But it would be a further six years before Britain's combat operations came to an end. Keith Fidler kisses his wife Cynthia, as their son Kolin looks on, during a homecoming ceremony in New York, April 8, 2011 for the New York Army National Guard's 442nd Military Police Company's return from Iraq, Tony Blair meeting troops in Basra in January 2004. Comments will be moderated before posting to ensure logical, professional, and courteous application to article content. Dissenters believe the Bush administration, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, intentionally misled the American public in order to secure holdings for the oil industry. Over the years, the suspicion that he did has hardened into certainty. The views expressed are those of the authors, and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense. The Daily Mirror, then edited by Piers Morgan, ran the headline: “Blair the poodle has become the Dog of War.” Sir Christopher Meyer, who was present in Crawford as Britain's Ambassador to the US, formed a similar view. “The conversation helped cement the closest friendship I would form with any foreign leader. The book is worth the price alone for the portion of chapter three where Porter dissects and dismisses the argument proffered by Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry—largely intended to spare the reputation of liberalism—that a realist triumvirate of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz drove the United States into Iraq. At 1.46pm British time, a Boeing 767 passenger airliner had hit the north tower of the World Trade Centre in New York. What Game of Thrones Can Teach Us About the Real Wars to Come. That the Iraqis chose not to have US forces stay on is routinely lost in the debate about the Obama administration’s withdrawal and the question of “who lost Iraq.” Without a new SOFA, there was no mechanism for US troops to stay in Iraq without literally being the illegal occupiers we claimed they never were. An early estimate was that 10,000 were dead. Perhaps they should have been able to make more rational judgments, but Blunder didn’t convince me that their failings weren’t due to basic fear and paranoia as opposed to the overpowering draw of the specific ideas the book explores. In his introduction, he rightly notes that his is not a definitive text nor can it be. But as written, at the time, it’s a better, more compelling breakdown of why Saddam was a threat than Colin Powell’s UN speech. the decision to invade Iraq CHRISTOPH BLUTH* The decision to go to war against Iraq with the United States was and remains without doubt the most controversial foreign policy act of a British govern-ment in many decades. The war resulted in the toppling of the Iraqi government led by Saddam Hussein. None of the hijackers who carried out the 11 September attacks was Iraqi: they were all from Egypt or Saudi Arabia, but in autumn 2001, a story emerged that their leader, Mohammed Atta, had met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. The history of the Iraq War will continue to be written as additional information becomes available and as its consequences are fully explicated. No, it wasn’t because of WMDs, democracy or Iraqi oil. The diplomatic half of this mission was a startling success. Porter has largely convinced me that Iraq could not have been “done better”; less certain is whether the United States—with or without British aid—should’ve definitively known better. At various points, the book is a testing ground—and a harsh one—for many of the explanations and counterfactuals that have since been proffered for why the war didn’t achieve the desired results. She resigned the following May. That unwavering commitment was arguably the most important decision that Tony Blair ever made. Most remember Bush pausing during his address to Congress on September 20, 2001 to specifically thank him. He was not lying. There is a long-awaited, 2.6-million-word answer. Even when Saddam Hussein's regime killed thousands of Kurdish villagers with an aerial poison gas attack on Halabja, in northern Iraq, in March 1988, the British government took six months to express its disapproval, and took no further action. While the US publicly maintained neutrality during the Iran-Iraq war, it privately attempted to forge a better relationship with the government of Saddam Hussein. Then the south tower also collapsed, and there were reports of a fourth plane crashing near Pittsburgh. In its place has come the assignation of blame to a handful of advocates, often obscuring the range and depth of support for removing Saddam that existed across a variety of political movements and ideologies. War profiteers! They organised an anti-war rally in Hyde Park on Saturday 28 September, with Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone among the speakers. That the book came not from the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute, but rather the Brookings Institution underscores the diversity of views that supported removing Saddam Hussein from power. Even if there had been, the West's record in relation to Saddam Hussein was inconsistent. Almost