Chilcot’s judgment is utterly damning – but it’s still not justice - George Monbiot
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/06/chilcot-judgment-damning-not-justice-tony-blair-crime-aggression
The Chilcot report, much fiercer than almost anyone anticipated, rips down almost every claim the Labour government made about the invasion and its aftermath. Two weeks before he launched his war of choice, Tony Blair told the Guardian: “Let the day-to-day judgments come and go: be prepared to be judged by history.” Well, that judgment has just been handed down, and it is utterly damning.
Blair, along with his government and security services, Chilcot concludes, presented the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction with “a certainty that was not justified”: in other words they sexed up the evidence. Their “planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate”. They ignored warnings – which proved to be horribly prescient – that “military action would increase the threat from al-Qaida” and “invasion might lead to Iraq’s weapons and capabilities being transferred into the hands of terrorists”.
Blair’s claim that the catastrophe he caused in Iraq could not have been anticipated was demolished with a statement that could serve as the motif for the whole report: “We do not agree that hindsight is required.” All the disasters that came to pass were “explicitly identified before the invasion”.
But the most damning and consequential judgment of all was the one with which Chilcot’s statement began: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
This is as clear a statement as Chilcot was permitted to make that the war was illegal. The language he used echoes article 33 of the charter of the United Nations, which lays out the conditions required for lawful war. He has, in effect, defined the invasion of Iraq as a crime of aggression, which was described by the Nuremberg tribunal as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.
