This book explains a decision for war. Britain’s participation in the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was a momentous choice. ‘Operation Telic’ was the country’s first military-strategic failure since the withdrawal from Aden and South Arabia in 1967,1 its largest scale combat since Korea in 1950, its most failed outcome since Suez in 1956, and its most polarizing campaign since the South African war of 1899. Iraq was a hinge event in British political life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It is never far from audits of how Britain’s public life lost its way. Britain has waged preventive wars before, ‘first strikes’ to destroy distant perceived threats. Yet these anticipatory campaigns are distant memories within very different conflicts: the invasion of Iran in 1941 during World War II, to prevent Axis disruption of oil supplies to the Soviet Union, and the bombardment of the Dano-Norwegian fleet at Copenhagen in 1807 to deny it to Napoleon Bonaparte. This smaller war was born of great ambition. As a move to topple a regime, reconstitute a state, change a region, influence a superpower and interrupt a hypothetical danger, as a war intended to be both precautionary and revolutionary, it was a landmark. It is also part of the present. At the moment of writing, a set of resulting crises straddling Iraq and its neighbours draws multiple states into collision. The wars energized by the war have no end in sight. With a large archive of documents and testimonies now unearthed, we can better ask what happened and why, and discern its warnings. The battle over the war’s memory continues. ‘All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.’2
Looking back, a reckoning with the campaign is not easy. People killed, died, and suffered for it, for disappointing results. To question the war is to doubt the value of sacrifice. And the very process of learning from history is a fraught and losing struggle. Our species has tried to educate itself through history, yet has failed often to prevent similar disasters. From the confusion of historical analogies, error can flow. Again and again, the mythologized memory of Nazi Germany and Munich has moved modern policymakers to identify adversaries as Adolf Hitler, to cast themselves as Winston Churchill, and to assume decisive quick victory. Major powers retain a propensity for self-inflicted wounds. They inflate threats and choose wars that are more costly and difficult than they realize. We have been here before. Studies of the United States’ conflict in Vietnam (1961–75) did not arrest George W. Bush’s drive for war in 2003. Five years before Iraq, Fredrik Logevall wrote a magisterial account of Lyndon Johnson’s fateful decision for major escalation in Vietnam in 1965. He feared that ‘something very much like it could happen again’ if permissive conditions arose, that ‘soldiers will again be asked to kill and be killed, and their compatriots will again determine, afterward, that there was no good reason why.’3 So it went. But we have to try.
In March 2003, Britain joined a coalition led by the United States to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical Ba’ath regime. Though not the most powerful state in the coalition, Britain was central to the war’s articulation and rationale. The invaders overthrew Iraq’s regime in three weeks. This came after twelve years of frustrated attempts to coerce Baghdad into verifiable disarmament, to contain it’s ruler’s aggression and shield the peoples he preyed upon, and to induce the ruler’s downfall. They struck partly in the name of counter-proliferation, to destroy an arsenal of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) that turned out to be non-existent. They struck partly to disrupt a perceived gathering threat, a potential union of terrorism, destructive weapons technology, and ‘rogue states’. And as I argue, these were intensely ideological days. At its core, the war was one of ideas, large and real. Iraq was one front in the ‘Global War on Terror’, declared after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to destroy ‘terrorism’ itself by spreading a liberating alternative. The invasion was supposed to help spread free markets and democracy. It was supposed to spearhead the emancipation of the Greater Middle East, to correct the conditions that spawned security threats. It was meant to accelerate the resolution of the Arab–Israel conflict and the birth of a Palestinian state. It was supposed to plant a wealthy, democratic, and compliant state in the heart of the Middle East. And in London, it was intended to strengthen and confirm British influence over the American superpower, to tame Washington and tie it into an international system that it might abandon. ‘Operational Telic’ was a war of many dreams. Warmakers articulated those dreams with disastrous eloquence.
