Editorials & Other Articles

bemildred

(90,061 posts) Mon Jul 11, 2016, 06:10 AM Jul 2016

Amateur Hour: Britain, Blair and Iraq

The British involvement in the Iraq War began as an ill-considered demonstration of strength in alliance with the US and ended up six years later as a demonstration of weakness.

Much of what is in the Chilcot inquiry was known or suspected before and little is entirely new, but it is important for what happened to be established beyond question and this the report has largely done. It is fascinating to see what started with Tony Blair promising to free the world of the evil dictator, Saddam Hussein, passed through a moment of illusory triumph when the invasion appeared to have succeeded in 2003, and ended in the failure by the British Army to control Basra and Iraq’s four southern provinces.

By 2007 there were no good choices left and Chilcot leaves no doubt about the extent of the defeat. The report says that “it was humiliating that the UK reached a position in which an agreement with a militia group [the Mahdi Army] which had been actively targeting UK forces was considered the best option available”.

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Mr Blair and Britain were looking to take part in what they thought would be a victory on the cheap, but the same could be said of President George W Bush and the US. Given the high reputation of British intelligence because of its triumphs in the field of code breaking in both world wars, it is extraordinary how ill-informed it managed to be about Iraq, including the absence of WMD and the very real threats any British forces were going to face in and around Basra.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/11/amateur-hour-britain-blair-and-iraq/

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Amateur Hour: Britain, Blair and Iraq (Original Post) bemildred Jul 2016 OP

Wrecked Iraq a symbol of stupidity bemildred Jul 2016 #1

bemildred

(90,061 posts)

1. Wrecked Iraq a symbol of stupidity

Reply to bemildred (Original post)

Mon Jul 11, 2016, 06:57 AM

Jul 2016

"Suppose that... the Iraqis feel ambivalent about being invaded and real Iraqis, not (just) Saddam's special guard, decide to offer resistance," wrote British prime minister Tony Blair to US president George W Bush in December 2001, two years before the US and the UK invaded Iraq. At least Mr Blair had some doubts, but neither man could really imagine that the Iraqis would see them as conquerors, not liberators.

Another 13 years have now passed, and at last we have the Chilcot Report, an official investigation into why Britain joined the United States in that invasion. (There is no equivalent American document.) It's a 12-volume study that illustrates just how ill-informed and reckless the planners of that illegal war were, but it doesn't tell us much we didn't already know.

There are some juicy documents about the pre-war connivance between Mr Bush and Mr Blair, like Mr Blair's promise in 2001 that "We are with you, whatever." But there is comparatively little on the scale of the disaster that the invasion inflicted on innocent Iraqis: 13 years of war, up to 600,000 Iraqis killed and a country effectively destroyed. So this is a good time to recall the fate of the city of Fallujah.

Fallujah was a city of a third of a million people, less than an hour's drive west of Baghdad, that was occupied by US troops in April 2003. It was the first place where American troops fired on Iraqi civilians (they were protesting against the takeover of a local high school by the US 82nd Airborne Division). It had fallen under the control of Iraqi resistance forces by the end of the year. That was the "First Battle of Fallujah".

http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1032757/

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