It wasn’t a vote for war – but it definately stated that despite the vigourous campaigning of those opposed to war, they failed miserably to make any difference to the result. The public simply didn’t much care.

British troops are largely out of Iraq having long ago given up active engagement in all but the most unusual of circumstances, and the American “surge” dramtically reduced violence in their regions. So it is not all bad now and it seemed the people there were fed up of extremism quite some time ago. However, the how it ends question is a good one. No one knows. But as things stand the “end” is a rather fractious and poor country with reasonably democratic practice and institutions despite ongoing though somewhat reduced violence.

Not an ideal state, but one that could be the basis for a good future for the country, or might yet be the basis for civil war.

The reports I’ve heard from UK troops have them doing incredible work in absurd and insane conditions. They definitely made a huge difference for the better, and your comments about the US erm… ‘liasing’ on details doesn’t surprise me at all. But honestly, we didn’t even control the Green Zone let alone anywhere else. It was a no-win from the start, as soon they did anything but hold immediate elections and hand the oil to the Iraqi people. Suicide bombers, IEDs, it was all horribly predictable. (And, indeed, widely predicted.)

The only question now is how it will end. Will they need to partition Sunni and Shia areas? Are the Kurds just completely screwed? There doesn’t seem to be a good answer, but pulling the US and UK out was the only step that would reduce the easiest *excuse* for violence. Now we just have to hope that the people have had enough of extremists, and Iran / Saudi can find a Sunni / Shia ratio of government which they can live with.

I remember reporting on it at the time, and although I was very junior at my firm and not exactly experienced at political analysis back then, I remember being struck by how compelling the evidence was.

Now as it goes I didn’t believe the evidence. But I think we forget that within the Commons there are a great many wider factors at play. There was strong and understandable deference to MI5 and 6. And there was also a strong sense of competing priorities. (Should a socialist oppose and maybe bring down a government on war, that was ramping up public spending and reducing poverty?)

So compelling sounding evidence was more than enough to win round MPs who did not consider that vote to be the most important they would face that year.

And the public took much the same view – re-electing the same government a couple of years later. (Maybe politicians are sometimes in touch with true public sentiment?)

—

Of course I agree that we went in because America did. That was the absolute reason. And as such I backed thw war.

I still wonder what Iraq might be like now had part of their nation not been occupied by Britain, with its reasonably sensible policies on civic reconstruction in urban conditions. Becayse the US started out training their troops with Israeli experts in that field – before doing an about-face and asking the british to explain their methods. (Seriously – a frightening prospect)

No, I’m not American. I agree the UK public wanted nothing to do with it in general, but the MPs seemed to be terrified of voting no. Far more lined up to vote for it than were reflected in the views of their constituents, and while it may have been due to heavy use of the party whip and sexing-up of evidence and rhetoric, the whole thing smelt of fear too.

In the US it absolutely was about 9/11 and patriotism, of course. But I think the US reasons are relevant, as Blair went in solely *because* the US did. That may have been all about Saddam messing with supply rates and the Neocons’ insane idea of taking on OPEC, but it determined the course the UK would take.

The fact it was based on lies isn’t what makes me angry. Even if it was merely on bad information and bad judgements (such as not taking more time to plan) the responsibility rests with the PM. Anyone making that huge and costly a mistake in any other job would be fired – when it involves the lives of so many military personnel and the money and security of the public, I want a criminal charge. Even if it’s criminal negligence or similar.

I may not get my wish, but justice demands that it at least be investigated.

Ae you American?

I ask because while I know it was fashionable to bang on about it being oil focused back when Bush was in the White House – And to an extent it is hard to ignore how the USA and France took exactly the stance that suited their oil industries. – the “call anyone who doesn’t vote for it unpatriotic” is rather American.

In the UK that was generally not the tone. In the UK the war scarcely ever supported by a majority of the population (briefly at the very start of war but only for a week or two, and only based on rather poor poling). It was fairly widely opposed by the state owned media. And Blair himself was always clear that he “respected” that people had genuine reasons for seeing it differently to him.

