Chilcot tells us what we already knew – How do we Implement?
Decisions to go to war don’t just analyze whether we can win. That is the easy part: the superiority of the western military machine makes this an absolute.
Did we really need 2.6 million words and 7 years of investigations to be told we should be making better decisions when we go to war? Oxford Research Group and many colleagues writing for openDemocracy were clear before the decision was made to invade Iraq – as is now so clearly stated in the Chilcot report – that it would intensify the risks of internal strife and Al Qaeda activity in Iraq. But there was no room for adversarial voices as a small sofa cabal of advisors to Tony Blair were already convinced of the war’s efficacy.
The Chilcot report now clearly states that all peaceful options were not exhausted prior to the invasion, and it is time to learn lessons from the myriad mistakes that were made. Over the last decade the UK has been involved in three major military engagements, now characterized as ‘strategic failures’. The mechanisms and reasoning behind these decisions to go to war have been exposed, by a series of ex post facto inquiries including now the Chilcot Inquiry as well as published memoirs of political and military figures. They have all highlighted that the way decisions were made were inadequate at best, and, at worst, dangerous for UK and global security and certainly for the people of Iraq.
These wars have also shown the current system of presenting the information to those at the heart of decision-making to be inadequate, not fully considering the consequences, and to many looking like a rubber-stamping exercise. The case of Iraq has highlighted the ways in which limited access to classified intelligence was combined with little engagement with relevant experts who understand the history, culture and the mindset, in short how the Iraqi people would react to our invasion of their country.
Decisions to go to war, as proved in Iraq, have devastating consequences and therefore those in positions of power and influence need to do their homework thoroughly and understand what it will mean to the people they are invading. Prior to the Iraq invasion, deluded and myopic narratives about “liberation” were peddled amongst politicians. Chilcot is clear that the judgments about the severity of the threat... were presented with a certainty that was not justified. Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated. Decisions to go to war are analysed through our own political lens, more often coloured by how we wish to see the world and not how it is. For this reason we have to identify where people are psychologically, and not behave as if they are where we want them to be. Without a deep understanding of the region, its culture and how the people are thinking, we are likely to make a big mess.
We convinced ourselves that American troops and their partners would be welcomed by the Iraqi people but the legacy of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny was not factored in. Exacerbated by years of western sanctions, it was inevitable that, even after the fall of the authoritarian dictator, there would be huge needs for retaliation and the avenging of wrongs that had been suppressed. Tyranny was soon to give way to anarchy.
We convinced ourselves that the Iraqi people would see us as liberators. We failed to remember the impact of sanctions that had a devastating impact on health education and the economy. We also forgot that after the first Gulf war the Kurds had been encouraged by George Bush to rise up against Saddam Hussein – yet he failed to intervene to support them. Saddam subsequently used chemical weapons against his people in Halabja. We might need to ask why the people would trust us after this experience? Again Chilcot says the circumstances in which it was decided that there was a basis for UK military action were far from satisfactory.
War decisions sometimes have to be taken swiftly, an obvious case being Libya when Gadaffi threatened an assault on Benghazi. In the cases of both Iraq and Afghanistan however, the government did not need to take hurried action. There was time for wide-ranging discussion and rigorous consideration. Non-military options were never seriously explored with a proper analysis of the after effects of long-term intervention? As Chilcot identified in his statement, the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Chilcot is now clear there was not proper planning and preparation. The consequences have caused huge insecurity and to a country where many would now prefer the harsh authoritarian government of the Hussein years to the chaos of today.
The postwar reconstruction plan precipitated Iraq’s decline into chaos and yet again demonstrated how out of touch the US decision-making process was with the real experience of the Iraqi people. Most Iraqis had not consented to this reconstruction experiment, nor to being occupied by foreign forces. The plan that was implemented was a de-Ba’athification process, in which thousands of professional people would lose their jobs at a stroke, including doctors and schoolteachers.
In practice, the “reconstruction” became more like a witch hunt. It fragmented the very core of the country’s infrastructure, with the disbanding of the security forces and the sacking of its civil servants. This reckless act of dismissing all those who had been employed by the previous regime planted the seeds of the insurgency, and many of those who had been Saddam Hussein’s army and now found themselves unemployed took their weapons with them. Many of those who were in positions of leadership in the Iraqi military later transferred their skills to the leadership of Islamic State.
The ensuing violence and fragmentation of Iraqi society into sectarian conflict demonstrated the lack of proper, disciplined, strategic thinking about the consequences of the intervention and a failure, according to Chilcot, to appreciate the magnitude of the task. Those involved in the planning process failed to imagine what conditions needed to look like to make the people feel safe, apart from the need to address issues of Iraqi security immediately. The risks of internal strife…regional instability and al Qaeda activity in Iraq were each explicitly identified before the invasion and yet were ignored in the UK ‘s Prime Minister’s messianic attempt to curry favour with the US President.
Decisions to go to war don’t just analyze whether we can win. That is the easy part: the superiority of the western military machine makes this an absolute. Military superiority is the easy first step, but creating and sustaining the peace is the real work. We did not exhaust all peaceful options first, and there is little evidence that we have made this commitment subsequently.
The fog of war and peacemaking is often extremely hazy, erratic and unpredictable. With I million people displaced in Iraq and at least 150,000 killed, the UK government needs to carry some of the burden of shame. Unless we learn the lessons of our own litany of mistakes, peacemaking will become even harder to achieve. If we do not fully understand the implications of our interventions, we can win the war and lose the peace.
Gabrielle Rifkind is the Director of the Oxford Process Oxford Research Group and co-author of The Fog of Peace: The Human Face of Peacemaking (IB Tauris, 2014).
