted because it coincided with Chilcot’s televised statement. Perhaps Blair wanted to avoid a shouting match.
The statement by the former Whitehall mandarin made it abundantly clear that his inquiry’s report was far from the whitewash that was so widely predicted. He had carefully prepared the statement with his fellow inquiry panellists. Chilcot did not mince his words.
He began: ‘For the first time since the Second World War, the United Kingdom took part in an invasion and full-scale occupation of a sovereign State. That was a decision of the utmost gravity.’
Saddam Hussein was ‘undoubtedly a brutal dictator who had attacked Iraq’s neighbours, repressed and killed many of his own people, and was in violation of obligations imposed by the UN Security Council’, Chilcot said.
But he added: ‘We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.’
The inquiry, he said, had also concluded that:
• ‘The judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – WMD – were presented with a certainty that was not justified.
• Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated. The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate.
• The Government failed to achieve its stated objectives.’
Chilcot then singled out Blair’s note to Bush on 28 July 2002, containing the assurance that he would be with Bush ‘whatever’.
He added that Blair and Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, blamed France for the ‘impasse’ in the UN and claimed that Britain had acting on behalf of the international community ‘to uphold the authority of the Security Council’. But there was no majority there in support of military action and it was Britain which was ‘in fact, undermining the Security Council’s authority’.
Chilcot said the Inquiry had not expressed a view on whether military action was legal. ‘That could, of course, only be resolved by a properly constituted and internationally recognised Court’, he said. The Chilcot panel cloaked their concern in their report by concluding only that ‘the circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were far from satisfactory.’
Chilcot went a little further in his statement launching the inquiry’s report. ‘The precise basis on which Mr Blair made that decision (that an invasion was lawful) is not clear’, he said. ‘Given the gravity of the decision, Lord Goldsmith should have been asked to provide written advice explaining how, in the absence of a majority in the Security Council, Mr Blair could take that decision.’ That was just one of the occasions when decisions and policy should have been considered by the Cabinet, Chilcot said.
Judgments ab out Iraq’s weapons programme and capabilities in Blair’s statement to the House of Commons on 24 September 2002 and in the dossier published the same day, ‘were presented with a certainty that was not justified’, Chilcot added.
As late as 17 March 2003, Blair was being advised by the chairman of JIC (John Scarlett) that ‘Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, the means to deliver them and the capacity to produce them. He was also told that the evidence pointed to Saddam Hussein’s view that the capability was militarily significant and to his determination – left to his own devices – to build it up further.’
Chilcot stated: ‘It is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments. They were not challenged, and they should have been.’
The Blair government’s denial that the weapons dossier was drawn to ‘make the case for war’ had been directly challenged in written evidence to the inquiry by a senior member of the Defence Intelligence Staff. Major General Michael Laurie wrote: ‘We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.’
Laurie, who was director general in the Defence Intelligence Staff responsible for analysing raw intelligence reports, explained: ‘I am writing to comment on the position taken by Alastair Campbell [Blair’s chief spokesman] during his evidence to you … when he stated that the purpose of the dossier was not to make a case for war; I and those involved in its production saw it exactly as that, and that was the direction we were given.’
Laurie continued: ‘Alastair Campbell said to the inquiry that the purpose of the dossier was not “to make a case for war”. I had no doubt at that time this was exactly its purpose and these very words were used.’
More than a year after the invasion, in October 2004, Blair had conceded in the Commons that though Iraq ‘might not have had stockpiles of actually deployable weapons’, Saddam Hussein ‘retained the intent and the capability’. In the statement launching his report Chilcot said pointedly: ‘That was not, however, the explanation for military action he had given before the conflict.’
Britain’s military contribution to the invasion was not settled until mid-January 2003. Chilcot said: ‘There was little time to prepare three brigades and the risks were neither properly identified nor fully exposed to ministers. Despite promises that Cabinet would discuss the military contribution, it did not discuss the military options or their implications.’
Blair had told the Inquiry that the difficulties encountered in Iraq after the invasion could not have been known in advance. Chilcot said: ‘We do not agree that hindsight is required. The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability, and Al-Qaeda activity in Iraq, were each explicitly identified before the invasion.’
