Jul 9th 2016

Tony Blair’s Day of Reckoning

by David Coates

David Coates holds the Worrell Chair in Anglo-American Studies

The very long (and indeed very long awaited) report of the Chilcot Inquiry was finally published in London on July 6th. Set up in 2009, its much-delayed arrival allows us one last large-scale public examination of the key event that so profoundly destabilized the modern Middle East – namely the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. It enables us to ponder again the arrogance of the Bush Administration in Washington, and of Tony Blair’s New Labour Government in London; and to ask – in relation to the latter – why did Blair do it? Why did Tony Blair join so enthusiastically in the neo-con inspired overthrow of Saddam Hussein?

Sadly, the Chilcot Inquiry does not fully answer that particular question, though it gives us many of the elements that such an answer inevitably needs. The Inquiry’s task was different: to report on what exactly happened in relation to Iraq between 2002 and 2009, and in what sequence, rather than to report on why that sequence occurred, or whether its outcome was in any sense a legal one. But from within the parameters set by its own restricted terms, the Chilcot Inquiry drew a string of scathing conclusions, in the process criticizing a previous British prime minister with a severity that is unprecedented in recent British politics. Sir John Chilcot might speak[i] in the quiet and understated manner of the career civil servant that he was, but that did not stop him or his team from speaking truth to power in a quite remarkable fashion.

There are lessons in what he said, and in the memories he stirred, which are of great value not simply to a British audience, but to an American one as well.

I

The Chilcot Inquiry simply declined to accept Tony Blair’s 2003 justifications for the invasion of Iraq; and by implication, declined to accept the justifications offered by the Bush Administration as well. Both Bush and Blair presented the invasion as essential and timely, and its immediate results as desirable and worthy of support. The Inquiry concluded, to the contrary, that the timing of the invasion was premature: “that Britain chose to join the US invasion before peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted.” It suggested that the case for invasion presented to the House of Commons by Blair in September 2002 was an inadequate one – that the dossier used in September of that year to build the case for war did not support the Blair claim that Saddam Hussein had an expanding program of chemical and biological weapons. The clearest summary of the Report’s lengthy findings, available from both the BBC[ii] and The Guardian[iii] in London, includes the following.

• That there was no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein in March 2003; that a strategy of containment could have been adopted and continued for some time; and that the judgments about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – WMDs – were presented to the House of Commons by Tony Blair “with a certainty that was not justified”.

• That despite explicit warnings to the prime minister from his intelligence sources and others, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated; and the planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam were wholly inadequate. One result: that in spite of the heavy casualties involved both immediately and thereafter, the UK government failed to achieve its stated objectives. Whatever the invasion of Iraq was or was not, it was not a success story.

According to The Guardian, “the report also demolished Blair’s claim made when he gave evidence to the inquiry in 2010 that the difficulties encountered by British forces in post-invasion Iraq could not have been known in advance. ‘We do not agree that hindsight is required,’ Chilcot said. ‘The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability, and al-Qaida activity in Iraq, were each explicitly identified before the invasion’.”

II

In making these judgment calls long after the events themselves, the Chilcot Inquiry  reinforced what was well recognized at the time by the bulk of Blair’s critics – namely that the UK’s involvement in the Bush Administration’s ill-judged and falsely-justified invasion of Iraq was very much Tony Blair’s own decision – and a very poor one at that. And there were critics of that decision even before it was made – lots of them indeed. More than a million people marched through London to oppose the war before the invasion actually started; and in the weeks and months immediately following the military action, buyer’s remorse built up quickly in the minds of many of those supporting the invasion as the reasons given in justification of invasion turned out to have been misplaced. Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader of the Labour Party in the UK, spoke for many of those critics in his response[iv] to the publication of the Chilcot Inquiry report, when he apologized for the invasion to the families of the troops killed/injured because of it, and to the many more Iraqi families whose lives have been forever changed by what Bush and Blair together decided to do.

As the Chilcot Inquiry report serves to remind us, there were problems for Tony Blair from the outset about the timing of the invasion, about the adequacy of the reasons given to justify it, and about the credibility of a prime minister taking the UK to war on the basis of those inadequate justifications. These were problems, all of which were well and truly evident at the time.  It was obvious to many people then, and the Inquiry team now, that the Blair rush to war was the product of a particular fusion of his world vision and temperament with a political system in which determined prime ministers can exercise excessive degrees of personal autonomy. And as was noted at the time, it was a fusion that created its own enormous problems.