twice that number said they would support action if it was authorised by the United Nations. As part of chapter two’s extended discussion on the inherent hazards of regime change, for example, Porter goes into depth on de-Baathification, one of the supposedly “fatal steps” taken by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Though not without weight, intellectual concepts often took a backseat to more basic impulses in the American case. Government officials knew that, but did not correct the error. How Lib Dem MPs voted on the Iraq War (1st vote) Hansard, 18 March 2003 The second vote was the main government motion, to use "all means necessary to ensure the disarmament of Iraq… British troops are not in a combat role in Iraq but are on the ground with coalition partners providing training and equipment to Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and Kurdish Security Forces (KSF). It began on March 20, 2003 and ended on December 18, 2011. The Issue: How did Britain join the 2003 Iraq War, if there were no nuclear weapons or other ‘WMD’ in Iraq? If the US and UK go to war, it may be just another way of provoking Iraq to use their weapons against us. "Fr If the UK were to attack Iraq, coming in from the north had clear advantages; the area was more stable than the south and contained many of the oil fields that needed to be protected and secured. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. From the transatlantic perspective, was he ultimately less a friend and more an enabler? It’s something that any supporter of the war—including this writer—needs to wrestle with: Could the Iraq War have achieved better ends if it was simply “done better”? British troops are not in a combat role in Iraq but are on the ground with coalition partners providing training and equipment to Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and Kurdish Security Forces (KSF). The specifics of how America went to war can and should continue to be investigated. Porter sees President Barack Obama’s role clearly, or more accurately he sees that there was a role for Iraqi free will in deciding not to renew the Status of Forces Agreement (or SOFA) that allowed American forces to operate on Iraq’s territory. Required fields are marked *. Most Americans thought he was. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the first stage of the Iraq War. If Britain and Blair’s particular storyline isn’t your specific interest, the book still holds value due to the architecture Porter constructs to support his investigation. Read more Tony Blair 'should be stripped of honours' if Chilcot says he lied. Ultimately, it was, of course, wrong and Pollack has since conceded that he was working off flawed intelligence data. This essay proceeds to compare and contrast the various aspects of the Just War Theory with the causes and outcomes of the war against Iraq in order to determine whether the war conforms to the theory. “TB said that we had to help the US, that they could not go it on their own, that they felt beleaguered and this would be tantamount to a military attack in their minds,” Campbell recorded in his diary. Britons reject Blair support for war with Iraq by JONATHAN OLIVER, Mail on Sunday Tony Blair risks a backlash from the British people if he joins America in a war against Saddam Hussein. The balance of opinion, the exact mixture of fear and confidence, were moving heavily in one direction from that point.” In short, while ideas were the combustion in the engine that drove Britain into Iraq, for the US side they were simply grease in the already-moving gears of war. The nature of the relations between Iraq and the UK and US in the aftermath of the Gulf War is important as it gives the context for understanding the excessive confidence in the assessments derived by intelligence analysts on Iraq’s WMD capabilities. A Leader’s Guide to Conducting Research Staff Rides, Striking the Right Balance: How Russian Information Operations in the Baltic States Should Inform US Strategy in Great Power Competition, From SAR to GFA: The ABCs of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, Competing for Connections: Authoritarian Powers’ Use of Cyber and Influence in Latin America, Call for Submissions: Polar SOF Essay Contest, Without Firing a Shot: Coercion and Strategy in an Era of Great Power Competition, Announcing MWI’s 2020–21 Fellows and Adjunct Scholars. Yet in order to have lied, Blair would have had to have known that Saddam Hussein really had ordered the destruction of Iraq's stockpile of illegal weapons. To many people the entire case against the war is encapsulated in the two words: “Blair lied.” To doubt that he lied is to be an apologist for war. The realities of Iraq’s internal political history always made the proposition of “breaking” that state and rebuilding it to Western specifications a dubious one. Armend Nimani/AFP/Getty Images) It … Blunder questions whether that affection was warranted. It’s to his credit that in a decisive fourth chapter he actually makes as strong and convincing a case for going to war in Iraq as you’ll find—before turning around and offering an