So there was no “label them unpatriotic” tone at all, aside from some rather patchy sillyness from papers like the Mail, which had next to no influence on the mentality of the nation.

Thinking back, only the Mail, the Express, the Sun, and perhaps somewhat ambiguously the Times really “supported” the war.

The news channels didn’t, and nor did the other papers. (Even the Telegraph, generally right wing, carried some pretty strong reservations)

—

That said – I agree that the inquiry is nothing to do with learning mistakes. It is about revenge by a public that was impotent and even re-elected the same government after the war.

It is time to get it out in the open. And legally there is no basis for removing even the worst of dictators (which Saddam undoubedtedly was among). Hence the big focus on WMD.

But the TUC speech ran as close to emphasising that this was a brutal dictatorship to be replaced as was possible without actually stating it (which would of course have been illegal and rather foolish as he was still trying in vain to win the security council round)

But we are now debating the rather small historical point of whether or not the moral justifications for war were emphasised early on or not. Which is a whole different matter to the legal case which turned out to have been just plain untrue.

Saddam was messing with the Oil Price because he could, and threatening to deal in Euros not dollars. He had to go. Everything else is lies added on afterwards by the US or UK to justify something which had already been decided.

Unprecedented number of protesters, dubious legality, utter absence of WMDs… nothing was going to stop it. Link it to 9/11 and call anyone who doesn’t vote for it unpatriotic, there you go.

Nothing short of criminal charges will satisfy the public who have suffered – the billions of pounds spent, the erosion of civil liberties at home, the increase in global terrorism. An investigation into how the Army could have been more effective once in there is irrelevant, and doesn’t answer the important question of legality.

I see nothing in Blair’s speech to the TUC in 2002 that makes a case for ignoring international law and invading a country to change its leader or political system. The speech is the kind of speech that Blair was making at the time, in which he tries to build up a picture of Iraq as a threat. There are the usual talking points:-

- mention of 9/11 (tick)
- Iraq has already invaded two countries (tick)
- weapons of mass destruction (double tick)
- go through the UN but the UN had better do its duty (tick).

There is nothing there about invading Iraq because it is a dictatorship. The issue of international law is not addressed. It may have worked as a speech delivered by Blair (a good orator) without any opportunity for debate or discussion and with an army of spin-doctors fanning out afterwards to tell journalists what a fabulous speech it was. When the foot-soldiers were sent out to public meetings and debates, the questions were always the same: What has Iraq got to do with 9/11? Isn’t invading Iraq a dangerous distraction from improving secuirty against international terrorists? Why invade Iraq in 2002 because it started a war with Iran in 1981? The same happened when diplomats and special envoys went out to members of the Security Council, and there were no good answers to those questions.

Fast forward 6 months to March 2003. There is no evidence that Iraq has anything to do with 9/11 or that invading Iraq will improve security against terrorism or that Iraq has offered weapons and training to Al-Qaida,. There is no evidence that Iraq is about to invade any other country, or is even able to. Intrusive weapons’ inspection are happening and there is no evidence that Iraq has WMD programmes. And no UN resolution. But the UK joins in the invasion because “Iraq has failed to disarm” which turns out not to be true.

So, as I said previously, there are a host of unanswered questions. Going to war because a country has WMD and because it is run by a dictator are completely different things, legally and in practice. Time to get this out in the open, I think.

Remember that the electorate voted Blair back in after he took the nation to war. So our collective view was either agreement with, or indifference to the war.

I think trying Blair for war crimes would be a big waste of time though. The legality is disputable, and retrospectively the UN largely sanctioned occupation.

Hence we need a public and open inquiry into the process of going to war – not to learn lessons (that can be done behind closed doors, and god knows the public don’t really care about that stuff to the extent that they would read about tactical details) – but to give release to the public’s sense of impotence at their own failure to make any difference – and to offer some vindication to their hatred of those who started the war.

Serbia had taken a largely defencive position by then – although we should keep in mind that Kosovo was part of Serbia, which made their reaction to is autonomy and cessation somewhat less predictable. This was after all, no less nationalist a nation for its defeats. And the man in charge was not one for compromise at any stage in his leadership.