 Blair claimed that the invasion of Iraq was a just war, his critics that it was just a war.[v] Blair claimed that the invasion was vital to stop the use by Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction: his critics that, in the absence of those weapons, the invasion was a mistake heard around the world,[vi] one whose negative repercussions reverberate to this day. Blair claimed that the invasion could not be delayed – Hussain’s weapons could get in the wrong hands, and anyway the troops were already deployed and must be used or stood down. Stand them down, his critics said: why rush to war when the UN inspectors are simply asking for more time, and when no successful vote for a second UN resolution is on the horizon?[vii]

                 

III

Thanks to the Chilcot Inquiry, we now have a fuller record of how the decision to invade was arrived at, implemented and later justified. But what the Inquiry does not give us – because it was not its brief to do so – is a full and clear understanding of the underlying causes of the events it details. But we have known those causes too from very nearly the onset of the invasion itself. They were extensively discussed at the time in – among many other places – a study of Blair’s War published in 2004; and because those causal drivers have not entirely gone away, they too are worth visiting here in at least summary form.[viii]

It is worth beginning any explanation of the Blair decision to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Bush in 2003 – his decision to insist privately to him that “I will be with you, whatever,” – with the recognition that Blair had first inserted himself as a key Bush supporter immediately after 9/11. Indeed, it is matter of record that leading figures in the Bush Administration did not initially welcome that insertion, or know precisely what to do with it. But they soon found out. They soon discovered just how good an advocate for their positions Tony Blair could be on the world stage – so much better indeed than Bush himself – which is why in consequence the UK prime minister then found himself traveling from world capital to world capital, building for Washington a coalition of the willing designed initially simply to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and to deny al Qaeda safe havens in Afghanistan.

But once so mobilized as the Bush Administration’s leading traveling salesman, Tony Blair found himself rather drawn to the job, and in any case was unable or unwilling to step back/aside when what was being sold in Washington DC subtly changed. From being an outside ally, Tony Blair found himself increasingly sucked into the role of an internal player, heavily invested in the debate inside the Bush Administration between those who wanted to use 9/11 to complete unfinished business from the first Gulf War and those who did not. “The fucking crazies have taken over the asylum,” Colin Powell told Jack Straw, the UK’s foreign secretary, in an unguarded moment in 2002;[ix] and Tony Blair was in there with Powell, trying to keep the crazies under some degree of UN control. This, from Blair’s War:

What seems to have happened to the New Labour Government as the events leading to the invasion of Iraq unfolded was that in part they became victims of their own prior statements. Having argued in Texas in April 2002 that there were certain regimes in the world that were too dangerous to be left in place, and that it was essential that the international community act to contain or remove them, by early 2003 Tony Blair had reached the moment he had long tried to postpone. He had reached the moment at which the dilemma written into the linkage he laid out in April could be avoided no longer – the moment, that is, when the condemned regimes were still in existence but the multilateral coalition to remove them was not. How then to jump? Had the status of the regime been changed by the absence of an international will to remove it? No, of course not. Was the regime too dangerous to leave in place? Blair was on record as saying so. So the case for unilateral action won, as it were, by default. Blair did not want to act without UN backing, but he couldn’t get that backing; and he had argued himself into a corner in which inaction against the regimes being criticized was no longer a possibility.

 

Tony Blair took the UK to war alongside the United States in March 2003 because by his public statements he had locked the UK onto a path of confrontation with Iraq, by standing alongside the US in its condemnation of the Iraqi regime. It was not a path from which escape was then possible without loss of face, and without imperiling the relationship with the US to which he had given unique priority and on which he was prepared to surrender New Labour’s commitment to multilateralism and, if need be, his party’s fortunes. Nor was it a path from which escape was possible without bolstering the self-confidence of the Iraqi regime that both the US and UK governments claimed was so dangerous. So the UK went to war in a comedy of errors, locked into a sequence of events that its Government had worked so hard to avoid. Comedies of errors of this kind can be avoided in the future, of course, by the early adoption of verbal restraint. They can be avoided, that is, if and to the degree that, whenever next the US singles out a rogue state, UK ministers are more cautious in their opening statements. But similar ‘comedies’ (really tragedies of course) will occur nonetheless, unless UK governments in addition make a sharp break with the ‘unique UK world role’ arrogance inherited from the imperial period, the very arrogance indeed that led Tony Blair to put the UK on that US-specified path in the first place. The best way to avoid  ‘accidents’ of the Iraqi war kind happening again, that is, is to make a sharp break with the mind-set that generated this one.