even more powerful rebuttal. The most obvious reason for going to war with Iraq would be a regime change. The American public took their cue from the top. Blair knew that he was going to have a delicate job persuading Labour MPs, if not the public, of the case for invading Iraq. On the one hand, he allows that the 9/11 attacks had changed the calculus for decision makers, unsure as they were if the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC were in fact one-off aberrations or part of an oncoming wave. The White House said that the document would have to be analysed to see if it was credible. The problems were in the other half of the mission, when it came to producing evidence that Iraq still held WMDs. It was arguably a longer, bloodier failure than the Iraq war, but it was never as damaging to Blair's standing at home. This leads to one of Porter’s most biting insights: for many in Britain, Tony Blair is what the neo-cons have become in the United States—a catch-all scapegoat for the Iraq War, far from blameless, yes, but also not the sole cause it’s comforting to see them as. They did not lash out. ”This is disgusting, totally disgusting,“ he told Alastair Campbell. After that drama there was a period of deceptive quiet. The police put the number at 150,000; the organisers claimed 350,000, including 100,000 Muslims. To challenge British policy requires interrogating US assumptions and doing so entails a discussion of a range of possibilities and debates—both before and after the war. He considered sacking her, but decided not to, which proved to be an adroit move. On 20 September, Bush made a speech to Congress that was televised live and watched by 80 million Americans. He had handed in his resignation a few minutes earlier, and had slipped out of Downing Street through a side door, much to the discombobulation of Clare Short, who was still making up her mind. The Prime Minister made frequent telephone calls to President Bush, and spoke regularly to other heads of government...but the success of that diplomatic activity owes much to the expertise and professionalism of many British diplomats and officials.”. (To cite just one example that now seems almost unfathomable, the New Yorker actually ran an editorial in favor of invading Iraq in February 2003.) The real reason is much more sinister than that. Since France was a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Paris's opposition ruled out any prospect of a UN-backed invasion. Moreover, other US partners—including France and Germany—would suffer no long-term damage in political relations with Washington despite openly opposing the Iraq invasion. The dodgy dossier that mattered was the one presented to Parliament on 24 September 2002 by Tony Blair, who told MPs that it proved that “the weapons of mass destruction programme is not shut down; it is up and running now. All that remained was to see how many other governments could be persuaded to endorse what had, in effect, already been decided. Similarly, with the British invasion force also in position, Blair was not going to renege on his promise to stand ”shoulder to shoulder“ with the USA. There was an element of political calculation in Blair's stance. There was nothing in the UN rules which said that a member government could be overthrown by military force because its ruler was a tyrant. “The accumulation of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq poses a threat, a threat not just to the region but to the wider world, and I think George Bush was absolutely right to raise it,” Blair told the Australian Broadcasting Company in February 2002. Equal parts engaging and grinding, Porter navigates the path to war in London during 2002 and early 2003 with the rigor of a forensic coroner reconstructing a murder. “Interrogate” is the right word for how the book proceeds. Documents . His first meeting was with the head of MI5, Stephen Lander, and the chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett. Even so, the coalition that drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait in 1991 did not include in its war aims the overthrow of Saddam Hussein or the ending of civil rights abuses within Iraq. Many believe the war was unsuccessful in its aim to deter terrorist activity. On 7 December - the very day that the New York Times reported that the US would have assembled enough manpower and military kit in the Gulf to launch an invasion in January - the inspectors were handed a 12,000-page declaration asserting that there were no WMDs left in Iraq. While the book is primarily focused on Britain’s path to war, one of the many reasons Blunder succeeds is it has no delusions about how the United States itself got there or why, a subject that understandably must be addressed to fully understand Britain’s position in 2002 and early 2003. Within Parliament, opposition was muted, because the Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, was as committed as the Prime Minister to backing the US. On 8 November 2002, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1441, which gave the Iraq government “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.” Though