‘I apologize:’ Tony Blair admits Iraq war mistakes

‘I apologize:’ Tony Blair admits Iraq war mistakes

His remarks have prompted allegations of an attempted 'spin' ahead of the release of Britain’s Iraq war probe – the Chilcot Inquiry. (File photo: AP)

 

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By Dina al-Shibeeb Al Arabiya NewsSunday, 25 October 2015

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has apologized for aspects of the Iraq war in an interview with CNN on Sunday, although analysts suggest that the gesture is too little, too late.

“I can say that I apologize for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong because, even though he [late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein] had used chemical weapons extensively against his own people, against others, the program in the form that we thought it was did not exist in the way that we thought,” Blair told CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria

Blair unleashed his apology on the American news network ahead of the release of Britain’s Iraq war probe, known as the Chilcot Inquiry.

However, his long-awaited apology was long due for some observers while for others, it was “hardly an apology,” George Joffe, a research fellow and lecturer at the center of international studies, University of Cambridge, told Al Arabiya News.

“It was an acknowledgement,” Joffe explained, adding “all he said basically that he made mistakes but getting rid of Saddam was not.”

Blair fell short of a whole-encompassing apology for the war when he said: “I find it hard to apologize for removing Saddam. I think, even from today in 2015, it is better that he’s not there than that he is there.”

But in the same time, Blair conceded that the Iraq war was partly to blame for the rise of the ISIS, which is currently occupying large swathes of territories in Iraq and Syria.

Responsibility

“Of course, you can’t say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015,” he said.

The former British prime minister said Iraq with or without Saddam would have been affected with the Arab Spring which began in 2011, and to his defense, he said “ISIS actually came to prominence from a base in Syria and not in Iraq.”

He also said Western countries have tried different myriad of options in the region, keeping the debate over Western intervention as inconclusive.

“We have tried intervention and putting down troops in Iraq; we’ve tried intervention without putting in troops in Libya; and we’ve tried no intervention at all but demanding regime change in Syria,” Blair said. “It’s not clear to me that, even if our policy did not work, subsequent policies have worked better.”

Chris Doyle, director of the London-based Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), also said intervening in conflict zones is still a continuous debate in the UK and the West.

But he said in 2003, both the Conservative and the Labour Party “did not have enough debate” on a leadership level.

Blair, who served as prime minister between 1997 and 2007, has repeatedly denied rushing to war. Under his leadership, Britain made the second biggest troop contribution to the Iraq invasion, and British forces were stationed in the country until 2011.

Doyle also criticized Blair for choosing an American news network to unleash his apology and not in Britain nor did he acknowledge his mistakes to the Iraqi people.

“He was given ample of opportunities. So many opportunities, invited to say sorry, to apologize, and he avoided at every single turn,” Doyle said, mulling Blair’s continuous media exposure and his concern for the future of the Labor party might have pushed him to acknowledge the past mistakes in 2003.

The interview could also serve him and could possibly make him more likeable, Doyle said. “I think most people prefer to be liked and loved rather than hated.”

Regrets not planning after removing Saddam

In addition to Blair describing false intelligence suggesting Iraq had so-called weapons of mass destruction, which was then used to justify the invasion, he expressed regret over the failure to adequately plan for the aftermath of the war in 2003, which saw the toppling of Saddam.

In the interview, Blair told Zakaria that he apologized “for some of the mistakes in planning and, certainly, our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime.”

Saddam’s Baathist regime ruled Iraq for 24 years. Critics had always slammed U.S. official Paul Bremer, who ran Iraq for 14 months after Allied forces toppled Saddam’s regime, for disbanding the Iraqi army.

Iraq’s new army could not thwart ISIS attacks and its lighting offensive against its second largest city last year and other areas in the country.

'He's said this before'

The British media, meanwhile, reported about the upcoming television interview on Sunday.

Following the report on Blair's apology, a spokeswoman for the former PM was quoted by The Guardian as saying: “Tony Blair has always apologized for the intelligence being wrong and for mistakes in planning. He has always also said, and says again here, that he does not however think it was wrong to remove Saddam.