But my query about Racak is not really about the incident. Before that Racak was just the name of a small town of 2,000 people, which had actually lost most of those 2,000 people already.

Which is why I tend to think that some level of ethnic cleansing was underway before Nato intervened, and that would have continued and escalated further had Nato not acted.

The suffering was hastened when Nato attacked, but then we would hardly blame the Allies in WW2 when their impending victory triggered a hastening of the holocaust effort. Nor would we assume that its hastening increased the total suffering in the long run.

So I think it is still fair to believe that ethnic cleansing, and perhaps genocide, were at least highly plausible outcomes had Nato not bombed. And that would have meant a lot more suffering than Nato’s involvement caused.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jul2002/walk-j20.shtml

It is a fairly partisan account, of course, but some of the concerns it raises are valid.

The best journalistic account I have read is Tim Judah’s book on Kosovo, which seems reasonably balanced.

I would agree with you that ‘The notion that the greater good was served by ensuring, ultimately, far fewer deaths and suffering – is a powerful one’, but I just don’t think that applied to Kosovo. Even now, 10 years on over 100,000 people are unable to return to their homes, when you add together the direct and indirect victims of the intervention, I think it did more harm than good.

Looking at the Balkans as a whole, I would say that there were two broad trends that happened. From 1989 up until 1995, Milosovic supported an aggressive Serbian nationalist policy, which fed on real and imagined grievances and tore apart the former Yugoslavia.

However, from 1995 up to 2000 the trend was the opposite, Serbs were driven out of Croatia, and large parts of Bosnia and faced a campaign of terrorism in Kosovo (a reaction to the discriminatory and brutal policies that they had been pursuing there). By 1998 the Serbs were adopting an extremely reactive and defensive posture in response to the series of defeats that they had suffered. Milosovic was isolated and vulnerable and only just clinging to office. I think that he would have accepted a deal to restore Kosovo’s autonomy at that point (although not the deal that was on offer at Rambouillet) and so negotiations could have succeeded. I think a large reason why Clinton and Blair prefered the military option was in response to the west’s failure to have prevented Srebrenica.

When people think about the history now they go straight from Srebrenica to the images of the mass expulsions that occured after the start of NATO’s bombing campaign without really understanding what happened in between.

But I quite agree that simply removing an unsavoury dictator is not a legal justification for war.

The legal justification was the WMD claim – which was of course the part of the case made for war that was by far and away most controversial.

But an illegal one. Regime change on moral grounds due to the dictator being a complete psycho is still not within international law (even if we previous sold him weapons, trained his troops and voted to not even raise the gassing of the Kurds as an item in Parliament at the time).

It would be nice if we could depose a cruel and violent leader so as to bring a better life to the majority of his people (Mugabe for a start) but we always seemed to follow up by moving in and taking resources. So it’s illegal with good reason.

Even if that argument applied to Iraq, a baby could have forseen the result we have today. I did, and I knew nothing about it in 2003 beyond what the experts were saying. Because he ignored them, because he went in with no planning when there should have been years of it, and because it was a cynical oil grab which has harmed this country and world security more than any other in decades, Blair should pay for it. Preferably in a war crimes court.

The notion that the greater good was served by ensuring, ultimately, far fewer deaths and suffering – is a powerful one.

Thinking about this seriously, I’m open to being convinced on the Kosovo issue. I’ve never given it much thought beyond what I’ve read and what I consider to be a common sense analysis of the situation.

So – if you know a great deal about the war, please provide me with evidence. In particular try to help me see how Racak’s experience was not likely to be repeated had Nato not bombed.

I should stress of course I’m not too interested in whether Rasak was the opening act of genocide or not – but more in that by the time of the “incident” the town had lost 80 percent of its people already. That suggested some level of ethnic cleansing. And that incident was itself months before Nato bombed.

So what was exceptional about Racak that the crime of ethnic cleansing there would not be repeated elsewhere?