it did not specify what would happen if Iraq failed to comply, or who would make that judgement, getting the resolution adopted was all the same a considerable achievement. But it would be a further six years before Britain's combat operations came to an end. This was a first in British history. Regime change, rogue states, and “the blood price” form Blunder’s core curriculum, as it were, but numerous other debates and arguments about the war are assessed and broken down along the way. The Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict that began in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition that overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein.The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the occupying forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. But one thing that is clear is that the fog of post-9/11 trauma played no small role in both the nation’s and the administration’s willingness to fight. The fifth chapter of The Threatening Storm is a detailed and sober accounting of Saddam’s conventional and possible WMD capabilities. Bush was truly invested in democracy promotion and in the strategic idea of remaking the Middle East politically to “drain the swamp” that allowed terrorism to fester. At 232 pages, Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq is a surprisingly short text yet a remarkably layered one. Author . Here are the main events before, during and since the conflict. The following day, Tony Blair took the unprecedented step of going before Parliament to seek approval for going to war. After the Crawford summit, British intelligence and the diplomatic corps knew what they had to do - they had to persuade the UN Security Council to issue an ultimatum that put the onus on Saddam Hussein to prove that his country held no WMDs, with the implied threat that if he failed, military action would follow. In total, 456 UK troops lost their lives in the conflict - a death rate much higher than that of the conflict in Iraq, or the Falklands war. (It should be noted that while the Watkins memo was sent to Hoon, it has never been established if Blair himself read it.). That was certainly what the accompanying British press pack picked up. The shock of those strikes—coupled with the underrated impact of the contemporaneous (but ultimately unrelated) anthrax attacks—created a cauldron of national fear and anger, not to mention a deep sense of recrimination in the national security community “to never let it happen again.” These were more than sufficient fuel for the American war drive, particularly when combined with the seeming infallibility of military solutions that had seeded itself in the American mindset from the 1991 Gulf War on. The first of these was a brief, conventionally fought war in March–April 2003, in which a combined force of troops from the United States and Great Britain (with smaller contingents from several other countries) invaded Iraq and rapidly defeated Iraqi military and paramilitary forces. It included, for instance, lunch with the senior executives and journalists of the Independent and Independent on Sunday, at the end of which Campbell was invited to go around the table and guess which of those present were for or against the war. The Prime Minister grasped at once that what he was seeing, from the Grand Hotel, Brighton, on 11 September 2001, was seminal, a pivotal moment in world affairs. This takes us into one of the most contentious questions of the whole Iraq debacle - did Tony Blair lie when he claimed that there were WMDs still in Iraq? US perspectives are, admittedly, outside Porter’s formal brief, but they can’t help but play into his analysis. George Bush was told the same thing later the same day by the head of the CIA, George Tenet. In that speech, he had named two dictators the world would be better off without. It was the worst attack America had suffered since Pearl Harbour. One of them revealed to the Swedish head of the inspections team, Rolf Edeus, the ruses that the government had used to deceive the inspectors and conceal their WMDs. In April 2003, after he had launched the invasion of Iraq, George W. … The coalition includes Iraq, European nations and the US. Tony Blair never did.”. Unless or until the Chilcot report proves otherwise, it will also be assumed that Blair hinted or promised in return that if US troops went into Iraq, British troops would be there alongside them. Goldsmith did not want to create problems for Blair, but the lawyer in him had doubts, and the conclusion he came to was ambiguous. The security services would run into heavy criticism within two years, but on day one, they got the story right. Want an ad-free experience?Subscribe to Independent Premium. The inquiry into the UK's role in the Iraq War is publishing its findings. Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), prolonged military conflict between Iran and Iraq. When looking at the biggest reason of why politically speaking the United States went to war with Iraq was because of oil. Yet when he was questioned by MPs in Parliament on 14 September, and a Labour maverick named Paul Marsden mentioned that Nato might bomb countries whose governments were hostile to the US, Blair exhorted MPs to not pay attention to “the wilder pieces of speculation.”