“He did not say the decision to remove Saddam in 2003 ‘caused ISIS’ and pointed out that ISIS was barely heard of at the end of 2008, when al-Qaeda was basically beaten.

“He went on to say in 2009, Iraq was relatively more stable. What then happened was a combination of two things: there was a sectarian policy pursued by the government of Iraq, which were mistaken policies.

“But also when the Arab Spring began, ISIS moved from Iraq into Syria, built themselves from Syria and then came back into Iraq.

“All of this he has said before,” the spokeswomen added.

According to the UK’s ITV News. Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister for Scotland has accused Blair of participating in a "spin operation" to prepare the ground for criticisms that may surface from the Chilcot Inquiry.

Leaked email

Last week, a leaked White House memo allegedly proved that Blair backed military action a year before seeking a vote in parliament.

The revelations focused on a memo allegedly written by former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell on March 28, 2002 to then president George Bush a week before the U.S. leader’s meeting with Blair at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

“On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary,” wrote Powell, in a document the Mail on Sunday published on its website.

“He is convinced on two points: the threat is real; and success against Saddam will yield more regional success,” Powell said, referring to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who was eventually ousted in the 2003 US-led invasion.

The Mail on Sunday said the memo and other sensitive documents were part of a batch of secret emails held on the private server of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton which U.S. courts have forced her to reveal.

A separate quote from Powell assured Bush “the UK will follow our lead in the Middle East”, while other statements suggest Blair’s willingness to present “strategic, tactical and public affairs lines” to strengthen public support for the Iraq war.

 

(With AFP)

Tony Blair is right: without the Iraq war there would be no Islamic State

Analysis: The former UK prime minister used to claim the 2003 invasion would undermine jihadis. The 12 years since have proved how wrong he was
 UK troops in Iraq during the 2003 invasion.
 UK troops in Iraq during the 2003 invasion. Photograph: Giles Penfound/EPA
Martin Chulov
Sunday 25 October 2015 14.50 GMT Last modified on Monday 26 October 2015 01.58 GMT
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Only one of Tony Blair’s mea culpas in his CNN interview stands out as truly significant: his partial acknowledgment that without the Iraq war there would be no Islamic State (Isis).

Until now, Blair had refused to link the two, insisting instead in the lead-up to the war that sending western troops would deny jihadis an arena and prevent Saddam Hussein from using them as proxies in his standoff with the west.


Tony Blair makes qualified apology for Iraq war ahead of Chilcot report
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The 12 years since have constantly disproved both claims. Within six months of British troops landing in Iraq, the SAS was sent to Baghdad’s western outskirts to attack jihadis who had taken up residence in Ramadi. Back then, they were a mob of foreigners and Iraqis who fed off a broad Sunni discontent fuelled by the invasion; a serendipitous vanguard that not long afterwards organised into al-Qaida in Iraq, then the Islamic State of Iraq and, since mid-2013, Isis.

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Throughout all its incarnations, the group’s grievances have been largely consistent. Central to them is the belief that the invasion destroyed a regional order, ousting a stalwart of Sunni rule, and inviting the rival Shia sect to take over. The sense of loss was profound, with many Sunnis passionately believing that the US and Britain must have known exactly what they were doing.

These views, formed along contemporary faultlines of power and patronage, drove a widespread Sunni resistance, a mix of non-ideologues enraged by losing jobs, status and dignity, and others, like the jihadis, who believed the war had been preordained in Islamic prophecies. As Iraq unravelled, the latter began to hold sway – just as later happened in Syria.

 Detainees pray at Camp Bucca, the former US military prison in Iraq, in 2009. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
 Detainees pray at Camp Bucca, the former US military prison in Iraq, in 2009. Photograph: Dusan Vranic/AP
Rightly or wrongly, the Sunnis of the region have come to believe that Blair’s decision to join George Bush’s war was the start of a historical pivot towards Iran and the restoration of Persian hegemony. They hold up a litany of developments to support their claim, including de-Ba’athification, which was aimed at eliminating Saddam’s influence, but also became a tool of repression against Sunnis, as well as the installation of Iraqi leaders who hailed from Shia supremacist backgrounds.

