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Chilcot Report on Iraq War Offers Devastating Critique of Tony Blair Chilcot Report on Iraq War Offers Devastating Critique of Tony Blair
(about 9 hours later)
LONDON — Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain went to war alongside the United States in Iraq in 2003 on the basis of flawed intelligence that went unchallenged, a shaky legal rationale, inadequate preparation and exaggerated public statements, an independent inquiry into the war concluded in a report published on Wednesday. LONDON — On July 28, 2002, roughly eight months before the American-led invasion of Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain sent President George W. Bush a personal note that alarmed some of Mr. Blair’s top national security aides — and was greeted with relief in Washington.
The long-awaited report by the Iraq Inquiry Committee, led by a retired civil servant, John Chilcot, takes up 12 volumes covering 2.6 million words, four times longer than “War and Peace,” and took seven years to complete, longer than Britain’s combat operations in Iraq. It concluded that Mr. Blair and the British government underestimated the difficulties and consequences of the war and overestimated the influence he would have over President George W. Bush. “I will be with you, whatever,” Mr. Blair wrote, in what appeared to be a blanket promise of British support if the United States went to war to topple Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader. Getting rid of Mr. Hussein was “the right thing to do,” Mr. Blair wrote, predicting that “his departure would free up the region.”
The result amounts to a broad indictment of Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war that overthrew Saddam Hussein and its aftermath, and it portrays Mr. Blair as trying without success to restrain Mr. Bush, to push him to obtain full United Nations Security Council authorization and to warn about the difficulties of the war — and deciding to go to war alongside Washington nonetheless. Fourteen years later, Mr. Blair’s pledge was revealed publicly on Wednesday as part of a voluminous, seven-year official investigation into how and why Britain went to war in Iraq.
Judging that Britain should stand by the United States, Mr. Blair told Mr. Bush in a private note as early as July 28, 2002, “I will be with you, whatever.” Mr. Blair knew by January 2003 that Washington had decided to go to war to overthrow Mr. Hussein and accepted the American timetable for the military action by mid-March, pushing only for a second Security Council resolution that never came, “undermining the Security Council’s authority,” the report concludes. The main conclusions in the report, by the independent Iraq Inquiry Committee, were familiar: that Britain, like the United States, used flawed intelligence to justify the invasion, that Iraq posed no immediate national security threat, that the allies acted militarily before all diplomatic options had been exhausted and that there was a lack of planning for what would happen once Mr. Hussein was removed.
The report is likely to underline in Britain the sense that Mr. Blair was “Washington’s poodle,” the phrase widely used by Mr. Blair’s critics at the time. The report says the lessons from the British government’s conduct are that “all aspects” of military intervention “need to be calculated, debated and challenged with the utmost rigor,” and decisions, once made, “need to be implemented fully.” Yet the report still had enormous resonance in Britain, in part because it came at a moment when Britons are engaged in a debate over their country’s place in the world after their vote last month to leave the European Union.
Mr. Chilcot, speaking for the inquiry as a whole, concluded that “sadly, neither was the case in relation to the U.K. government’s actions in Iraq.” And he emphasized that Britain’s relationship with the United States was strong enough “to bear the weight of honest disagreement.” The report also amounted to a moment of searing public accountability for Mr. Blair, whose legacy has been defined in Britain almost entirely, and almost entirely negatively, for his decision to go into Iraq alongside the United States.
“It does not require unconditional support where our interests or judgments differ,” he continued. Mr. Blair’s note to Mr. Bush was part of what the report showed to be a campaign to back the United States before the war and to steer the White House toward building diplomatic support for efforts to address the perceived threat from Iraq.
The inquiry, while revealing little that changes the understanding of the war, its preparation and aftermath, pulls no punches on a deeply flawed British governmental process. The report’s 2.6 million words describe a prime minister who wanted stronger evidence of the need for military action and a more solid plan for occupying Iraq and reconstituting a government there. Beyond its pledge of fealty to Mr. Bush, the July 28, 2002, note warned broadly of the risks of “unintended consequences’’ from an invasion and presciently forecast that other European nations would be reluctant to back the war.
“It is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments,” Mr. Chilcot said. “They were not challenged, and they should have been.” But by the time the invasion was launched, most of Mr. Blair’s warnings and conditions had been swept aside, the report concluded. The chairman of the committee, John Chilcot, said on Wednesday morning that Mr. Blair had been advised by his diplomats and ministers of “the inadequacy of U.S. plans” and their concern “about the inability to exert significant influence on U.S. planning.”
The report says: “At no stage was the hypothesis that Iraq might not have chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or programs identified and examined” by the Joint Intelligence Committee. Mr. Blair chose to override their objections.
