Blair’s legacy was damned in Baghdad –notbyabureaucrat

THREE days ago, the Cardiff-born BBC foreign editor Jeremy Bowen filed a piece from Baghdad.

It is as damning as anything in the detailed demolition of the decision to take Britain to war in Iraq, the conduct of the conflict and the preparation for post-war Iraq produced by Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq Inquiry yesterday.

Mr Bowen was writing in the wake of bombings that we now know killed 250 people in the Iraqi capital, the deadliest such attack since the 2003 invasion. His emotive writing cannot be effectively summarised.

“Almost 24 hours after the massacre of civilians in Baghdad by so-called Islamic State, young men were digging frantically through the basement of one of the shopping centres that was destroyed,” he wrote.

“They were looking for human remains. But all they found were some shoes and a pile of black ash. It was hot in the basement. The fire was still smouldering. Warm, scummy water dripped from the ceiling.

“Outside, hundreds of people had gathered. Being there was a form of defiance. In the Iraqi capital, any crowded, dark street is a potential target for a suicide bomber.”

The contrast between that dark reality of today’s Iraq and what now seems the naive optimism contained on the newly published memos from Tony Blair to George Bush is just so sad.

In one, dated February 2003, Blair wrote of showing “how we will protect and improve the lives of the Iraqi people”.

That hope was sadly mistaken. Saddam may have been “harsh and murderous”, in the words of Mr Bowen. But his Iraq was “a calmer, more secure place”. Since then, “they have not had a proper day of peace”.

More than 4,400 Americans, 179 British servicemen – including 14 Welshmen – and scores from other nations lost their lives in a conflict that has left Iraq a morgue and with lawless areas that act as incubators for the kind of international terrorism that has hit the West again and again over the past 13 years.

We do not even know how many Iraqis have lost their lives in that time. The website www.iraqbodycount.org is as reliable as any source. It estimates there have been as many as 179,312 civilian deaths from violence since the 2003 invasion.

Most recently, it lists 39 deaths on Tuesday: 17 in Mosul by coalition air strikes and six by execution, 14 in Baghdad by mortars and improvised explosive devices, one in Mahmudiya also by IED and one body in Samarra.

There were also 21 deaths on Monday, 41 on Sunday and the 257 written about by Jeremy Bowen above on Saturday.

If that does not fill your heart with sadness, you cannot have one.

With the benefit of that bloody knowledge, all the eagerness, earnestness, depth and intensity of Tony Blair’s long and frequent communications with George Bush between 2001 and 2007 – totalling more than 100 pages across 30 separate memos and handwritten notes, seem childish.

For all their political nous and the might of the military and administrative machines they headed, Blair’s memos give no sense that either he or his correspondent (whose replies remain confidential) had an accurate perception of the the forces they might unleash.

Ever since the 9th of September 2011, we have been living through the story of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. The blundering of Blair and Bush in Iraq, and the extent to which their dismantling of Saddam Hussein’s repressive Baathist regime paved the way for the emergence of Islamic State is just part of that story. Blair today writes and talks at length of the threat that Islamic extremism poses. He wrote a long piece for the Sunday Times in March this year that began: “We are at war with Islamist extremism. We need a different rhythm of thought in respect of it; preparing for a conflict that is longer than anything we have seen in modern times.”

Yet all this rhetoric seems hollow when you read the memos he sent Bush and realise the lack of consideration given to the idea that the danger of an invasion might not just been fanning the flames of anti-Western hatred in the Middle East but providing it with a destabilised, leaderless country to take hold in.

Blair’s place is now in history and seems likely be written as someone who, in trying to fight ideological extremism, helped it spread.

If anything, the memos that are released in Chilcot’s report go some way to absolving him of the most heinous suspicion of him as a lying warmonger.

This was, as we’ve known all along, America’s war.

Blair went along with it seemingly in the misguided belief both that he was a restraining influence on Bush and that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction.

He is then not a belligerent contributor to the great bloody instability of our age but a misguided supporting character who let 179 British servicemen die in Iraq on active duty in the mistaken belief he was doing the right thing.

And that is why many families of servicemen who died or were injured in Iraq may have breathed more easily after Sir John Chilcot’s report.

In a very real sense, even if his careful prose did not express it directly, Chilcot has held Blair responsible for those deaths.

He says the intelligence case was not justified, that there was no imminent threat to Saddam and the war was not the “last resort” it was presented as to MPs and the public.

We did not go have to go to war. And the British deaths in that conflict are down to the man who took us into it.

If Iraq was now a beacon for peace, all that might be forgiven.

But it is not. Blair’s reputation has burned in Baghdad.