The 2003 invasion was right, but the rest of the plan was wrong

Sir John Chilcot's report tells us little we didn't already know, says Martin Newland

Sir John Chilcot presents The Iraq Inquiry Report. Jeff J Mitchell / Pool /Reuters

The Chilcot report tells us very little that we did not know already about Tony Blair’s military alliance with George Bush, but its publication has lent heft to findings unearthed by the media in the years since the US-led invasion.

What the report does not say is that Mr Blair deliberately misled parliament or his cabinet in his desire to secure a war mandate, or that intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was fabricated. It points rather to a cavalier attitude to planning and process characteristic of Mr Blair’s government. It outlines a lack of a duty of care towards the legal case for invasion and a failure to properly question intelligence reports vaguely suggestive of a domestic threat.

Much was made last week of a memo from Mr Blair to Mr Bush sent prior to the conclusion of a UN investigation into Saddam’s WMD capacity pledging the former’s backing “whatever”. But it was well known before Chilcot that Mr Blair had given undertakings to Mr Bush at the latter’s ranch in Texas, while diplomatic avenues were still being pursued.

I am of the opinion that such pledges were indicative (though unwise) and not literal, and were made while the prime minister was still trying to persuade the president to secure UN backing. The “whatever” memo made excellent fodder for an apoplectic media – the same media that had wafted Mr Blair to successive general election victories and which had for the most part backed the war it now condemns.

In my opinion, as someone who interviewed Mr Bush in the post-invasion period and who, as editor of the Daily Telegraph at the time, had some dealings with Mr Blair, the whole Iraq case was built on two scripts. The first was practical, legal, multilateralist and in the end expendable. The second was ideological, liberationist and romantic. The first script failed as a means of legitimising action but the second, one of evangelical interventionism, remained.

This script was based on a doctrine of moral intervention in a sovereign state’s affairs – a “responsibility to protect” civilians as Mr Blair’s memoirs put it – if that state failed to protect its own. Coupled with this was a prospect of “intervention … based on a desire to bring freedom and democracy”.

Mr Blair had been active in such interventions in the Balkans, in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. For the most part these were not undertaken to offset domestic threats, but to punish bad men and protect civilians.

In the same way the so-called “war on terror” was not just about punitive action or protecting the homeland post-9/11. It carried with it a desire to transform societies and to make an example of brutal governments.

“If there was a people in need of liberation, it was surely the Iraqi people,” Mr Blair wrote in his memoirs. “If there was a message to be sent about the defiance of the international community, it should be sent to Iraq.”

The freedom script was also prominent in an interview Mr Bush gave to me and other selected journalists soon after the fall of Iraq. His foreign policy, he said, was dominated after 9/11 by two principles: firstly to protect America and secondly to facilitate the transformative potential of freedom and democracy.

“My point to you is that free societies and democratic societies are transforming societies,” he said. “(Iraq) is a transforming mission. It is a milestone … in the history of liberty.”

The Telegraph supported the Iraq invasion, which is probably why I found myself in the Oval Office, but my thinking on removing Saddam was purely practical.

Here was a man who persecuted and murdered his own people, who had engaged in a devastating war with Iran and who had invaded sovereign Kuwait, requiring the world’s armies to remove him. Here was a man who had been allowed to slink back to Baghdad, rebuild his army and his engines for internal repression and defy international sanctions. In what world was he not going to cause trouble again?

Of course, the lack of post-invasion planning, the intensity with which both Mr Blair and Mr Bush stamped out the remnants of the Ba’ath Party and any structures that might ensure a degree of continuity, was to bring about the quagmire that ensued.

The withdrawal of American personnel by Mr Obama after the successful 2007 “surge” snuffed out the hope for any sort of reconstruction and reconciliation.

When the “freedom” narrative hit the region it was not at the barrel of an American Abrams tank. It was sparked rather from within, with the self immolation of a Tunisian fruit seller and a grass roots bid for self determination – and similarly snuffed out by the twin forces of autocratic self preservation and religious fundamentalism.

A key legacy of the Iraq invasion and its aftermath is that spontaneous humanitarian intervention on the basis of immediate need is dead.

Martin Newland is a former editor in chief of The National