“The assessed intelligence had not established beyond doubt either that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons or that efforts to develop nuclear weapons continued,” the report said. Within hours of the report’s release, Mr. Blair appeared at a nearly two-hour news conference in which he acknowledged missteps and intelligence failures, but defended his decision to go to war. Now rejected by his own Labour Party, his place in British history defined by those crucial days in 2002 and 2003, he looked humbled, even haunted, saying that not a day went by when he did not think about decisions he made more than a decade ago.
“The J.I.C. should have made that clear to Mr. Blair,” who spoke of Mr. Hussein’s possessing “vast stocks” of weapons of mass destruction when there was no definitive evidence to support them, according to the report. “There will not be a day of my life where I do not relive and rethink what happened,” Mr. Blair said. “People ask me why I spend so much time in the Middle East today. This is why. This why I work on Middle East peace.”
“The U.K. chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted,” the report said. “Military action at that time was not a last resort.” A decisive moment seemed to come when Mr. Blair’s draft of the 2002 note to Mr. Bush, classified “Secret-Personal,” circulated to two senior aides, David Manning and Jonathan Powell. The report disclosed that they urged Mr. Blair to soften or delete the “I will be with you, whatever” declaration, and not to tie his political fate too tightly to Mr. Bush’s judgments.
In the end, the British government “failed to achieve its stated objectives,” the inquiry concluded, and said that “Mr. Blair overestimated his ability to influence U.S. decisions on Iraq.” Mr. Manning, a former ambassador to Washington and Mr. Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser, testified that he had told Mr. Blair the sentence was “too sweeping,” that it seemed to “close off options” and that there was “a risk it would be taken at face value.”
Mr. Blair was said to have been advised by his diplomats and ministers of “the inadequacy of U.S. plans” and their concern “about the inability to exert significant influence on U.S. planning.” But he chose to override their objections. Mr. Blair later said he thought he had amended the sentence, but he had not.
The inquiry concluded, bluntly: “Mr. Blair eventually succeeded only in the narrow goal of securing President Bush’s agreement that there should be U.N. authorization of the post-conflict role.” Mr. Blair insisted that he had provided no “blank check” to Washington, and the note quickly moved to an assessment of the many difficulties of such a war, including building a political coalition to back it and the “need to commit to Iraq for the long term.”
Influence, it said, “should not be set as an objective in itself.” He warned of “unintended consequences,” like large numbers of Iraqi civilian casualties or an eruption “of the Arab street.”
“The exercise of influence is a means to an end,” it said. The report concluded that Mr. Blair and the British government both underestimated the difficulties and consequences of the war and significantly overestimated the influence he would have over Mr. Bush.
The inquiry did not make any judgment on legal culpability. Outside the convention center where Mr. Chilcot spoke, near Parliament, demonstrators chanted and held up a sign reading: “Blair Must Face War Crimes Trial.” The results have haunted the Iraq, the United States and Britain ever since: more than 200 British dead, including 179 soldiers, at least 4,500 American dead and more than 150,000 Iraqi dead, most of them civilians, as sectarian warfare, terrorist groups and actors like Iran have filled the vacuum left by Mr. Hussein.
In a statement issued later on Wednesday, Mr. Blair said that he took “full responsibility for any mistakes, without exception or excuse,” but he emphasized that he had not been accused of falsifying intelligence or misleading his cabinet colleagues, and that he had made no “secret commitment to war.” Just this week, at least 250 Iraqi civilians died from a car bomb in Baghdad as they celebrated the final days of the holy month of Ramadan.
Mr. Blair had previously said that he had no regrets about acting to remove Mr. Hussein from power. He has denied inventing or distorting intelligence, but he accepts that there were flaws in the intelligence process, and he says that he now understands more about the complications of the Middle East. Once the report was published, he said in May, he looked forward to participating in “a full debate” on the issues. As Mr. Chilcot’s committee delved back into what seems to many young Britons like ancient history — students entering college this year were 4 years old when the critical decisions were being made — they found something of an echo chamber between London and Washington.
But the inquiry is quietly scathing. “The judgments about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” it said. An intelligence official, Tim Dowse, told the committee that British officials were nervous enough about United States suspicions that aluminum tubes acquired by Mr. Hussein could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium that they had initially kept the subject out of a British summary of Iraq’s weapons projects published in 2002.
The current leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has called the war illegal. After Vice President Dick Cheney had talked about the tubes on American television, “we felt that it would look odd if we said nothing on the subject,” Mr. Towse said. “It would open us up to questions.”
