Tag Archives: Chilcot Report

Britain, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Terrorism, United Nations, United States

The West has a responsibility in Iraq

mosul

Mosul: Violence in Iraq continues to escalate.

IRAQ

Intro: Recognising the huge human cost that the war is having on Iraq, we must accept and understand that we have an ongoing responsibility to help bring the bloodshed to an end.

Violence still engulfs Iraq. The United Nations has said that at least 6,878 Iraqi civilians were killed in 2016, a number that is most certain to be on the low side because of the unverifiable number of civilian deaths in war zones. And we do not know the full death toll from the ongoing fighting in that country because the Iraqi government has not published the causality figures for government troops and paramilitary forces fighting in Mosul and elsewhere in northern Iraq. It is a tragic toll.

In December alone, 109 civilians perished and 523 injured in Baghdad. These are largely attributed to Islamic State who have claimed responsibility for a string of bombings. But, as IS get shifted out of Mosul and other areas they have controlled, the bombings will only get worse. Fanatics will carry on the fight on the streets of the country’s cities.

Recognising the huge human cost that the war is having on Iraq, we must accept and understand that we have an ongoing responsibility to help bring the bloodshed to an end. Along with the United States we were at the forefront of the regime change invasion of Iraq that has unleashed such a violent insurrection since. Britain cannot be allowed to wash its hands as if now the mayhem has nothing to do with them. It does.

The conclusions of the Chilcot Inquiry found many failings of the UK but was specifically critical of the way in which the U.S. dismantled the security and intelligence apparatus of Saddam Hussein’s army, as well as describing the whole invasion as a strategic failure. Whilst the immediate violence is largely being perpetrated by IS and its fanatics, the West could have served the Iraqi people much better after getting involved.

It is always difficult to stand back and watch merciless dictators with no compunction committing butchery on their own people, but the long-term costs of not thinking through action from the start is now all too clear. Western intervention and the lack of proper military plans in Iraq – in dealing with all that has happened since that ill-fated invasion of 2003 – explains much of what we are witnessing now. Hideous incompetence.

A lesson we still seem not to have learnt in Syria.

Standard
Britain, Government, Iraq, Politics, Uncategorized

Secret advice on Chilcot given by Whitehall mandarins will not be released

Intro: Philippe Sands, QC, queries confidential guidance that left Sir John Chilcot unable to rule on legality of 2003 invasion

Baghdad

Baghdad under attack at the start of the Iraq war in 2003.

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT is refusing to release confidential advice Whitehall officials gave to Gordon Brown about the remit and scope of the Iraq inquiry. This made it impossible for Sir John Chilcot to rule on whether the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was illegal.

The refusal to issue the advice given flies in the face of an information tribunal ruling which has ordered that the material be released. It means the public cannot see what options were considered when deciding on the nature and breadth of the inquiry when it was established in 2009.

The Chilcot inquiry has expressed grave doubts about the war’s legality, but the inquiry, a privy council committee headed by Chilcot, was only charged with learning lessons from the disastrous invasion and was not able to declare whether the war was illegal.

This conclusion would have been available to a judge-led inquiry, a decision that could have been used by those calling for the prosecution of government ministers and officials.

“The Chilcot inquiry’s treatment of the legality of the war is curious,” said Philippe Sands QC, an expert on international law and director of the centre on international courts and tribunals at University College London.

“It claims not to have addressed legality, yet concludes that the UK has undermined the authority of the security council, found that ‘the circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were far from satisfactory’, and obtained 37 independent submissions which point overwhelmingly to the manifest illegality of the war.

“The facts it has found, working diligently over many years, raise the most serious concerns, suggesting negligence, recklessness and possibly even criminality, in circumstances in which more than 150,000 people have died and more than a million displaced.

“We are entitled to know who took the decision to turn the inquiry away from matters of legal responsibility, and why.”

Existence of the advice has emerged from a freedom of information request by a member of the public, whose previous requests to see minutes from two pre-Iraq war cabinet meetings were vetoed by successive governments. That person thought it important to place in the public domain information relating to the setting up of the inquiry, what sort of inquiry it should be, how the panel was selected, how the remit was decided upon and whether there would be supporting legal counsel. Such information would have allowed an evaluation on how effective, or honest, the assurances given to parliament by Gordon Brown in the summer of 2009 were. It would also have offered assurances that the inquiry would be completely independent of government and operate impartially and objectively.