IV

Tony Blair spent a full afternoon this week – the Wednesday afternoon following the release of the report in the morning – apologizing publicly for many of the consequences of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, whilst continuing to defend the legitimacy of the process that led him to join George W. Bush in authorizing it. It was a pretty desperate, thin and ultimately unconvincing afternoon performance – the inadequacy of which is everywhere evident in the image of a beaten-down Blair that adorned the front pages of the UK press on Thursday,[x] and in the string of critical editorials and reporting which accompanied the image.[xi]

For there is no easy way to deny the persistence and the ubiquity of the shadow thrown forward by the grievous mistakes made by the Bush Administration and the Blair Government in 2003; and that shadow is, of course, no minor affair. It still entirely dominates international relations, homeland security, and public policy on a raft of issues from immigration control to welfare reform.  For what Bush and Blair started, no one has yet found a way to end. The ‘mission accomplished’ by the invasion of Iraq turned out not to be the creation of a stable democratic Iraq, liberated in the manner of a Germany or a Japan in 1945. It turned out instead to be the destabilization of an entire region, with the arrogance of those invading that region in 2003 being matched only by their ignorance of the conditions they were actually destabilizing.

So no matter how often Tony Blair now denies it, or George Bush simply declines to discuss it, it remains the case that the full horrendous cost of their lethal fusion of arrogance and ignorance when in office is being borne today by the civilian populations of the Arab world, and by the families of the many casualties of the war and terror that the invasion released.  And because the scale and scope of those costs is so vast and so apparently permanent, the call will inevitably appear again, in the wake of the publication of the report of the Chilcot Inquiry, for particular individuals to stand trial. The call will come – indeed it already has[xii] – for those who took us to war in 2003 to be tried both for the war crimes they orchestrated and for those which their policies subsequently released – if not the invasion, then the rendition; if not the decision, then the deceptions used to justify it. And why not? African dictators, after all, regularly receive such trials at The Hague these days, the better to discourage dictators in Africa in the future. So why not Bush, Cheney and Blair as well, for similar reasons here?

Yet in that particular rush to personal judgment and blame, there is one reason at least for some caution and wider reflection. For those subject to the excesses of dictatorship – in Africa and elsewhere – can at least legitimately claim that they were not consulted ahead of the crimes being committed in their name. They can claim that their hands are entirely clean and their consciences entirely  clear. But neither the Anglo-American political class not their electorates can be so easily excused, or excuse themselves. If we are to avoid Chicot Inquiry equivalents in years to come, it is the ignorance and arrogance that we all carry that now needs to be both investigated and held to account.

The Bush/Blair mindset that left them so confident about their right to rearrange other people’s political furniture in a country far removed from their own is a mindset that has not gone away: and it needs to. We would all be horrified if some outside power turned up in either Washington or London, set on using military force to change the entire political order. Indeed, the British celebrate their resistance to Hitler in 1940 on precisely those grounds, as do the Americans do in relation to the British themselves, on every 4th of July. It is surely time, therefore, for all of us to break decisively with the double standards that sit at the center of the imperial mindset that produced the invasion of Iraq, and seek instead a world order built on the principle of doing unto others only what you would have them do unto you. And where better to start that search than back at the United Nations whose potency for global good was another immediate casualty of the Bush/Blair rush to war in the heady days of 2003?

