We still have lessons to learn from Iraq
Last month marked the twentieth anniversary of the House of Commons debate and vote which authorised the invasion of Iraq. At the time I was a reasonably new MP, having entered Parliament in the 2001 General Election, and had recently been picked up as a Shadow Health Minister. Unable to support the war, however, I resigned my shadow position and voted against the conflict.
The proximate reason I voted against the war was because I wanted to give Hans Blix and his team of UN weapons inspectors more time to find the weapons of mass destruction that most governments – whether they supported the war or not – believed that Iraq continued to possess.
I did not believe at that time that war was the measure of last resort, a conclusion that was endorsed by the Iraq Inquiry under Sir John Chilcot when it finally reported in 2016. Even if Iraq had these weapons, it was not obvious to me that they presented an imminent threat to British lives.
No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq. The case for war was made differently in the United States, but in Britain it was almost entirely based upon eliminating the threat from Iraqi weapons – as set out by the Prime Minister in the debate on 18th March 2003.
For millions of people in Britain, the war was fought on a false premise, and it continues to raise concerning questions as to the use of military force and the role of secret intelligence as a means of justifying it.
Gordon Corera’s excellent series of BBC radio programmes were a reminder of how the intelligence community grew too close to power, and did not subject the raw information it was receiving to its usual professional scepticism, challenge and scrutiny.
To a large extent the infamous September Dossier was drafted by Government spinners, and it was this dossier which underpinned the Government’s case when Parliament was recalled on 24th September 2002.
We take it on trust that one of the positive legacies of the Iraq War is that the way intelligence is assessed and used has changed. Certainly the British and American intelligence prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine appears to have been highly accurate, even as other European intelligence agencies concluded no invasion would take place.
In a reminder of the dangers of basing military operations solely on intelligence, it was the Russians’ intelligence assessments that were found wanting: Ukrainians were not awaiting liberation, did not welcome Russian troops with flowers and did not roll over at the first whiff of gunfire.
Throughout 2012 it seemed as though Britain, the United States and Israel were working towards bombing Iranian nuclear facilities, based upon secret intelligence and backed up by somewhat loose wording inside a 2011 IAEA assessment of the Iranian nuclear programme.
Fortunately no air strikes took place in the end, our governments perhaps correctly concluding that nothing would more guarantee the creation of a Iranian nuclear weapon.
Indeed, one of the concerning long-term legacies of Iraq is that states have concluded, especially after Libya and indeed Ukraine, both of which gave up their nuclear weapons, that states with nuclear weapons are left alone. Equally, nuclear deterrence is working well for the Russians – there seems little doubt that NATO forces would otherwise have got involved to liberate the occupied areas of Ukraine. The decades-old non-proliferation architecture is creaking.
The invasion of Iraq also fundamentally altered the balance of power in the region. Revolutionary Iran and Saddam’s Iraq acted as counterweights, but the weakened Iraqi state ushered in Iran as a major regional power, and one which is increasingly making its presence felt on the wider stage.
Iranian threats have compelled one Persian-language TV station to relocate from Britain to the United States, and Iranian drones and other forms of support are bolstering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Even Tony Blair acknowledges that the invasion and its botched aftermath laid the seeds for the emergence of Daesh. The weak and fractured Iraqi state was unable to stop the rapid spread of the Caliphate, and in many cases the Iraqi Army, even though supplied with first-rate kit by the United States, simply turned and fled as the militants advanced.
For an invasion that was meant to stop terrorism, this is a bitter irony, not least as Daesh organised and inspired terrorist attacks across Europe and further abroad. The unresolved cases of Shamima Begum and the other British Daesh fighters are also legacies of the 2003 invasion.
One of the main reasons I have opposed military interventions throughout my time in Parliament is because I believed these wars of choice distracted us from the real and enduring threats posed by nation states.
Western militaries were shaped to fight counter-insurgency campaigns in areas where we enjoyed total air supremacy, and traditional war-fighting skills and resilient supply chains were neglected. Speculating on alternative histories is perilous, but it is not difficult to imagine how stronger reactions to Russia’s interference around its borders over the last 20 years might have played a role in deterring the invasion of Ukraine.
The experience of the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have definitively put paid to the notions of ‘liberal interventionism’. As Theresa May said in her 2017 speech to the Republican National Congress, ‘the days of Britain and America intervening in sovereign countries in an attempt to remake the world in our own image are over’. A Parliamentary vote prior to military action is now a strong convention, with MPs setting the bar very high when it comes to authorising it.
In Britain perhaps the greatest legacy of the Iraq conflict is amongst those who served there, and their families and friends. Very few left Iraq unchanged or unaffected by their experiences, and some received life-changing injuries – both physical and mental. On top of this, 179 British servicemen and servicewomen did not return from their tours. On this anniversary, we remember them and their families especially, along with the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians who lost their lives.
John Baron is the former Conservative MP for Basildon and Billericay and a former Shadow Health Minister.