The verdict of the inquiry into the planning and conduct of British military involvement in Iraq was withering, rejecting Mr. Blair’s contention that the difficulties encountered after the invasion could not have been foreseen. So the report mentioned the tubes but noted “we couldn’t confirm that they were intended for a nuclear program.”
Such questions about the prewar intelligence were left unresolved, despite Mr. Blair’s oft-repeated desire for a “smoking gun.”
Mr. Blair stressed on Wednesday that the report concluded that he had not invented or distorted intelligence. But he won little sympathy: The current leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, apologized for the party’s having led Britain into the war, and the governing Conservatives were happy to let the Labour Party eat itself up over Mr. Blair and Iraq.
The sense that Britain was led into carnage by a foolish devotion to the United States has had lasting consequences and made members of Parliament reluctant to authorize further military action alongside Washington.
The legacy of Iraq kept Britain from joining the United States in bombing Syria over its use of chemical weapons. It was also a factor in President Obama’s decision to back away from a military strike on Syria’s chemical weapons facilities, and to delay military activity there against the Islamic State.
But having been a forceful ally of President Bill Clinton in the Kosovo war and having intervened successfully in Sierra Leone in 2000, Mr. Blair was a believer in using force to impose a more rational world order, and after the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, he was quick to align himself with Mr. Bush.
The inquiry’s verdict on the planning and conduct of British military involvement in Iraq was withering, rejecting Mr. Blair’s contention that the difficulties encountered after the invasion could not have been foreseen.
“We do not agree that hindsight is required,” Mr. Chilcot said. “The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability and Al Qaeda activity in Iraq were each explicitly identified before the invasion.”“We do not agree that hindsight is required,” Mr. Chilcot said. “The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability and Al Qaeda activity in Iraq were each explicitly identified before the invasion.”
Over all, Mr. Chilcot continued, “the government’s preparations failed to take account of the magnitude of the task of stabilizing, administering and reconstructing Iraq, and of the responsibilities which were likely to fall to the U.K.” Mr. Blair’s concern before the invasion of Iraq, the report makes clear, was less about the need to overthrow Mr. Hussein than about how to justify doing so.
With the military also conducting operations in Afghanistan, resources were stretched, having an impact on the availability of helicopters and surveillance equipment. The intelligence that Mr. Blair presented in public had a great deal more certainty than his officials presented in private, the report said.
Britain’s Defense Ministry was slow to respond to the threat from improvised explosive devices, and there were unacceptable delays in providing properly protected patrol vehicles, the report said. The report says: “At no stage was the hypothesis that Iraq might not have chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or programs identified and examined” by Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee.
By 2007, the British were forced to do deals with militia in the southern city of Basra, releasing detainees in exchange for an end to targeting of its forces. “The U.K. chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted,” the report said. “Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
“It was humiliating that the U.K. reached a position in which an agreement with a militia group which had been actively targeting U.K. forces was considered the best option available,” Mr. Chilcot said.
Mr. Blair is blamed directly for many failings. “Despite concerns about the state of U.S. planning, he did not make an agreement on a satisfactory post-conflict plan a condition of U.K. participation in military action,” the document said. “The U.K. was fully implicated” in the decisions of the postwar Coalition Provisional Authority, “but struggled to have a decisive effect on its policies.”
The cabinet did not discuss military options or their implications. At the same time, a laudable, “can do” attitude among the military meant that “at times in Iraq, the bearers of bad tidings were not heard.”
The war killed about 200 Britons, including 179 British troops, almost 4,500 American personnel and more than 100,000 Iraqis.
The Iraq Inquiry held public hearings from 2009 to 2011, taking evidence from more than 150 witnesses and analyzing 150,000 documents. The release of the report was repeatedly delayed, in part by disagreements over the inclusion of classified material, including conversations between Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush, whose communications with Mr. Blair were not released by the United States, and in part because individuals set to be criticized were allowed to read drafts of the report and respond to them before a final version was written.
Sarah Helm, the wife of Mr. Blair’s then chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, wrote on Monday about a Blair-Bush phone conversation she overheard in early March 2003, about which she took notes. In a discussion about a second Security Council resolution, Mr. Bush was described as jokey and bluff, praising Mr. Blair for his “true courage,” while Mr. Blair emphasized that “we’ve got to make people understand we are not going to war because we want to but because there is no alternative.”
Mr. Bush said: “You know, Tony, the American people will never forget what you are doing. And people say to me, you know, is Prime Minister Blair really with you all the way? Do you have faith in him? And I say: ‘Yes, because I recognize leadership when I see it. And true courage. He won’t let us down.’ ”
Mr. Blair laughed, unsure, Ms. Helm recounted, then said, “Well, it might be my epitaph.”