Iraq ten years on: lessons still not learnt - by Michael Meacher MP

The facts, no longer seriously in dispute, are stark. The US went to war over Iraq because of oil and to assure themselves of a platform for control of the Middle East region, as set out in the Project for the New American Century document published for the Bush election team in September 2000. As we now know from Bush’s first Treasury Secretary O’Neill, that was was planned from the first days of the Bush Administration. Then 9/11 simply provided the pretext for launching it.

The UK went to war over Iraq because President Bush wanted British support. At the Crawford summit in April 2002 Blair in effect committed to providing that, publicly pledging to stand shoulder to shoulder with President Bush. From that point on, the assessment of intelligence data conflated analysis into advocacy in order to find a rationale for the war that had alreadcy been decided on for other reasons.

Blair’s deceit

The decision having been made to go to war, Whitehall provided a briefing that any rationale depended on being able to show incontrovertible evidence of ‘large-scale’ activity by Iraq in weapons of mass destruction (WMD). However, because the UN inspectors left Iraq in 1998, the evidence was almost non-existent. The CIA admitted that its resources on Iraq were ‘thin’, and the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee had already concluded in March 2002 that intelligence on Iraq’s WMD and ballistic programmes was ‘sporadic and patchy’.
The key point is that, in the evidence put together in the crucial 5 months from the Crawford summit up till the publication of the September dossier to justify the war, we now know that all the specific data were flawed:

1. The inventory of chemical and biological weapons and weapons parts that Blair presented to the House dealt with weapons unaccounted for since the first Gulf War 12 years before. They were not presented as weapons unaccounted for, however; they were presented as weapons that were believed definitely to be currently possessed by Saddam.
2. The 45-minute claim referred to battlefield nuclear weapons, but the impression was given that the threat went much wider. Accordingly when it was reported thus, no attempt was made to correct the misreporting despite the belief that it was wrong.
3. The claim that Iraq tried to buy 500 tonnes of yellowcake – a requirement for nuclear fission – fromNiger was still included in the dossier, despite the fact that it was known that a visit made to Niger by a former US ambassador to that country had confirmed 6 months before that the claim was completely bogus.
4. Blair claimed to the House on 25 February 2003 – and I think this is very important, yet has had virtually no attention – that the defection of Hussein Kemal, Saddam’s son-in-law, in 1995 had revealed “the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme”. But as we now know from a Newsweek exclusive a few weeks later, what Hussein Kemal actually said in his de-briefing was exactly the opposite: “all weapons – biological, chemical, missile, nuclear – were destroyed”.

As the Butler report pointed out so poignantly, all the ifs and buts, qualifications and caveats in the raw intelligence data were dropped from the dossier, while the positive allegations were distinctly over-hyped. Sources were treated as reliable when they clearly were not , and they were not checked with the expertise of intelligence staff.
Anyone who reads appendix B of the Butler report, which is well set out, can see step by step how the process of massaging and accretion steadily accumulated until we were finally told in the September dossier that Saddam’s WMD programme was “active, detailed and growing”, and that the intelligence on which the judgement was based was “extensive, detailed and authoritative”, despite Blair having been told a month before by the UK intelligence community that: “We know little about Iraq’s chemical and biologival weapons work since late 1988″.
The first great issue therefore is accountability in regard to Blair’s judgement, his deceitful presentation, and over-eagerness to take this country into a war on grounds that far exceeded the available evidence to justify it. One cannot take a country into a war under false pretences and then proclaim, as Butler does, that nobody can be held responsible.

Failure of accountability

The most striking characteristic of the Butler report is the disjunction between analysis and judgement. It catalogues a litany of failures and then pulls all its punches by declaring that in effect no-one is to blame. George Tenet was sacked as head of the CIA for intelligence failures over Iraq, but John Scarlett who was responsible for exactly the same intelligence failures in this country, is still recommended by the report for promotion, despite all the damning evidence to the contrary. It is a very British Establishment charade but, as an exercise in accountability which is what is needed, it is utterly unacceptable.
I believe there are two issues on which those responsible must be held to account:

1. The presentation of the evidence that persuaded the House to agree to war. Being sinuous with the truth may not be lying, but it is certainly not open or honest. Presenting a seriously misleading account of the facts may not be lying, but it is not truthful or straightforward either.
2. The framework of governance that allowed the decision to go to war to be taken. On that point we still await the final decision and recommendations of the Chilcot report which has been going now 4 years and their report is already far too long delayed.