First posted, with full academic citations, at www.davidcoates.net


[v]David Coates, “A just war, or just another of Tony Blair’s wars?’ in A. Bartholemew (ed), Empire’s Law, London, Pluto Press, 2006, pp. 282-296: Available at:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Coates+Blair%27s+War&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=CT57V8XSH-eQgAaGvLO4Bw#q=David+Coates+A+just+war

 

[vi] David Coates and Joel Krieger, “The mistake heard around the world: Iraq and the Blair legacy,” in Terrence Casey (editor), The Blair Legacy: Politics, Policy, Governance and Foreign Affairs, Polity, 2009, pp. 247-59. Available at:

 https://www.rose-hulman.edu/~casey1/BAB-Coates-Kreiger.pdf

 

[vii] David Coates, “The still unanswered question – why did we rush to war?’ Greensboro News and Record, February 22, 2004: Available at  www.davidcoates.net/opeds/The%20still%20unanswered%20question.pdf

 

[viii] From David Coates and Joel Krieger (with Rhiannon Vickers), Blair’s War. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2004, pp.125-28: available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blairs-War-David-Coates/dp/0745633595

 

Browse articles by author

More Essays

Jun 27th 2020
An essay about the "the enormously influential 1940 'Head of Christ' painting by evangelical Warner E. Sallman" pictured below.
Jun 17th 2020
EXTRACT: "The diverse, non-human life forms that live in our guts – known as our microbiome – are crucial to our health. A disrupted balance of these contribute to a range of disorders and diseases, including obesity, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease. It could even affect our mental health..... It’s well known that the microbes living in our guts are altered through diet. For example, including dietary fibre and dairy products in our diets encourages the growth of beneficial bacteria. But mounting evidence suggests that exercise can also modify the types of bacteria that reside within our guts."
Jun 13th 2020
EXTRACT: "Bonhoeffer’s life holds an important lesson for us today, regardless of our religious affiliation or lack thereof. And simply put it is this: you are called upon; you are called on behalf of your neighbor. When you are called to be responsible that is not an obligation which you can decline, discharge or acquit yourself of – it is an infinite responsibility, a “forever commitment” as Charles Blow recently put it. And we all must be prepared to make any sacrifice necessary when we are called."
Jun 11th 2020
EXTRACT: "People differ substantially in how much they’re affected by experiences in their lives. Some people seem to be more affected by daily stress, or the loss of someone close to them. On the other hand, some people seem to get through the same experiences relatively unscathed. Similarly, some people benefit strongly from counselling, or having a support system of close family and friends. Others seem better able to manage on their own. But understanding why some people are more sensitive than others isn’t just a question of how they were raised, and the experiences they’ve been through. In fact, previous research has found that some people in general seem more sensitive to what they experience – and some are generally less sensitive."
Jun 7th 2020
EXTRACT: " The root causes of anthropogenic climate change – which has led to the endangering of countless species across the globe – cannot be adequately grasped in isolation from the technological application of modern science. While Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was certainly justified in calling upon American legislators to “unite behind the science,” neither can we overlook the culpability of science in bringing about the environmental crisis. "
May 23rd 2020
EXTRACT: "The QAnon movement began in 2017 after someone known only as Q posted a series of conspiracy theories about Trump on the internet forum 4chan. QAnon followers believe global elites are seeking to bring down Trump, whom they see as the world’s only hope to defeat the “deep state.” OKM is part of a network of independent congregations (or ekklesia) called Home Congregations Worldwide (HCW). The organization’s spiritual adviser is Mark Taylor, a self-proclaimed “Trump Prophet” and QAnon influencer with a large social media following on Twitter and YouTube."
May 23rd 2020
EXTRACT: "The aim of my research for the Understanding Unbelief programme was to investigate the worldviews of non-believers, since little is known about the diversity of these non-religious beliefs, and what psychological functions they serve. I wanted to explore the idea that while non-believers may not hold religious beliefs, they still hold distinct ontological, epistemological and ethical beliefs about reality, and the idea that these secular beliefs and worldviews provide the non-religious with equivalent sources of meaning, or similar coping mechanisms, as the supernatural beliefs of religious individuals."
May 22nd 2020
EXTRACT: "Psalm 91, for example, reassures believers that God will protect them from “the pestilence that walketh in darkness… A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee”.............Luther was a devout believer but insisted that religious faith had to be joined with practical, physical defences against sickness. It was a good Christian’s duty to work to keep themselves and others safe, rather than relying solely on the protection of God. "
May 22nd 2020