‘Telic’ draws from the Greek telos, meaning ‘direction’ or ‘purpose’. It is the unintended consequences, however, that the world must live with. The toppling of Saddam bred disorder, and disorder led to bloodletting. It killed and maimed hundreds of thousands. It displaced millions who fled the country. It cost billions of pounds and trillions of US dollars more than was expected. It precipitated sectarian warfare and the influx of Sunni Islamists. By destroying a regime that had given up its chemical and biological weapons and abandoned its nuclear and ballistic missile programme, the war struck a blow against the cause of disarmament—not for the last time—by implicitly demonstrating to other hostile states the value of nuclear deterrence. It upended a rough balance of power in the region, empowering Iran. Iraq was not the only generating event behind today’s turmoil in the Middle East. But it helped drive both sectarian strife and a geopolitical cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. As an effort to project and increase power, the war instead consumed it.
Worse than a crime, the war was a blunder. The blunder led to defeat. In March 2017, the unveiling of a memorial in Whitehall to the wars in the Gulf and Afghanistan underscored a tragic failure. One photographer captured a lonely former Prime Minister Tony Blair sitting Aztec-faced among chattering royals, officers, and dignitaries. The carefully crafted liturgy mentioned ‘duty’ and ‘service’, but never victory. This has the taste of ashes. If not defeat—and some find the notion crude—the campaign’s result was at least a barely acceptable stalemate. In August 2007, with the city of Basra imploding around Britain’s overstretched forces in southern Iraq, with dwindling domestic support and demand for the bolstering of embattled positions in Afghanistan, Britain’s MI6 station chief quietly negotiated a deal with a senior leader of the Iranian-backed Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) paramilitary force, the ‘Mahdi Army’ that was besieging British bases. The militia agreed to stop targeting the British military in exchange for the release of detainees from British custody. British troops were permitted to withdraw from Basra Palace to the refuge of the airport without the loss of life, a withdrawal the militia graciously policed en route.4 UK ministers framed this pullback as an efficient handover to Iraqi state security forces and the culmination of an effective operation. But as Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned the House of Commons after the Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940, it would be wrong to assign this deliverance ‘the attributes of a victory’.5 When an army charged to oversee the creation of a new state must retreat to safe passage under the cover of night, and only with the permission of a private force, obtained with bribes, that is humiliation. Basra’s Shia militia subsequently brought the whip to uncovered women, intellectuals, and merchants, and a revived black market. These dividends of Britain’s failed stewardship were only reversed later by a joint Iraqi–US offensive of March 2008, launched with Britain sidelined. Britain’s mission was supposed to democratize the state, emancipate women, and unite Iraqis above confession and ethnicity, and affirm the UK’s strategic value to Washington. The results were perverse. Like other conflicts waged for wildly unrealistic aims in far peripheries, it exposed the deadliness of good intentions and the limits of Western power.
This book was conceived in the summer of 2016, a bitter season in British politics. I worried that Iraq would be part forgotten, and part mis-remembered. If humans are creatures of memory, they are also tempted to forget. I feared that upheavals since the Iraq War—like Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union—would overshadow it. The long and painstaking inquest, the ‘Chilcot’ Iraq Inquiry, published its report in an hour when the Brexit fallout was all-consuming. Granted two days of parliamentary discussion over the Inquiry Report, only fifty MPs out of 650 took part in discussion on day one, falling at times to fifteen or twenty. Some decision-makers welcomed the diversion. Two foreign ministers who once pressed the case for military action, Jack Straw and Colin Powell, wished the matter gone. In leaked correspondence, Straw allegedly wrote that Brexit had a ‘silver lining’, reducing ‘medium term attention on Chilcot’, which has ‘faded altogether’.6 Powell noted gladly that Chilcot barely registered in Washington. Others also call for a process of forgetting. In making the case for military adventures today, those who carry the flame of warlike idealism talk of Iraq as a ‘shadow’7 that we must escape, or ‘move on’8 from, lest its memory arrest Britain’s inclination towards heroic internationalism and morally charged military action. To linger over Iraq might induce ‘isolationism’, some warn, as though a concern for prudent war avoidance is tantamount to cancelling trade, aid, or alliances.9 On 29 March 2006, a group of British writers, journalists, and scholars issued the ‘Euston Manifesto’, insisting that
the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted—rather than picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention.10
‘Rubble’, ‘shadow’, ‘move on’—this is the euphemistic language of amnesia. To encourage the forgetting of Iraq’s memory would not only breach civic duty to commemorate the dead. It would do a disservice to the living and unborn, especially given that the war’s consequences are still with us. The Euston group wished to separate the issues of whether to intervene and the commitment to Iraqi liberation, but the two questions are inseparably linked. The difficulties of remaking a state after breaking it, and the violence this can unleash, points back to the original question of whether to break it to begin with. Part of ‘proper concern’ for any conscientious citizen is precisely to argue over intervention, and argue again. Whether or not to take up arms is the ultimate political question. It will not leave alone countries that possess the capability to project power. We therefore must pick through the ‘rubble’ of the past. The rubble contains fragments of history, and history is the only guide we have. We are not entitled to ‘closure’.