I was responsible for Amnesty UK’s crisis response campaign on Kosovo during the summer and autumn of 1998 – when the first wave of of people fled their homes. Several friends of mine were part of the OSCE’s Kosovo Verification Team that was deployed to the region that September – and whose evacuation after the Racak killings made the slight to war virtually inevitable. I first went to the region to train people on international law in the refugee camps while the war was still happening. I was also in the first wave of international civilian staff to get to Pristina in August of 1999. I then spent a year deployed there for a UN agency.

I agree that none of us could have predicted the future, but many of us did have very strong reservations about whether a bombing campaign was the best response to the crisis. On balance, by the time the action actually occurred, I supported it, but its consequences were catastrophic and the atttempts to re-write history and claim it as a success are extremely dubious. The international community is rightly castigated for the mistakes it made that led up to the killing of 8,000 civilians in Srebrenica. A similar number probably died in Kosovo and yet this was portrayed as a model for future interventions. Had the real lessons of Kosovo been learned by policy-makers maybe some of the disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq could have been avoided.

Also – I should stress that I didn’t live through the St. Brice’s Day Massacre in 1002. Nor have I experienced Danish agression against England or lived among a large and previously agressive though by then largely agrarian foreign peoples.

Yet many who did seemed to think the massacre might deter further Danish agression. They were wrong. That suggests I’d suggest that personal experience is a long way from insight, and is a rather weak justification for predicting the future.

There was no genocide in Kosovo – nor an attempted one. Prior to NATO’s intervention the Serbs counter-insurgency policy against KLA terrorists had killed several hundred people (the absolute top estimate is 1,500), but the big spike in killings came after NATO started bombing the place. That is also when the Serbs launched their policy of driving large numbers of people from their homes in the hope of creating a refugee crisis that would swamp neighbouring states and pressurise NATO to call off its actions. Of course such actions were reprehensible, but you cannot cite them as justifications for NATO’s intervention given that they happened after it.

I tend not to trust my first hand experience alone. Often it is too subjective, biased and emotional. Hence a strong grasp of historical and political context aligned with the humility to consider other people’s experience equally valid can prove valuable.

And Bosnia and Kosovo are an awful lot more similar places and faced an awful lot more similar circumstances than Rwanda under the Hutus in 1994 and England under Ethelred in 1002.

Conor

the link you post to states as fact that genocide in Kosovo was exagerated and so the Nato assault killed more people than would have otherwise died. Ignoring that even were they not slaughtered, the making of hundreds of thousands of kosovan refugees was bad enough, I have to wonder about the slightly myopic nature of that assumption. Serbia had by then a pretty well documented practice of ethnic cleansing through mass murder. (read Behind the Curtain – Travels in East European Football for a surprisingly unnerving account of that) Assuming that just because they hadn’t got that far yet they thus were not going to is, frankly, a little like hoping Hitler might stand by his promise to leave Poland alone.

Guano

This notion that removing Saddam and instilling democracy was an argument tact on later is just not true. In fact it was clear in his speech to the TUC in autumn 2002 that removing Saddam was a big part of his moral justification. Just not part of the legal case.

Just as trying Al Capone for tax evasion was only a legal tool to stop a killer, so WMD was always the legal tool to start a war. It was not itself the reason for war, or the only justification used to win people round. (hardly uncommon for a developed society that well knows that what is legal and what is moral are not always the same).

—

None of which made Blair right, or justifies the war or negates the need for a public inquest.

It just grates at me that people end up glossing over details and misreporting what happened in order to exagerate a case that just doesn’t need exagerating.

- there was decision in Parliament in March 2003 to invade Iraq because it had failed to disarm; Parliament accepted Tony Blair’s assurance that he knew the WMD existed; the “overthrow a dictator” reason only emerged when the WMD were shown to have been dismantled in the 1990s
- invading a country to change its regime is illegal under international law and this is very clear.

There’s plenty to discuss. It’s a very funny form of democracy where war aims are changed post-hoc and parliament is in favour of breaking international law, without ever even acknowlidging that this is an issue. I would hazzard a guess that the Times’ leader was written by Oliver Kamm, who has his own views on these issues. The risk is that extreme views, such as those of Kamm, become accepted as UK policy by default, or that we continue with the current ambiguity in which no-one seems to be able to say openly why the UK got involved in the invasion of Iraq.