States of Matter. Surviving Chilcot

The UK’s long running official inquiry into the 2003 invasion of Iraq published its report on July 6. Except where myopic clerics insisted on a day’s deferral of Eid-ul-Fitr, people of the Muslim faith were just then ending their month-long Ramadan penance.

That was pure coincidence. But there was no denying the linkages between the invasion of Iraq and the month of brutality just ended. And by far the worst in a catalogue of atrocities in the name of faith occurred in Baghdad on July 3, where multiple bombs in a busy shopping area killed over 250, just as people began to gather after the day’s fast.

John Chilcot, the long-retired civil servant who headed the Iraq inquiry, began his half-hour summary of a 2.6 million word report, by noting the linkages between the carnage in Iraq and the 2003 invasion. Accountability was not within his terms of reference, but there was little ambiguity over the person he was calling to account.

In a statement to the Commons shortly after the report was published, Prime Minister David Cameron carefully avoided any mention of his predecessor Tony Blair, and declined to apologise on behalf of the British government. Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn denounced the rush to war, urged that legal sanctions be initiated and apologised on behalf of the Labour Party while paying homage to the 179 British military personnel and “hundreds of thousands of Iraqis” who had perished.

Corbyn did the decent thing, but he had just defeated an internal rebellion by Blair loyalists. The Labour parliamentary contingent remains bitterly opposed to Corbyn, unreconciled to the strong support he enjoys among the wider party membership. Shortly after he spoke, Labour MP Hillary Benn — recently sacked from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet — took the floor to repeat Blair’s tired old alibi, that ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein was a worthy end. Expectedly, in a press conference after the publication of Chilcot’s report, Blair himself invoked the long-dead dictator at every awkward juncture.

Sentiment was very different on the streets of Baghdad. Kadhim al-Jubouri earned his few moments of marquee fame that April day in 2003 when the US military spearhead arrived in Baghdad city, taking a sledgehammer to a statue of Saddam Hussein. Blair’s remorse was not long coming. As reported by the BBC’s Baghdad correspondent, al-Jubouri today is traumatised by the chaos, nostalgic for the old days: “It wasn’t like this under Saddam. There was a system. There were ways... Saddam never executed people without a reason. He was as solid as a wall. There was no corruption or looting, it was safe”.

Blair’s only moral claim against history’s verdict collapses under briefest scrutiny. The Chilcot inquiry was commissioned by his successor Gordon Brown towards the end of his tenure, to stop an alarming slide in the Labour Party’s credibility. The favoured alibi till then on both banks of the Atlantic, was one of faulty intelligence which pointed towards vast stockpiles of chemical and nuclear weapons in Hussein’s possession.

Those symmetric pleas advanced on behalf of Blair and his senior partner, then US President George Bush, only held because the intelligence agencies were willing to embrace the lesser sin of incompetence to evade the larger one of criminality. It was a brittle claim, decisively shattered in May 2005, when media reports emerged of the intelligence services being tasked with creating the casus belli where it clearly did not exist.

The Chilcot inquiry records that on 23 July, 2002, the head of the UK’s external intelligence service, Richard Dearlove, reported after a visit to Washington, that there had been “a perceptible shift in attitude”. Military action was “seen as inevitable” and the object was to “remove Saddam”. The conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction would be the justification, and “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”.

Six days after this briefing, Blair wrote an epistle to Bush that must be regarded as a classic vow of fealty by a serf to his master: “I will be with you, whatever. But this is the moment to assess bluntly the difficulties. The planning on this and the strategy are the toughest yet”.

In other words, the template used by the Atlantic axis in earlier civilisational wars would not work in Iraq. That did not restrain a determined effort by British intelligence and counterparts in the US, to deliver the fabrications the political leadership demanded. As the bellicosity mounted, Blair sought the comfort of UN authorisation, which was not proffered beyond a point. All the intelligence that the war camp presented to the UN, was called out as faulty or forged, well before the invasion.

The Chilcot inquiry does not diminish Bush and Blair any further than they have already fallen in public esteem. It blows away every justification but fails to offer in its copious pages, any explanation for their obsessive pursuit of war. That explanation would have to look at the precarious economic state of the US in the early years of the Bush presidency. It would have to consider the foundations of the “special relationship” and how the UK’s prosperity itself hinges on the brokerage of speculative financial flows into US markets. That relationship has not changed, even with the 2008 financial meltdown. It will certainly be roiled by the UK’s recent referendum on leaving the European Union. The political fallout of Chilcot’s report adds another dimension to that complexity.

Sukumar Muralidharanis an independent writer and researcher based in Gurgaon

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