EXTRACT: "Evidence from this study shows clearly that eating foods rich in flavonoids over your lifetime is significantly linked to reducing Alzheimer’s disease risk. However, their consumption will be even more beneficial alongside other lifestyle changes, such as quitting smoking, managing a healthy weight and exercising."
May 5th 2020
EXTRACT: "It’s possible that the answers to questions like, “how do I live a virtuous life?” or “how do we build a good society?” are not the same as they were a few weeks ago."
May 2nd 2020
EXTRACT: "Strangely, those with strong beliefs tend to be admired. The human mind hates uncertainty, so it is comforting to be told what to think, and to form settled opinions. But it is not rational. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Apr 21st 2020
Extract: "Humans, Boccaccio seems to be saying, can think of themselves as upstanding and moral – but unawares, they may show indifference to others. We see this in the 10 storytellers themselves: They make a pact to live virtuously in their well-appointed retreats. Yet while they pamper themselves, they indulge in some stories that illustrate brutality, betrayal and exploitation. Boccaccio wanted to challenge his readers, and make them think about their responsibilities to others. “The Decameron” raises the questions: How do the rich relate to the poor during times of widespread suffering? What is the value of a life? In our own pandemic, with millions unemployed due to a virus that has killed thousands, these issues are strikingly relevant.
Apr 20th 2020
Extract: "If we do not seize this crisis as a moment for transformation, then we will have lost the war. If doing so requires reviving notions of collective guilt and responsibility – including the admittedly uncomfortable view that every one of us is infinitely responsible, then so be it; as long we do not morally cop out by blaming some group as the true bearers of sin, guilt, and God’s heavy judgment. A pandemic clarifies the nature of action: that with our every act we answer to each other. In that light, we have a duty to seize this public crisis as an opportunity to reframe our mutual responsibility to one another and the world."
Apr 16th 2020
EXTRACT: "Death is the common experience which can make all members of the human race feel their common bonds and their common humanity."
Apr 7th 2020
EXTRACT: "A crisis such as this one demands that we exercise what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the ‘public use of reason’ – as opposed to merely the ‘private use of reason’ where, briefly put, the expert, the specialist is tasked with resolving a defined problem. The private use of reason is sufficient when we are dealing with a problem that can be solved by simply applying the appropriate expertise...............The public use of reason asks: how we are defining the problem? Is our definition – our conceptualization of the problem – perhaps part of the problem itself? Is this pandemic solely a problem of public health, or is it also a problem of extreme economic inequality? ..............Since this crisis began, the greatest failure of the administration is not the denial, the lies, the lack of preparedness, but the inability to rally and unify the nation against this common threat, the lack of genuine leadership – Trump’s utter inability to bring the nation together."
Apr 5th 2020
EXTRACT: "Rarely has an architectural experiment aroused such extremes of ire and admiration. One side is convinced the house is a masterpiece. The other expresses brutal condemnation of the entire project (leaky roof, danger of flooding, too-hot, too-cold interiors depending on the American Midwest weather).........Farnsworth encapsulated her personal ambiguity in her comment to a Newsweek interviewer: “This handsome pavilion I own is almost totally unworkable.” She told one journalist, “ … all I got was this glib, false sophistication. The conception of a house as a glass cage suspended in air is ridiculous.”
Apr 1st 2020
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effects of Good Government fresco, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.
Mar 29th 2020
EXTRACT: "The coronavirus crisis has forced us to look at our behaviour in a way that we’re not used to. We are being asked to act in the collective good rather than our individual preservation and interest. Even for those of us with the best of intentions, this is not so easy."
Mar 23rd 2020
EXTRACT: "In March 2020, my sister Nancy and I did something that, as scholars, we had never done before: we wrote about ourselves, comparing our own experiences receiving cancer care on either side of the Atlantic. As we recently reported in the BMJ, much of our experience is similar. As twins, we both have the same form of cancer. Both of us received excellent treatment in well-established university teaching hospitals. Both of us are now in remission. But there is a glaring difference. Nancy lives in the US, covered under a good private healthcare scheme. I live in the UK, covered by the NHS."
Mar 21st 2020
EXTRACT: "In philosophy, individualism is closely linked with the concept of freedom. As soon as restrictive measures were imposed in Italy, many people felt that their freedom was threatened and started to assert their individuality in various ways. Some disagreed with the necessity of cancelling group gatherings and organised unofficial ones themselves. Others continued to go out and live as they always did. We often assume that freedom is to do as we choose, and that is contrasted with being told what to do. As long as I am doing what the government tells me, I am not free. I am going out, not because I want to, but because that shows I am free. But there is another route to freedom..........."