Even 10 years on we still haven’t had published the secret pledges that Blair made to Bush at his Crawford ranch ten months before the war began and before any consultation with Cabinet, Parliament of the British people. Chilcot has seen this evidence, but is being prevented from publishing it, even though Blair himself, Powell and Campbell have disclosed privileged information when it suited their case. Being told, as we have been, that ‘it is not in the public interest’ is the strongest possible indication that it is very much in the public interest that it should be revealed.

The consequences of the war

A second fundamental dimension of this whole saga is clearly: what did this war achieve in the long-term? At this tenth anniversary it has been said that the US won the war, Iran won the peace, and Turkey won the contracts. But did the US win the war? At a cost of over £1 trillion – which Joseph Stiglitz, a former member of the Presidential Economic Council puts at twice that level – and a death toll of 4,500 US troops, 32,000 wounded and thousands still struck down with post-traumatic stress disorder, what did the US achieve? They completely failed to anticipate the insurgency which eventually forced them out. After all the wasted blood and treasure they were left with the one result they were desperate to prevent – a Shia autocracy in Iraq reinforcing a a resurgent Shia Iran. And even the US goal of securing control of the enormous Iraqi oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia’s, they were forced to forego. If one had to pinpoint the moment when the US lost its unipolar power as the world’s hegemon, it must surely be the total disaster of the Iraq war.
As for Iraq itself, it remains a bitterly divided and violent country. It’s not only the hundreds of thousands of dead and at its height the 4 million refugees, but after 9 years of US and British occupation thousands are still tortured and imprisoned without trial, health and education has dramatically deteriorated, the position of women has gone horrifically backwards, trade unions are effectively banned, Baghdad is still divided by checkpoints and blastwalls, electricity and water supplies have all but broken down, and people pay with their lives for speaking out.
In the longer term the war has undermined the moral standing of the US and UK. It generated an al-Qaeda presence in Iraq and beyond that has not been there before. And it has sent a clear message, which has emboldened Iran and North Korea, that the only way to deter blackmail and attack from the US was indeed to acquire WMD. It could even be said that the greatest WMD were those wielded by the Americans – the systematic demolition of Fallujah, the US-led massacres at Haditha, Mahmudiyah and Balad, and the biggest refugee crisis in the Middle East since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

What we should learn

The third consideration lies in the lessons that should be drawn from this disaster.
The first is that in any such future scenario the House of Commons vote must be taken, not on the very eve of war when with 45,000 British troops already deployed in the field it was virtually impossible to draw back, but rather at a much earlier stage when war was first being seriously contemplated, and in addition at that stage the documentation purporting to justify war must be fully disclosed to the House before the vote.
The second lesson is that Blair’s power and wilfulness brazenly overrode normal democratic procedures in a manner that must never be allowed to recur:

• He made the commitment to go to war at Bush’s Crawford ranch ten months beforehand without any prior consultation with anybody else.
• He regularly told Parliament right up to the very start of the war that no decision had been taken, when clearly an unstoppable momentum had already deliberately been built up.
• He leant heavily on his Attorney General between 7th and 17th of March to induce him to change his warning that the war could not be legally justified.