. That problem mysteriously resolved itself when Goldsmith had another think, and decided that the impending war was indisputably legal. The issue had come up at a Cabinet meeting on 28 February, when the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, had raised the “unsettling speculation” that Donald Rumsfeld was itching to go to war. Along similar lines, Porter correctly assesses that Iraq was not “abandoned” after the success of “the surge” and the application of more effective counterinsurgency strategies by Gen. David Petraeus. It defined the remainder of his premiership, and would pursue him in his semi-retirement. This myth—reinforced by Adam McKay’s cartoonish, Oscar-nominated film Vice—endures despite having been dispelled by sound scholarship from the likes of the New York Times’s Peter Baker and Princeton’s Julian E. Zelizer. In Pew’s latest survey, as many Americans say the military situation in Iraq is going well as say it is not going well (48% each). Rather than a cadaver, though, his subject is the intellectual underpinnings that played a role in pre-war debates on both sides of the Atlantic and were essential to the case for invasion presented to the British public by the government of Tony Blair. But the intelligence services had no network to speak of within that tightly ruled country, where the death penalty was routinely applied to anyone even suspected of spying. Meyer “was never present at the Bush meeting, wasn't even in the same building; I made no such commitment...”. Out of this circle of deception and self-deception came the formal document that is sometimes referred to as the “dodgy dossier”. Yet at other times, Porter seems to chastise the same policymakers for letting their intellectual beliefs—about rogue states, about regime change, about reshaping the Middle East—get in the way of sounder judgments regarding the threat Iraqi WMD really posed. This policy did not shift when Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran. Blunder doesn’t trade in platitudes or indulge in conspiratorial fantasies but rather lays bare the very real and—in the abstract—noble ideas that fed into the most consequential and destructive war of this century. After a few impromptu remarks to the delegates, Blair took the first train back to London, to meet his security chiefs. World War 3: Will UK go to war? That Britain was more influenced by ideas and less by national trauma will lead American readers to reassess—perhaps harshly—Blunder’s principal protagonist: Tony Blair. Pollack’s book is arguably the most elegant and convincing case ever publicly made in favor of invading Iraq. Because while ostensibly about Britain’s path to war, Blunder really is a discussion of the entire endeavor—intellectual, military, and political—of reshaping the Middle East, in general, and Iraq, in particular, following the September 11 attacks. Sometime long before 19 March 2003 Tony Blair probably made a commitment to GW Bush that Britain would join at attack on Iraq. The Liberal Democrats would harvest a reward for their opposition: at the following general election the number of Lib Dem MPs rose by 10, to 62, the biggest contingent of third party MPs since the collapse of the Liberal Party in the 1930s. He told the Chilcot inquiry: “I am not entirely clear to this day... what degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford ranch.”, Blair replied to Meyer's claims in his memoirs, in language revealing that one of the many complications is that Blair and his people did not trust or confide in the ambassador. “There was no equivocation in his voice,” Bush recalled. US President Donald Trump says he ordered the assassination on Friday of Iran's top general, Qasem Soleimani, "to stop a war." The south tower was hit 17 minutes later. Their reasons were clear, but were mostly based on false intelligence, and misleading information. Much to Blair's annoyance, the Cabinet Secretary, Andrew Turnbull, was insisting that he must have something which he could circulate around the civil service to assure them that there was legal justification for war. He was fretting that George W Bush, under intense pressure to react swiftly, might be driven to do “something irresponsible.”. The decision to go to war against Iraq with the United States was and remains without doubt the most controversial foreign policy act of a British govern-ment in many decades. Control over the Iraqi oil which (in 2003) accounted for quarter of world's oil production and containing more than 60% of world's known reserves. That evening, Cook announced in the Commons, to applause, that ”with a heavy heart, I resign from the Government.“. Iran has vowed to “turn day into night” following the death of one of its most revered military leaders, Qassem Soleimani. Sensibly, Bush decided nothing that day. Grabs or conspiracies about Halliburton ’ s war in Iraq simplest and most intelligible was... 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