The request was for the disclosure “of all information held by the Cabinet Office relating to how the selection criteria used in recruiting the individual members of the Iraq inquiry panel was decided upon” and “disclosure of information regarding the remit of the inquiry”.

The submission said “there was a public interest in disclosing information that revealed why a decision had been taken not to employ legal counsel for the inquiry or to include a practising lawyer on the panel”.

The information commissioner ruled against disclosure, arguing that it would “very likely … result in a significant and notable chilling effect on the way in which officials advise ministers on matters of similar importance in the future.

“This is because the information … comprises a detailed and candid examination of the various issues and options associated with the establishment of the inquiry.”

This argument was rejected in May by Judge Peter Lane after an appeal to the information tribunal. However, the Cabinet Office has declined to cooperate, saying it has until 30 July to decide if it will appeal the ruling.

A government spokesperson said: “The Cabinet Office is considering the tribunal’s decision and will respond in due course.”

Several theories have emerged as to why the Cabinet Office was fighting disclosure. One reason could be that there is material which would show that the Chilcot inquiry was not founded on ‘independence’ and impartiality.

Another could be that the senior civil service will fight tooth and nail to keep these spaces in which advice is given on policy formulation as being part of their own protected areas of work.

A further reason could be that they are stringing it out until the most favourable time exists to use the ministerial veto.

Standard
Government, Iraq, Politics

The Lessons of Chilcot

Intro: The calamity of foreign-policy laid bare. A number of valuable lessons emerge from the Chilcot Report

THE BRITISH MILITARY spent six years fighting in Iraq; the official inquiry under Sir John Chilcot into how they ended up there has taken nearly seven years to complete. On July 6th, the Chilcot Report containing some 2.6m words was published. Its findings are devastating.

The report highlights that assessments of Iraq’s weapons ‘were presented with a certainty that was not justified’; post-invasion planning ‘wholly inadequate’. The foreign-policy blunder of the century, billed as a war of necessity, in fact was ‘not a last resort’. Chilcot points to several areas where peaceful means should have been pursued and had not been fully exhausted.

The report, which cost millions of pounds to produce over such a lengthy time period, holds many lessons over the invasion of Iraq: the dangers of impetuous decision-making; of failing to plan; and, of making optimistic assumptions and assertions.

Yet, there is also a perception and risk that the wrong lesson may also be learned. As Britain begins the Brexit process of disentangling itself from the rest of the European Union, there is the danger that Britain will turn inward. Not only will the report be read by many as evidence of a badly conceived mission in Iraq, one which was thinly planned and poorly executed, but proof also that Britain and its Western allies should hasten their retreat from the wider world. A knock against liberal values will be damaging.

The first lesson which may be taken from the Chilcot report is that prime ministers should beware commitments that catch up with them later. Tony Blair promised George W. Bush in July 2002 that British forces would join an American-led invasion, wholeheartedly believing the intelligence assessments presented by MI5 and MI6, Britain’s intelligence services, of the chemical and biological weapons programmes held by Saddam Hussein. That subsequently proved to be false. By the time Mr Blair was made to keep to that promise 8-months later, circumstances had changed. Dr Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, wanted more time; and the failure to get a second UN Security Council resolution cast doubt on the legality of action. Mr Blair found himself being propelled into war by the military deadline set by the White House.

The second lesson that emerges is the need for pragmatic realism and planning. A distinct lack of both infected every aspect of Britain’s Iraq-war decision-making. Defence plans were based on a best-case scenario in which foreign troops would be welcomed and embraced as liberators, and it was assumed that a pluralist democracy would replace the Ba’athist system. Nor was there much realism about what influence Britain’s military contribution would purchase from America.

Significant weight was placed on intelligence assessments that went unchallenged, and overly optimistic estimates of troop requirements led to a direct breakdown of order from which the occupation never recovered. A narrative in the report is given, when, in Basra, under-resourced British forces made a ‘humiliating’ agreement with a militia group in which detainees were released in return for a pledge by the militia not to target British forces.

The real danger now is that pessimism rules rather than realism. With the UK retracting from Europe under the Brexit vote, and bracing for turbulence at home, there is a concern that it might take a backseat in geopolitics. To counter that, others will argue that the next government must be active in NATO and by supporting its armed forces and foreign diplomats. As we have tragically seen in Syria, inaction can have dire consequences, too.  A key lesson of Iraq is not that military intervention in itself is wrong but, if that is going to happen, you had better get it right. To resolve instead that countries ripped apart must now be abandoned to their own fate is the bloody legacy left behind from the US-UK led invasion of Iraq.

Standard