On 15 February he ignored and dismissed the biggest protest demonstration in Britain’s history involving up to 2 million members of the public marching against the war. According to Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to the US, Blair was even rung up by Bush to suggest he could “sit out the war” while the Pentagon’s Donald Rumsfeld was happy to go in alone, but Blair was obsessive about seeing it through.
In an interview in December 2009 he was asked: “If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?” to which he replied “I would still have thought it right to remove him” (i.e. Saddam). To that end he even colluded with what his own head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, said in July 2002, 8 months before the war, that “intelligence and facts were being fixed round the policy”.
It is that background of the contumacious wilfulness and high-handedness of a Prime Minister dragging this country virtually single-handedly into war that makes it the duty of this House to set down the inviolable conditions to prevent any such catastrophe ever happening again. That must at the very least embrace unquestionable compliance with UN Resolutions, a clear and unwhipped vote of the Commons long before any envisaged hostilities, and full disclosure of all relevant evidence before that vote.
This is based on the speech made in the House of Commons debate on the Iraq war yesterday.
http://www.leftfutures.org/2013/06/iraq-ten-years-on-lessons-still-not-learnt/#more-15586

Dahr Jamail reports

Iraq's invisible refugee crisis

Al Jazeera reports (May 12^th): According to UNHCR figures, there are currently 450,000 Iraqis in Jordan.

But what there aren't figures for, is a growing influx of Iraqis fleeing the increasing violence wracking Iraq.

"Most everyone in my city in Iraq are now hoping to leave," a man from Iraq's western al-Anbar province, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera.

http://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/05/20135109413806217.html

The brutal death of Baha Mousa

AT Williams writes for The Guardian (May 3^rd): First, there was a farcical court martial. Seven soldiers were prosecuted for the death, the ill-treatment of nine other prisoners held with Mousa, or neglect of duty. But those soldiers who came to give evidence suddenly could no longer remember what had happened; the judge advocate lamented the collective amnesia that had set in and had little choice but to dismiss most of the charges. Six defendants were acquitted. The seventh, Corporal Donald Payne, was convicted only because he pleaded guilty to inhuman treatment; he was sentenced to 12 months in prison. No one was held responsible for Mousa's killing or even for allowing the system of torture (for that was what it was: hooding, handcuffing, enforced stress positions, sleep deprivation, beatings) to become an institutionalised practice.

My book A Very British Killing, which has just been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, is an attempt to make sense of all this. It became a forensic detective story of sorts. The details of the military police investigation and the legal hearings that followed needed to be laid out with precision. I hope that was achieved. But the shame is that ultimately it's a detective story without resolution. Despite all the available evidence, a damning report at the end of the Baha Mousa inquiry in 2011, and army generals queuing up to lament this "stain on the British army", still no one has been brought to justice.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/03/investigate-brutal-death-baha-mousa

Military news

Hawija: Chronicle of an Announced Mass Murder

BRussells Tribunal reports (April 23^rd):At least 38 protesters (some reports say 50) were killed and hundreds injured when Maliki’s security forces stormed an anti-government protest camp in Hawija near Kirkuk on Tuesday 23 April and turned a peaceful demonstration into a slaughterhouse.

http://www.brussellstribunal.org/article_view.asp?id=990#

Scores killed in two days of Iraq clashes

Al-Jazeera reports (April 25^th): More than 100 people have been killed in two days of violence across Iraq after a raid on a camp of mostly Sunni Muslim protesters ignited the fiercest clashes since US troops left.

Fighting broke out for a second day between government troops and protesters in the country's north, after the deaths of at least 56 people at a protest camp in Kirkuk province.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/04/201342410811252501.html

Oil workers on the march

Ten years after the occupation of Iraq, trade unions are fighting back, reports Mike Phipps

On April 16, over a thousand workers from the Basra oilfields converged on the head quarters of the Southern Oil Company. They came to demand unpaid bonuses, the upgrading of temporary workers to permanent status and other elementary rights. A tent city was set up - the workers are digging for a long haul.

This protest came despite the prosecution of Hassan Juma, President of the Federation of Oil Unions in Iraq, who has been  charged by the Ministry of Oil for allegedly organising strikes. The court case has been repeatedly postponed, however, due to the inability of the oil companies to present a shred of evidence.

The union’s campaign began in mid-February against the practices of major multinational oil companies in the region, including BP. It quickly turned into a fierce battle with the Iraqi Government that threw its security and intelligence apparatuses against the workers.

