A delayed apology from Tony Blair

Former British prime minister Tony Blair has apologised for mistakes committed more than a decade ago when his government strongly supported an American plan for invading Iraq on grounds that the Saddam Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Blair is known to have personally played an active role in that war which eventually led to not only the political and physical destruction of Iraq, but also to destabilising the very foundations of states’ structure in most of the region.

What purpose could such an apology serve at this stage, assuming it may be sincere and genuine? In reality it serves no purpose.

Blair’s much delayed admissions to the CNN last Sunday, hardly convincing as real, are more of a self-serving tactic to clear a heavily burdened record of deceit and opportunistic politics; hence, an additional insult, rather than an authentic verification of the hitherto concealed truth. 

Blair’s apology included three general points. He said the intelligence was wrong; that there were some mistakes in planning “and certainly our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you remove the regime”, for which he also apologised; and he saw merit in the argument that the Iraq war was to blame for the rise of Daesh.

That the “intelligence” the war planners relied on in justifying their war against Iraq was “wrong” as Blair now admits, is quite strange. The intelligence was designed to be wrong to fit the purpose. Every shred of data intelligence communities in both the US and Britain had produced during the run up to the war that yielded adverse results from what the planners had in mind, was instantly dismissed as unhelpful and ordered modified. The intelligence departments’ duty at the time was not to objectively, scientifically or authentically search for the truth; rather, it was to locate, or even to fabricate, a certain outcome supporting the allegation that WMD did exist in Iraq and therefore the war must proceed as planned.

In normal situations significant decisions of such magnitude: an invasion, a declaration of war — indeed an open aggression — on another country without UN approval, would, in the least, have to rely on proven and incriminating evidence.

But since the entire case against the Saddam Hussein regime at the time rested on the claim that Iraq possessed threatening WMD, it would have been logical to prove the existence of such weapons first, let alone validate their threatening nature as well.

Ironically, the Iraq war project was processed in reverse order: invade first then invent the justifying cause afterwards. That is exactly what happened with respect to that detrimental political chapter in the recent history of this region.

The justifying evidence for an illegal invasion was to be found after the decision to invade had been taken, and it had to be compatible with the avowed pretence. If fact did not help, and indeed it did not, forgery and fabrication was the only remaining option.

Therefore, the Blair claim that the pre-war intelligence data was wrong is in itself wrong. The intelligence findings were in fact very true and realistic, and as such had failed to prove the WMD claim. If accepted, the case for the Iraq war would have fallen apart and there would have been no invasion.

Hence was the desperate need to invent any convenient “evidence” — not necessarily real — to facilitate the implementation of the invasion plan.

Towards that objective, in February 2003 the British produced what came to be notoriously known as the Dodgy Dossier or the Iraq Dossier. The dossier was supposed to contain uncontested proof that the Saddam regime was indeed guilty of all that it was accused of. The scandal, however, occurred when Glen Rangwala, a lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge University, discovered that the contents of the dossier were mostly no more than material plagiarised from postgraduate students’ theses and published articles in Jane’s Intelligence Review, with major falsifications to strengthen certain points. One notable source of plagiarised material was a paper by then-graduate student Ibrahim Marashi where a whole section on Saddam’s security organisations was copied verbatim, including typographical errors. 

That is just one example of the kind of evidence used to justify a major military adventure that caused massive damage and loss of life, indefinite political consequences, vast spending in hundreds of trillions of dollars, the rapid spread of terror and a mighty terrorist organisation, fragmentation of societies, rise of religious and sectarian wars and the steady collapse of state systems across most of the Arab world.

Of course, the Iraq war is responsible for the rise of Daesh and many other extremist organisations currently spreading violence and chaos all over the region. Is that not a natural outcome of reckless adventurism and high-level corrupt politics? It is the disbanded Iraqi army personnel and the summarily condemned and stripped-of-rights Baathists, left without any future or hope that provided such organisations with trained fighters, weapons, know-how and even motivation. But this was also part of the war plan: to dismantle the state and its institutions, not just topple the regime.

How, under such circumstances, could anyone fail to understand “what would happen once you remove the regime”, when what happened was planned to happen beforehand as precisely it did.

All the admissions Blair offers now were known right from the beginning and nothing was accidental or realistically unforeseen. 

The curse of the Iraq war, the lethal consequences of which are yet to unfold, will continue to haunt the perpetrators. No amount of delayed and faint apologies will help clear any portion of the heavily burdened records of war crimes and devastating political blunders.