Still counting the cost of the war waged by history’s odd couple
IT was Nelson Mandela, almost at the sunset of his life and with his health failing, who deployed his enormous international reputation to lay into George W Bush and Tony Blair, the chief architects of the Iraq invasion.
“One power, with a president who has no foresight and can’t think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust,” Mandela said almost presciently in January 2003 as US tanks were about to rumble into Baghdad.
“Why is the US behaving so arrogantly?”
He dismissed Blair as acting like the foreign minister of the US, the monkey to Bush’s organ grinder.
In Washington, Mandela’s comments were dismissed as the rantings of an old man, with White House spokesman Ari Fleischer saying a holocaust would be caused by those who, confronted by danger, chose to do nothing.
Mandela was obviously not the only critic of the sortie. Across the world thousands marched against the invasion. But it had powerful backers, which is why it was able to go ahead in the teeth of this opposition.
Thirteen years later, with the authors of the mayhem gone, Iraq is still a cauldron of violence. It has pushed the world into a financial crisis and spawned mindless bands of terrorists with limitless resources, which have fanned across the world wreaking death and destruction.
This week’s Chilcot report on Britain’s role in the Iraq invasion opened wounds still trying to heal. After seven years of inquiry, it told us nothing that we didn’t know already. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Britain rushed to join the invasion before all peaceful options had been exhausted. Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. It goes on and on; an amalgam of deceptions.
The report hasn’t received the requisite attention as it was released in the aftermath of the Brexit decision; Britain is currently cannibalising itself.
And there’s general weariness about Iraq. People may still be dying, but the world is eager to move on.
The report reinforces Blair as Bush’s zealous lickspittle, always ready with a helpful anecdote or aside and cheering him on all the way to Baghdad. In one of numerous letters, Blair writes: “I will be with you, whatever.” There can be no blanker cheque than that.
One suspects that it is the image of Blair as Bush’s grinning toady, more than anything, that sticks in the craw for most Britishers. It offends their self-esteem and autonomy as a proud nation. Bush was often depicted as a crass, slightly deranged and triggerhappy rightwinger.
Bush and Blair have always been an odd couple. When Bush became president, many in Britain may have feared for the so-called “special relationship”. Bush didn’t much care for the rest of the world. He hadn’t travelled much outside the US before becoming president.
The attacks on the twin towers in New York in September 2001 changed all that. “You’re either with us or against us!” he declared in a speech to the US Congress.
But instead of targeting Afghanistan, where the Taliban were in charge, or Saudi Arabia, where the attackers came from, he aimed his sights at Saddam, Iraq’s dictator.
He gave short shrift to pleas for a UN mandate. The US would go it alone if necessary. Then Blair came tagging along; the antidote that Bush needed — a left-leaning politician lending his shoulder to a right-wing cause.
The Americans were convinced they’d be welcomed with open arms in Iraq. After all, they’d have deposed an unpopular dictator. But Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League, warned the US that attacking Iraq would “open the gates of hell in the Middle East”.
And so it came to pass. An estimated 550 000 Iraqis are said to have died as a direct result of the invasion. And the carnage continues. This week, Iraq saw the worst bombing since the invasion, with more than 250 dead.
Removing Saddam left a vacuum. The Iraqi army and the ruling Ba’ath party, which the Americans disbanded, have morphed into Islamic State, which is now wreaking mayhem across the globe.
The financial crisis, from which the international community is emerging, can also be attributed to the invasion. In prosecuting the war, the US got into more debt, thus plunging the world economy into a crisis.
Bush is now happily retired. Blair, meanwhile, is running the gauntlet of critics who want to see him lynched or jailed. He came out to defend himself this week. He looked gaunt, forlorn and spent. Even his voice seemed on the verge of giving up. He manfully defended himself, but one suspects nobody was listening. When the wound is still raw, the perpetrator’s words, instead of soothing, can often reopen it.
It is ironic that Blair, the sycophant, seems to be held in more contempt than Bush, the villain of the piece.
The two men may have left the political stage, but their decisions have destroyed a country and continue to cause untold suffering to millions. There should be a place in purgatory for such misdeeds.