The Iraq Inquiry (aka. the Chilcot Report)

[kscarbel2]

Americans should pay attention to this.

All said and done, I still view Tony Blair as one of the best leaders of our time. He has, in my mind, a great deal of integrity. And to be honest, at this juncture with BREXIT occuring, I would like to see Tony Blair once more take the helm.

 

Related reading:

http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36712735

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/chilcot-report-crushing-verdict-tony-blair-iraq-war

.

.

 

[kscarbel2]

I ran Iraq in 2003. Washington hadn't prepared for the aftermath of war

By Paul Bremer, former U.S. occupation head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq.

The Guardian  /  July 6, 2016

“The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.”

Those are the words of Winston Churchill, and they seem particularly appropriate at the moment.

Wednesday saw the release of the Chilcot report into the Iraq war, commissioned by the British government. As the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq, I believe there is some truth in its findings.

There is much in the report which mirrors problems the American government experienced. A fair assessment of coalition decisions should take account of the challenges in the immediate aftermath of Saddam’s ruinous three-decade rule.

At every turn, we found ourselves faced with bad options – and worse ones.

Prewar planning was “inadequate”. Chilcot notes that much of what went wrong stemmed from that lack of preparation. The same can be said of American planning.

The key assumptions by the American government were that after the war there would be large-scale human migrations within and to Iraq and massive destruction of Iraq’s oil facilities. As often happens, planners were basing assumptions on the 1991 post-conflict experience in Iraq. Revealingly, the American organization set up in early 2003 was called the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

According to Chilcot, the British government was driven by “a consistent desire” to reduce its military presence in Iraq. The commission noted that that “bad tidings” tended not to be heard in London.

The same was true in Washington. Before the war, a few American military officers suggested the need for a substantial post-conflict military presence. They were not heard.

Before leaving for Iraq, I read a report by the nonpartisan thinktank Rand. Studying previous post-conflict experiences, it concluded that the coalition would need some 480,000 troops to provide adequate security. We had less than half that number (some 180,000 Americans and 20,000 British). I sent the report to Secretary Rumsfeld and raised it with the president. The only positive result was that the Pentagon slowed down its plans to withdraw about 150,000 troops by September 2003.

The Chilcot report rightly focuses on the postwar looting. When I arrived in Baghdad, all of the Iraqi government ministries had been looted. Some were still afire. We had about 40,000 coalition forces in the capital, but their very restrictive rules of engagement (ROEs) did not allow them to use force to stop the looting.

Throughout the 14 months I was in Iraq, I objected in private conversations and cables to the under-resourcing of military forces and to their restrictive ROEs. I also reported to Washington that we lacked an appropriate counterinsurgency strategy, a failure which was not corrected until 2007.

As David Richmond, one of the able British CPA colleagues told the commission, the coalition “never got on top of security”. So the coalition gave the impression to Iraqis that we were not serious in this most important goal of any government. No doubt this failure encouraged some members of what became the resistance.

On two specific points I disagree with the Chilcot conclusions.

The first is de-Baathification. Saddam modeled the Ba’ath party on Hitler’s Nazi party. Party members, though only 10% of the population, held all key government positions. They ran all political and social institutions, even sports teams. Every Iraqi neighborhood had a party cell to report on neighbors. Like the Nazis, the party recruited children to spy and inform on their parents. Opposition was ruthlessly punished.

As Chilcot notes, some level of de-Baathification was “inevitable”. The state department’s prewar planning had concluded that “a program of deBaathification of all aspects of Iraqi life has to be put into effect”. The Iraqi program was much narrower than the similar de-Nazification program in 1945. It affected only the top 1% of party members and only forbade them from holding government positions. They could set up a business, open a newspaper or become farmers or journalists.

I mistakenly gave Iraqi politicians responsibility to implement this narrowly drawn program. They greatly expanded its scope to settle political quarrels. I reversed their actions, for example by working with the Iraqi minister of education to reappoint 11,000 teachers who had been unjustly affected.

De-Baathification remains contentious in Iraq – not because the effort was ill-advised but because true reconciliation remains difficult in a traumatized society.

The second point of disagreement is over whether we should have overthrown Saddam Hussein. I do not share the commission’s assumption that in early 2003, the “strategy of containment” was adequate to the challenges posed by Saddam’s Iraq.

Context is essential to the decision to go to war. The September 11 attacks showed a massive new threat, particularly if terrorists could get their hands on WMD. Iraq had been designated a state sponsor of terror by successive American presidents of both parties.

After 9/11, no American president could dismiss the possibility that a state sponsor would provide devastating weapons to terrorist groups, or use them itself. Iraq had WMD programs for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds in 1988.

Since 1991, the United Nations security council (UNSC) had passed 17 resolutions, with the force of law, demanding that Saddam come clean about his WMD programs. He didn’t. The international inspectors had found his biological weapons program in 1995 only because of information from Iraqi exiles.

At the same time, the international sanctions imposed by the UNSC were beginning to erode; countries like France, German and Russia were arguing for a new approach. Containment was no longer a viable option.

I believe history will agree that it was the correct, if difficult, decision to remove Saddam Hussein. Had we not done so, today we would likely confront a nuclear-armed Iraq facing off against a nuclear armed Iran. Bad as the unrest in the region is today, that would be worse.

[kscarbel2]

BBC  /  July 7, 2016

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN in 2003, said Mr Blair had wanted a UN resolution backing action.

But he told the BBC senior US officials thought it was a "waste of time".

Sir Jeremy said he felt Mr Blair had wanted to wait longer before taking military action.

It would have been "much safer" to give weapons inspectors in Iraq another six months to continue their work, he added.

"I felt that at the time, the British felt it at the time, I think the prime minister felt it at the time, that the Americans pushed us into going into military action too early," he told the BBC.

Mr Blair had wanted to secure a UN resolution before the conflict but US officials were not committed to a resolution, he added.

"The Americans weren't genuine about it - but the prime minister was genuine about it - because he thought there was a chance that Saddam could be made to back down before we had to use military force.

"And George Bush for a while agreed with him. But other people behind George Bush didn't agree with him and thought it was a waste of time."

General Tim Cross - the most senior British officer involved in planning the war - said former US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, would not listen either to the UN or the UK about the aftermath of the invasion.

He said the US dismantled the Iraqi army and the ruling Ba'ath party without consultation.