The Chilcot Report is, as expected, damning of Tony Blair's government and its decision to support America in a war of invasion against Iraq. There isn't much that is positive to be taken away from the report, from the war's inception, to its execution and through to its long drawn out, disastrous aftermath.
But Blair did not act alone. Indeed, it is his slavish desire to show solidarity with the American administration and inability to temper - even a little - that administration's determination on war that is such a contributory factor in his overall failure.
Chilcot is damning about the awful aftermath of the invasion in Iraq. As well he should be. But the real responsibility - if we accept that Blair was a mere cipher in this regard - lay with the ultimate planners of the war, and none was more involved than George W Bush's Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.
It is worth briefly recounting why the Iraq invasion turned that country into such a ruinous state in so rapid a time.
Once determined on war, Donald Rumsfeld was also determined that it should be fought with as few men as possible. Having scythed through Baghdad, Rumsfeld’s forces were then confronted with a horrendous security operation, and faced with the Secretary’s unyielding demand that this too be undertaken with the most underwhelming force possible. Rumsfeld, indeed, even stopped one division from going to Baghdad at all, in the belief that it was an unnecessary expenditure.
The man in the Pentagon thus hamstrung the very forces he had sent into Iraq right from the start. There was worse to come, though, in the form of his sweeping aside of the cautious but politically aware team of American reconstructionists who were in Baghdad and headed by Jay Garner, in favour of the brash, arrogant and wholly unsuited Paul Bremer. Bremer, a man of supreme egoism who likened himself to General MacArthur, insisted on complete authority to run Iraq. It couldn’t have gone to a less qualified individual. Bremer had no knowledge whatever of the Middle East – unlike Garner and his team, or the Iraqi originally slated to be a co-leader, Zalmay Khalilzad. His foreign experience had been as a chief of staff to Henry Kissinger, and an ambassador to the Netherlands. It was this lack of any prior involvement in Mid East affairs that endeared him to the ever cretinous Rumsfeld.
Bremer arrived in May 2003 to an urgent need to establish some sort of authority in Baghdad. His predecessors, Garner and Khalilzad, had been making some useful moves to incorporate previous Iraqi civil servants and military commanders into a new governing authority. Bremer swept this aside, since he had arrived determined to stamp his authority on Baghdad by dismissing the whole of Saddam Hussein’s political and military structure. His first order was thus to bar the top four levels of Saddam’s Baath Party from holding any government office. As the CIA station chief in Baghdad noted, Bremer had just disenfranchised 30,000 people.
Bremer’s Order No 2 was even more catastrophic. Despite the talks that had been going on between Garner and Khalilzad and potentially sympathetic Iraqi army commanders, Bremer’s order – drafted by former Clinton aide Walter Slocombe – removed the entire military structure that had existed under Saddam. The reaction in Iraq was furious, with angry demonstrations in Baghdad and other cities; sixteen US soldiers were wounded by violent protests in Mosul, a matter of particular annoyance to General Petraeus whose forces had up to that point been making some headway in winning over the city’s population. And if Order No 1 had sent 30,000 officials to unexpected unemployment, Order No 2 did the same for 300,000 well armed soldiers. It is no surprise to discover that many of those soldiers formed the nucleus of the Islamic Army of Iraq and Syria that is causing so much grief today.
Bremer’s orders, confirmed by Rumsfeld, were ill considered and destructive, but even the logic on which they were based was flawed, not least because Bremer failed to make even the most cursory investigation of the country he had come to rule. Had he done so, he would have discovered that the Iraqi army’s top ranks had far fewer Baathists than he had thought. A mere half of the generals, and only 8,000 of the 140,000 officers and NCO’s were committed Baath Party members. The Iraqi officers who had been in discussions with Garner and Khalilzad knew this, but Bremer had dismissed their contribution out of hand. He ended up pursuing de-Baathification of a military that hadn’t needed it.
There is a final indication – and perhaps an appropriate one – of Paul Bremer’s mendacious ignorance of Iraq and Arab culture. He and Slocombe had devised a scheme to replace the Iraqi military with a ‘New Iraqi Corps’. NIC, when pronounced in Arabic, sounds very much like “fuck”. It is a fitting commentary on a man who has retired into a peaceful life of painting and lecturing in the bucolic countryside of Vermont while the reverberations of his ill-thought out and gung-ho policies continue to condemn thousands of Iraqis to death, torture, or – often at best – a wretched existence carved out in the midst of slaughter, and fear of the ISIL monster which has filled the vacuum he created. Mr. Rumsfled may not have been in favour of imposing democracy. The trouble is, he doesn't appear to have been in favour of imposing anything at all.
The book “Cobra II” by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (chapter 24) provides much of the narrative detail referred to above.
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