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Perhaps even more directly relevant to Sunni grievances and the rise of Isis, was the US-run prison system, which started with rampant abuses at Abu Ghraib and evolved into mass detention, albeit of both major sects. Sunni jihadis said the prison system was their most effective organising tool.

A senior Isis commander has told the Guardian that without the Camp Bucca facility in southern Iraq, in which he and most of the senior leadership were at one point detained, there would be no Isis today. “It made it all, it built our ideology,” he told the Guardian last December, “We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else,” he said. “It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred metres away from the entire al-Qaida leadership.”

As Iraq sank into chaos from early 2005, sectarian positions steadily hardened. Sunni militants, though battered in 2006 when Iraqi tribal leaders joined US troops in fighting them, were tamed for a time but never defeated. In the years since 2011, when US troops left, and in the wake of the Arab spring, Isis was able to feed off grievances that had remained unresolved since the British and US armies rolled north from Basra eight years earlier. The jihadis’ rallying call that British and US-led aggression caused all of this still resonates broadly, far beyond their constituency.

A sense of loss, enduring indignity and injustice on one hand, and helping to restore lost glories on another are a potent double act for Isis, which openly hails 2003 as its raison d’etre. It remains just as much of a unifying principle now as it was back then. Events ever since in Syria and Lebanon, where Iran is ascendant militarily and politically have if anything given it even wider appeal. This would not have happened if the Iraq war had not been launched.

In Baghdad on Sunday, Jihad Mohanned, a Sunni resident from the west of the city, said Blair’s acknowledgment was “so obvious it’s surprising he bothered to speak”.

He added: “It really isn’t possible to come to any other conclusion. Without the invasion, we would not have Isis. It’s crystal clear

Tony Blair’s partial apology for Iraq isn’t enough

 Tony Blair talks with British troops during a final visit as Prime Minister to Iraq
 Tony Blair talks with British troops during a final visit as prime minister to Iraq, a country whose future may define the legacy of his decade in power. Photograph: Dan Chung/The Guardian
Letters
Tuesday 27 October 2015 19.44 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 27 October 2015 22.01 GMT
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Tony Blair’s partial apology for the Iraq war (Report, 26 October) shows how little he has learned from his adventures in international relations. Removing Saddam Hussein is the problem and is the cause of the rise of Isis. Saddam’s justification for his brutal regime was that he maintained control of an otherwise ungovernable state. His removal and the emergence of Isis is testimony to the accuracy of his judgment.

The removal of the equally brutal Gaddafi from Libya, and the subsequent disintegration of that state, is further testimony to the misjudgment of European politicians. The removal of a dictator, before a stable replacement is available, simply creates a vacuum which destructive elements quickly exploit.

Assad kept the lid on Syria, until overflow from the disintegration of Iraq fractured his regime. The influx of refugees into Europe, from both Syria and Libya, is the continuing consequence of democratic politicians failing to appreciate the inappropriateness of introducing democracy into states with no established record of the peaceful transfer of political authority.
Martin London
Henllan, Denbighshire

• Tony Blair apologises, among other things, for the inaccuracy of the intelligence information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But the fact is that by the time the war started, the highly regarded UN weapons inspector Hans Blix hadn’t found any such weapons and didn’t believe he was going to.

Twelve and a half years on from the march via which over a million of us tried to give Blair a get-out-of-jail card, it still troubles me that a prime minister who until that point had been among the most sure-footed this country had elected in generations either could not or would not see that it was entirely in Saddam’s interests both to have destroyed his weapons of mass destruction and to be maintaining some uncertainty as to whether he had done so.
Jeremy Waxman
Saltaire, West Yorkshire

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• Sadly, the rise of Isis was a relatively milder consequence of the Iraq war. The wider consequence was the creation of a religious war across the whole of the Middle East. Before Iraq, al-Qaida was not attacking Shia or Kurd. Its targets were the west. Sunni and Shia have always been on opposing sides but there were no conflicts in the Middle East based on this religious division.