Some of the unpaid bonuses go back years. When the mass demonstration converged on the Company headquarters, the general manager came out  and informed the angry protesters that he had met with the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Minister of Oil Al Shahristani, who authorised him to release 50% of the accumulated production bonuses from 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Union leaders were more sceptical. They declared that they would see if the Government would keep its word before demobilising. Iraq exports about 80% of its oil through Basra's oil fields and the workers’ conditions, including in the multinational firms, are no better than in Saddam Hussein’s time.

Hassan Juma faces a possible jail sentence of up to five years under a 1987 law banning public sector employees from organising protests or strikes that could harm the economy. This is one of the few pieces of Saddam Hussein-era legislation that American authorities left on the books after the 2003 takeover. Juma accuses the Government of “overriding the Iraqi constitution, which gave the right to protest and strike, and which acknowledges the right of any citizen to express his opinion in a civilized manner, provided there is no damage to public property.”

Iraq's oil unions have positioned themselves as a guardian of Iraq's oil on behalf of the Iraqi people. In March 2007, Juma helped organise a prospective strike against an oil law that some workers judged as too generous to foreign companies. It was his union that insisted no oil law be signed, while the occupation was still ongoing.

Oil, probably the central reason for the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, remains a vital part of Iraqi identity. The civil society campaign against the oil law the multinationals wanted led to its being voted down by the Iraqi Parliament in 2007. The agreement eventually signed fell far short of the companies’ demands.

US Labor Against the War is calling on all supporters to sign a letter calling on the Iraqi Government to drop the charges against Hassan Juma. Please see https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2488/t/0/blastContent.jsp?email_blast_KEY=1270876

Daily life

The deadliest war for journalists

Al-Jazeera reports (April 11^th): The invasion and subsequent nine-year occupation of Iraq claimed the lives of a record number of journalists. It was undisputedly the deadliest war for journalists in recorded history.

Disturbingly, more journalists were murdered in targeted killings in Iraq than died in combat-related circumstances, according to the group Committee to Protect Journalists.

CPJ research shows that "at least 150 journalists and 54 media support workers were killed in Iraq from the US-led invasion in March 2003 to the declared end of the war in December 2011."

http://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/04/2013481202781452.html

Iraq executes 7 convicts over terror charges

Xinhua reports (April 7^th): The Iraqi Ministry of Justice announced that it has executed seven convicted prisoners over terror charges.

"The executions were carried out today by hanging for the seven terrorists in accordance with Article 4 from the anti-terrorism Law," the ministry said in a statement.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2013-04/07/c_124548711.htm

Iraq struggles to solve electricity crisis

BBC reports (April 12^th): Thick clusters of electric wires hang low from tilted wooden poles, winding their way through Baghdad's alleyways to distribute privately generated electrical power.

It is one of the most common scenes across Iraq's urban landscapes and seems to reflect much of what is wrong with the country's electricity sector - crumbling infrastructure, unreliable services, and a tangled web of bureaucracy and corruption.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22093992

‘US illegally obtained and kept thousands of Iraq’s cultural treasures’

Russia Today reports (April 9^th): One of the gravest casualties of the 10-year US-led war in Iraq is the destruction of the country’s cultural heritage, Iraqi archaeologist and architect Ihsan Fathi told RT.

On top of thousands of looted or illegally obtained cultural artifacts during the war, billions of dollars have also been transferred out of “Iraq’s Central banks to US without any paper trail.”

“I’m sure that everything that was stored in the Central and other banks was sent to the US without any documentation and now is kept in archives,” Fathi said. “Huge amounts of documents representing historical importance that cannot be assigned a monetary value were taken by the US.”

http://rt.com/op-edge/iraq-war-cultural-artifacts-553/

Hassan Jumaa Awad: Working class hero facing jail for oil union organizing

http://platformlondon.org/2013/04/06/hassan-jumaa-awad-working-class-hero-facing-jail-for-oil-worker-union-organizing/