For the war is still with us. Our choice is whether to confront it, or wish it away. The war’s notoriety, the gap between promises and reality, sets the terms and vocabulary of debate through which we contest the use of force: ‘regime change’ and ‘exit strategy’, ‘forty-five minutes’ and ‘mushroom cloud’, ‘shock and awe’ and ‘war of choice’, ‘mission accomplished’ and ‘poodle’. As well as language, the seductive ideas that powered the invasion outlived the retired decision-makers, and are still with us. Under later governments, the ideas that drove the venture inflicted further mischief, from the chaos wrought by intervention in Libya to Western sponsorship of an Islamist-infected rebellion in Syria, to an escalating crisis triggered by threats of preventive war against North Korea. Expectations that the end of the Blair era meant the curtailing of adventures in ‘regime change’ proved naïve. The next government would assist a revolution in Tripoli and a failed one in Damascus, with results that were not uniformly excellent. As before, the reigning ideology, of transforming ‘ungoverned space’ through benevolent force, could return. This makes the inquest urgent.
I also wrote this book from fear that the war’s memory would be reduced, turned merely into ‘Blair’s war’, or into a tactical exercise about how to wage ambitious expeditionary wars better, ‘next time’. Indeed, a counter-narrative has now formed, interpreting the Iraq War as a lesson in the need to be more determined to project military power, not less. Some find error not primarily in the war’s launching, but its ending. They pin failure on Western abandonment and premature withdrawal, treating the state of Iraq as the West’s to lose. On the other side of the divide, critics fixate too much on one actor, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the ‘Blairites’, isolating culpability and exonerating others. This was Britain’s war, not just Blair’s. It was carried by assumptions widely shared and which outlive the warmakers, it held a quiet majority of support in the country, it was endorsed by a free vote in the House of Commons, and by a decisive margin. The glib catch-cry ‘Not in My Name’ has no place in a responsible democracy.11
My attempt to interpret Iraq does not spring from personal involvement. Iraq is as personal as it gets for those who were directly affected. For many others, it was a puzzling and seemingly faraway event. The state encouraged citizens to support it but mostly as passive consumers of events. For some of us, Iraq seemed desperately important, as it would be consequential over time and space. As a student of international security, Iraq was the defining political event of my lifetime after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Working on the academic staff at the British Defence Academy, the daily implosion of Iraq in the autumn of 2006, bombings, kidnappings, and rampant criminality, was a sobering rebuke to the ambitions of the war party. That people I knew who were rotating in and out of Iraq lent added pathos to the issue. Ultimately, Iraq was the decisive point in my own political thinking, towards an aversion to utopias and a wariness of the implicit danger of militarism in liberal foreign policy.
Given this background, I cannot pretend to a personal detachment. Even with arcane subject matter, pure value-free objectivity is impossible. Dispassion is all the more difficult with such a wrenching history. Yet the obstacles to objectivity do not license historians to tell stories without worrying whether they are true. Subjectivity should be resisted, not indulged. I attempt to counterbalance any subjectivity in my account by reconstructing the strongest possible case for the invasion, both with and without hindsight knowledge. In order to grasp what drove the decision, I try to perform a double act, attempting to empathize with those who rolled the iron dice, while retaining enough distance to exercise a clear-eyed judgement.