As Martin Chulov (The crucial point: a partial acknowledgment that without the war there would have been no Isis, 26 October) quite rightly states, the Iraq war stoked these divisions, destroying the country, favouring Shia, oppressing Sunni and generating the chaos of a civil religious war. This division has now broadened into Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Lebanon, and the Middle East is on fire as Sunni and Shia fight a religious war that is every day becoming a single international conflict with the US on one side and Russia on the other.
Chris Owen
Holywood, County Down

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• Martin Chulov’s reference to Abu Ghraib resonates in Syria. I was in Damascus when events at Abu Ghraib surfaced and while meeting with Bouthaina Shaaban, media adviser to president Bashar al-Assad, I voiced my concern about the many young Syrian men who seemed keen to go to Iraq to fight. More young lives lost, I felt. “They have seen what happened in Abu Ghraib,” she said, “and they have to go.”
Mary Russell
Oxford

• The main outstanding issue about the Iraq war is how and why it came to be that when British forces landed in Iraq their stated purpose was to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction, but when they departed their stated achievement had been the overthrow of the Iraqi regime which, incidentally, posed no threat to the security of Britain or its military allies. That goes well beyond mere apologetics. When the Chilcot inquiry has shed some forensic light on this issue it should be easier to make a final judgment on the war and Britain’s role in it.
Robin Wendt
Chester

• Tony Blair’s pre-emptive strike against Chilcot and the publication of the Chilcot report, still, I believe, leave one key aspect of the affair unanswered. Let me recount an incident that took place in Italy in May 2003.

While eating out one evening, I was able to prevail on other diners to make space for an American family. Once all were seated I engaged in the sort of conversation one has in these situations; talk touched on the invasion of Iraq. The father, a notable US academic, stated quite firmly that it was Blair who persuaded the American intellectual elite that it was right to launch the war on Saddam Hussein.

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Ever since that moment I have watched for anything that focuses on this aspect of the affair, and I believe that Chilcot did not consider Blair’s role in influencing US public opinion; why should he, when accountability is restricted to the “line management” within a nation state? The publication of the dialogue between Blair and Bush may go some way towards addressing this, but is unlikely to reveal the ultimate spin.

It seems that it is this triangulation for which Bush was grateful, and for which the US right continues to show gratitude to Blair through channelling generous lecture fees to him. Blair will continue to prevaricate with qualified apologies and regret for things that are peripheral to the main point. Only an international inquiry, dare I say an international court, is able to properly consider Blair’s role in propping up the intellectually weak US argument for war.
Will Messenger
Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire

• There is one problem with Tony Blair’s qualified mea culpa: Britain did not overthrow Saddam. Neither did it to any significant degree slaughter the civilian population, bomb cities, destroy infrastructure or desecrate holy places. In fact the UK did virtually nothing in the Iraq war after the initial seizure of Basra except hand it over to pro-Iranian militias and retreat to the safety of its barracks at Basra airport, there to await relief from US forces. Blair’s comments are an arrogant repetition of the lie that the UK made any difference at all to either going to war or in determining the outcome. From the outset of hostilities Blair’s war aim was the avoidance of casualties. The best (or worst) that can be laid at Blair’s feet is that he gave moral cover to the US, which made it contemptuously clear that it would proceed with the war no matter what the UK did or didn’t do in support. Blair should admit it: the UK’s participation in the Iraq war was an irrelevance. He should then sleep sound in the knowledge that the only war crimes he was guilty of are hubris and cowardice.
Chris Forse
Snitterfield, Warwickshire

• It seems Tony Blair is still at it – twisting and turning as usual. He says he apologises for “the intelligence being wrong” but what he really should say is: “I apologise for the intelligence being correct but we ignored that and told the general public and parliament a totally different story to suit our intentions.” Why is there still a need to listen to him?
Henk Slagter

Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire