Chilcot report

Former British PM Tony Blair and the former US President George Bush had insisted that the war on Iraq in 2003 was necessary and that they had left the Middle East ‘better off’ without Saddam Hussein. That this was a shameless lie is a fact that has never needed revelation. Even so, this fact has now been ‘confirmed’ by a more than 6,000-page report that was commissioned by the British government. Compiled by Sir John Chilcot, the report took seven years to be made public. The verdict is clear. The Iraq war was unjust. It was built on false intelligence. Tony Blair misled parliament and the people. Advice against the war was ignored and the authority of the UN was undermined. The report also shows that American and British oil firms fought for access to Iraqi oil fields. The report is supposed to have delivered a crushing verdict against the ‘mistakes’ (read criminal intentions) that led to, and the ‘mismanagement’ that followed, the Iraq war which left an entire region devastated. Blair talked to the press for two hours after the report was made public and attempted to defend the indefensible. He continued to dispute key claims within the report and his expressions of sorrow and regret are as contrived as the lies that he told to lead the UK into the war.

The Chilcot report is merely symbolic and offers no justice to the victims of the conflicts in the Middle East that started because of the Iraq war. It offers no path to stop the continuous devastation that the region faces. Around a million people have died and at least five million have been displaced in the aftermath. Iraq has been ravaged, Syria is in disarray and civil war has spread to Yemen and Libya. The Middle East is in chaos. The rise of the IS from the ashes of Iraq has presented a more potent threat than Al-Qaeda that the so-called war on terror was said to fight. We do not need a Chilcot report to know all this. Western imperialism has created the conditions for decades of strife. The Iraq war was no blunder, it was a crime. This is what the Chilcot report ‘very naturally’ stops short of saying. But the world – including the West – must now grapple with the consequences of the crime. In a more just and saner world the response would have been not only to embrace refugees but also to try Blair and Bush for war crimes. Instead, like accidents, such ‘mistakes’ too will keep happening – as long as the world stays the way it is.