This book takes a hammer to the war’s rationale and the dogmatism and muddled thinking at its heart. At the same time, it is offered as a reproach to the anti-war movement. Opposition to the war was a broad church. Its ranks included the honourable and the conscientious. Those at its commanding heights, though, did not properly confront the dilemmas before them, and their popular slogan ‘not in my name’ suggested disengagement rather than engagement with the question. As Brendan O’Neill observed, ‘Protesting wars today seems to be a way to cleanse one’s private conscience rather than effecting public change—a case of opting out instead of getting stuck in and having the hard arguments.’12 Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, set on the day of the mass protest, captured the point. As his character Henry Perowne observes, ‘All this happiness on display is suspect … If they think—and they could be right—that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.’ Perowne puts his finger on the war’s central dilemma: ‘The price of removing Saddam is war, the price of no war is leaving him in place.’13 This book argues for why leaving him in place was the ‘lesser evil’.
At the hands of some critics, the Iraq War became a canvas onto which they projected their discontent with the New Labour project and modern life generally, overstating the sudden rupture that Blair’s war inflicted on a once green and pleasant land. Peter Oborne, for instance, claims that:
The British people used to trust the British State. This trust is the magnificent legacy of World War Two, when we united in common sacrifice to confront fascism. Ever since then, we have regarded our state as ultimately decent and benign. We have understood that civil servants owed their loyalty to the state (symbolically expressed as the Monarch) rather than political parties or sectional interests. It was also understood that there was a secret state which was unaccountable through normal democratic means. This was tolerated because we felt that British intelligence officers … were decent, patriotic people. This trust in the state was shattered by the Iraq War, and its gruesome aftermath. We have learnt that civil servants, spies, and politicians could not be trusted to act with integrity and decency and in the national interest.14
Oborne’s picture of a once-trusting country losing its faith because of a single military campaign is strikingly ahistorical. Earlier history contained crises of confidence over the integrity of the state, from abuses of power in Northern Ireland to the Brixton and Poll Tax riots to industrial unrest, to long declines in political participation, to the general crisis-ridden decade of the 1970s. Oborne’s explanation, that suddenly a gang of bad people took over the country, and that spies, officials, and elected leaders in 2003 were oblivious to any concept of the national interest in a sudden fall from their predecessors’ patriotism, is pantomimic. Oborne himself, who admits earlier branding the Major government of the 1990s as ‘rotten’, reflects a broader tendency to romanticize the past and villainize the present.15 This tells us little about why the Iraq War was actually fought, and what we should learn.
Above all, the book is a self-reproach. My response to the war was fraught and flawed. Opposed at first, I became a supporter as the violence intensified in Iraq. I was hopeful about the possibilities given life by the fall of Saddam, mindful of the fascistic nature of al-Qaeda and the Ba’ath insurgents, and repelled by the toxic anti-Americanism and ‘anyone but Washington’ spirit so endemic in sections of the anti-war movement. I believed those in the family of hawkish idealism, the neoconservatives and liberal hawks, were right on the main point, that the West should not have to choose between tyranny and chaos in the Middle East—indeed, that Western-sponsored tyranny had fed the Islamist beast and unleashed chaos. The hijackers on 9/11 were not Afghan but Gulf men, products of oppressive orders—theocratic, or kleptocratic—that had spawned Wahhabi fanaticism and winked at the Islamist groups who had unilaterally declared war on us all. Given those roots, 9/11 and its aftermath warranted an ambitious project to transform the Arab-Islamic world. I was moved by the eloquence of the hawkish idealists Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Fouad Ajami, and Norman Geras. This was poor judgement. It was born of an attraction to the elegance of ideas over their practical utility, an overestimation of Western power, a disregard for the wildness of war and its unintended consequences, an ahistorical attachment to Munich-Churchill-Hitler analogies as the universal guide to security problems, and a blindness to the historic deadliness of good intentions. Even if a revision of the West’s relationship with the Middle East is in order, an ideological crusade to reorder the region at our convenience is no kind of answer. It should not have taken a disaster to grasp these realities. As we will see, some in the ‘war party’ maintain that the chance of liberating Iraq and the region was ‘worth’ the vast human price inflicted. Such claims are too reminiscent of Bolshevik ‘eggs and omelettes’ rationalizations, which also failed. Others argue that victory was at hand, only to be squandered by feckless defeatists, an argument too reminiscent of Weimar-era alibis for another disastrous preventive war.
