Iraq was destined for chaos – with or without Blair’s intervention

As a British-Iraqi, I look forward to reading more of the Chilcot report to learn about why my country invaded my country. As a Brit, I can understand the frustration with a government that launched a war based on “facts” that turned out to be no such thing. However, as an Iraqi, I think much of this debate is irrelevant.

For Iraqis, there is no debate to be had over WMDs . Iraqis know very well how WMDs work because they have been on the receiving end of them. It is not merely a political, legal or academic discussion but rather a brutal reality they faced. Also, whether or not Saddam Hussein actually had WMDs in his possession by 2003 is irrelevant because, for most Iraqis, Saddam was the WMD.

There is a lot of anger about the postwar descent into chaos, but much of that anger in Iraq is being directed towards the corrupt Iraqi political class who killed our dreams and aspirations, not the clueless, sometimes well-intentioned, foreign invaders. Here in Britain, there seems to be nostalgia for pre-2003 Iraq. People either do not know or have too quickly forgotten the horrors of the Ba’athist regime.

Saddam’s endless wars with Iraq’s neighbours and his genocidal campaigns against his own people are bizarrely seen by many in the west as part of an era of “stability” and “security” for Iraqis. Stability imposed with chemical weapons and security achieved with mass graves. We would need to stretch the definition of those words beyond reason and meaning before we could ever apply them to pre-2003 Iraq.

Of course, there is nostalgia for Saddam in Iraq too. But much of this, in both Britain and Iraq, is too Baghdad-centric. Stability – whatever that means – in the Iraqi capital came at a very bloody price for the rest of the country.

The warped sense of reality in Saddam’s Iraq was partly due to the fact that we did not have the luxury of social media and hashtags to show the world what was happening to us. Even mainstream journalists in Iraq would be accompanied by government minders to make sure stories could be controlled. Before 2003, Iraqis were being slaughtered silently and not inconveniencing anyone by being part of the news cycle.

Coalition occupation authorities made many mistakes in Iraq, the most glaring of which was not the invasion per se but the lack of postwar plans for the country they were going to control. That said, it is the Iraqis who should shoulder the main responsibility for their failures. The Iraqi opposition in exile spoke of transitional justice, human rights and equality. Empowered by the US-led coalition, the peaceful rhetoric soon turned into destructive policies of revenge, abuse and corruption.

Another problem with the debate that rages around the Chilcot report is that it tends to exaggerate the role and capabilities of the UK during the invasion and its aftermath . Iraq was essentially a US project and the UK only went along for the ride to try to shape the policy. One of the conclusions of the report was that “Blair overestimated his ability to influence US decisions on Iraq”. It is worth taking note of this because, while the British public has every right to question the motivations of the government and foreign-policy decision making, we need to have a much more realistic view of how much the UK actually mattered in the grand scheme of things and what the UK could have done differently.

Hayder al-Khoei is an associate fellow on the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House.

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