It was at once both intriguing and infuriating to watch Tony Blair before the Chilcot Inquiry panel. Part of the frustration was generated by the docility of the board in questioning Mr. Blair. But much of it stemmed from the fact that Blair remained unrepentant and ever self-righteous about a war that had gone tragically wrong and to which he committed his country long before the matter came to a head in 2003.
Blair even lied about the fact that already a year before the war he was in favor of “regime change.” Documents released in Britain show that before 9/11, he offered his support for removing Saddam Hussein “when the circumstances were right.” He remained defiant about his decision to go to war and argued that Saddam, intent on carrying on with his WMD programs, “was a monster who threatened the region and the world. I do genuinely believe the world is safer as a result.”
The testimony also revealed that Blair, the Prime Minister of the former imperial power that literally invented Iraq (if not the entire Middle Eastern political geography) after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, did not think through the full consequences of this war. According to Blair, “people didn’t think that al-Qaeda and Iran would play the role that they did.”
In other words, Blair did not think that a Shiite-dominated Iraq would give Iran vast opportunities to increase its influence—especially once the Americans refused the offer made to them by Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami in April 2003 to settle all outstanding issues between the two countries. Resentful or fearful of Iran, Blair came very near to calling for military action against that country in his testimony.
Blair could not fathom that the disenfranchised Sunnis of Iraq, as well as all those Sunnis in the region infuriated by the invasion, would respond to al-Qaeda’s call. For someone who claimed that “after September 11, the calculus of risk changed,” such shortsightedness strikes me as quite an admission of incompetence.
There is one element in Blair’s testimony that can and should be taken seriously. The historical verdict on the war may yet be different. The war did have a revolutionary impact. By unseating the regime in Iraq, the Americans and the British, along with their junior partners, changed the social basis of political power in Iraq.The Iraqi Shiites and Kurds ascended at the expense of long dominant Sunnis. This had both social/political and strategic implications because of the Iran connection in neighboring countries. In the end, 30 years from now, the Iraqi experiment may turn out right, but then the question will remain whether the cost in lives, treasure, calamity was worth the result.
Still, the exercise in Britain to go to the bottom of the decision-making process about Iraq is an important one. An exercise I hope will be repeated in the United States as well. Not only because there are eerie similarities in the way both governments/administrations used what turned out to be false pretenses to go to war.
In both countries the democratic checks and balances seriously malfunctioned, the media were far too quiescent and international law arguably was stretched to the limit. The war undermined the authority of international law, debased Western claims to be the custodian of universal principles, and delegitimized Western discourse on human rights, democracy, and liberal internationalism. Those responsible for this misadventure and its aftermath ought to be held accountable for their deeds and exposed.
If we talk about the shift of power from West to East these days, the financial/economic crisis is only part of the reason. The Iraq war took away (or seriously undermined) the West’s right to set the rules and demand compliance from other countries on the basis of liberal values. The humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq and Abu Ghraib may prove to be far more damaging to Western interests, from this angle, than Saddam could ever be.