Before we begin the diagnosis, two further points of justification are needed. In the course of preparing these arguments, a persistent accusation arose that this is an exercise in ‘hindsight’, and implicitly, that our position of ‘looking back’ should limit criticism. This is a widespread but defective view of our relationship with the past. Firstly, given the current lack of time-travel capability, it is difficult to examine and judge the past from any other vantage point. Secondly, criticisms of the doctrines that led to war are not purely hindsight creations. The arguments I make here were anticipated and made at the time by concerned observers and participants. Most importantly, we are trying to learn something from the past, to guide decisions to come, always a difficult exercise. That is an exercise both in empathy and criticism. To abandon that task is to tell stories with no purpose.
Conversely, there is another common response, regarding the inquest into Iraq as a waste of time and resources, because the folly of the decision was ‘obvious’. The fact that the Iraq Inquiry, launched in 2009, took seven years to complete and issue its report, and followed three other inquiries,16 induces a widespread ‘Chilcot fatigue’, the dismissal of the inquest as a waste of time,17 and the desire to reduce Iraq into a sad story that needs consigning to history. That attitude certainly is born of a hindsight distortion. If the imprudence of the Iraq War seems strategically and morally obvious today, it didn’t seem so to many at the time. More than most crises, the Iraq War presented a choice of agonies. To oppose the invasion was effectively to argue for continued management of the status quo, which was a bloody one. More people favoured invasion than they care to remember. People remember opposing it, but a plurality of Britons supported it at the time, albeit mostly in muted form, according to twenty-one polls carried out by YouGov between March and December 2003.18 The Economist that later judged it ‘obvious’ that occupying Iraq made international terrorism worse, that reported the ‘damning’ conclusion that an adapted strategy of inspections and containment could have succeeded, is the same journal that in February 2003 called for Saddam to be disarmed by force if necessary, because alternative strategies had failed.19 Iraqis too are divided on the issue, and they most bore the brunt of war’s negative consequences.20 Many resent what happened to the country in the wake of Saddam’s fall, yet are glad he fell, and the question of America’s withdrawal divides them on largely sectarian lines.21 Evidently, for those involved, the question is a complex one. Internationally, there was no global consensus at the time. Opinion was conflicted and fluid. The coalition assembled by the United States, that lent diplomatic and material support, was larger than the one that fought the Korean War. It had the support of half the member states of the European Union. Its ranks numbered South Korea, Poland, Japan, Australia, Italy, Spain, Georgia, and the Czech Republic, and after the first phase, New Zealand troops, German money, and Canadian trainers. Mongolian soldiers also came, descendants of Ghenghis Khan the sacker of Baghdad, who this time aimed ‘to rebuild Iraq’.22 Even if we accept the dubious proposition that we can evaluate the wisdom of decisions by ‘counting heads’, there wasn’t overwhelming international opposition that critics imply. If many thought differently about Iraq then, and warnings went unheeded, that is a matter of important historical inquiry.
The history of Britain’s Iraq War is still being written. Far from an exhaustive account of the whole episode, this book is about the most fundamental decision: whether to take part. I explain the decision, critique it, and offer a broader caution, rooted in realism, against warlike idealism, to guide more prudent decision-making in future. It is not an account of how the campaign was rescued. Rather, it asks how Britain got itself into a campaign that needed rescuing in the first place.