Chilcot continued: ‘Ministers were aware of the inadequacy of US plans, and concerned about the inability to exert significant influence on US planning. Mr Blair did not establish clear Ministerial oversight of UK planning and preparation. He did not ensure that there was a flexible, realistic and fully resourced plan that integrated UK military and civilian contributions, and addressed the known risks. The failures in the planning and preparations continued to have an effect after the invasion.’
Chilcot’s statement added:
More than 200 British citizens died as a result of the conflict in Iraq. Many more were injured. The invasion and subsequent instability in Iraq had, by July 2009, also resulted in the deaths of at least 150,000 Iraqis – and probably many more – most of them civilians. More than a million people were displaced. The people of Iraq have suffered greatly … . The Government’s preparations failed to take account of the magnitude of the task of stabilising, administering and reconstructing Iraq, and of the responsibilities which were likely to fall to the UK.
The UK took particular responsibility for four provinces in the South East of Iraq, Chilcot’s statement noted.
It did so without a formal ministerial decision and without ensuring that it had the necessary military and civilian capabilities to discharge its obligations, including, crucially, to provide security … . Whitehall departments and their Ministers failed to put collective weight behind the task. In practice, the UK’s most consistent strategic objective in relation to Iraq was to reduce the level of its deployed forces … . We have found that the Ministry of Defence was slow in responding to the threat from Improvised Explosive Devices and that delays in providing adequate medium weight protected patrol vehicles should not have been tolerated.
With withering criticism, Chilcot went on:
It was not clear which person or department within the Ministry of Defence was responsible for identifying and articulating such capability gaps. But it should have been. From 2006, the UK military was conducting two enduring campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. It did not have sufficient resources to do so. Decisions on resources for Iraq were affected by the demands of the operation in Afghanistan. For example, the deployment to Afghanistan had a material impact on the availability of essential equipment in Iraq, particularly helicopters and equipment for surveillance and intelligence collection. By 2007 militia dominance in Basra, which UK military commanders were unable to challenge, led to the UK exchanging detainee releases for an end to the targeting of its forces.
‘It was humiliating that the UK reached a position in which an agreement with a militia group which had been actively targeting UK forces was considered the best option available. The UK military role in Iraq ended a very long way from success. We have sought to set out the government’s actions on Iraq fully and impartially. The evidence is there for all to see. It is an account of an intervention which went badly wrong, with consequences to this day.
The Inquiry Report is the Committee’s unanimous view. Military action in Iraq might have been necessary at some point. But in March 2003:
• There was no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein.
• The strategy of containment could have been adapted and continued for some time.
• The majority of the Security Council supported continuing UN inspections and monitoring.
Military intervention elsewhere may be required in the future. A vital purpose of the Inquiry is to identify what lessons should be learned from exper ience in Iraq. There are many lessons set out in the Report. Some are about the management of relations with allies, especially the US. Mr Blair overestimated his ability to influence US decisions on Iraq. The UK’s relationship with the US has proved strong enough over time to bear the weight of honest disagreement. It does not require unconditional support where our interests or judgements differ.’
The Chilcot report said the misleading weapons dossier had produced ‘a damaging legacy, including undermining trust and confidence in government statements, particularly those that rely on intelligence that cannot be independently verified’.
The Commons cross-party Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee drove the point home. ‘The decision to invade Iraq has left an indelible scar on British politics’, it said, adding: ‘The consequences of that decision remain profound for the domestic politics of the UK and the US, and for our relations with other countries, as well as for the stability of the region. The continuing loss of life of Iraqis underlines the failure of the post-conflict strategy.’
The chaotic, truly irresponsible and ultimately disastrous way successive governments over many decades conducted British security and defence policy was brutally exposed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The causes and symptoms had been evident for a long time before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but wilfully ignored by a Cabinet unwilling to challenge its prime minister.
Blair imposed absolute secrecy in the run-up to the invasion. He suggested he did not want to tell the Cabinet about the preparations for war for fear of leaks. Secrecy and closing down debate were the root causes of Britain’s military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and their huge cost in lives and money. The repercussions of these military adventures, which all fed on the fetish for secrecy in running the British state, are still being felt across Europe as well as the Middle East.