Weighing the Arguments

I have mentioned once before in the House the advice that was given by Archidamus to his Spartan allies. He said that slow and cautious may be seen as wise and sensible. Many years later, the Athenian superpower, in its impatience, found out that he was absolutely right: impatience had imperilled it and led to its destruction. I say earnestly and honestly to the Government: their impatience will reap a whirlwind …

Peter Kilfoyle MP, 18 March 2003

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

Oliver Cromwell, 1650

If the spirit of this book is to question assumptions, then the book’s critique should also be placed under scrutiny. Was the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a blunder? I will argue that it was. By blunder, I mean more than a military misfortune, or the failure of an institution ‘to learn, anticipate, or adapt’ to the demands of a mission assigned to them.¹ Rather, I mean a failure of judgement about the most fundamental question, taken by the government with professional advice, on whether or not to invade, the prospects of success, and whether it would be worth it. A blunder is a ‘careless error’ with results that are much worse than intended or expected, when viable alternative courses are available. If the spirit of this book is to plea for less dogmatism, it is only fair that the arguments against the war, like those in favour, are properly weighed in the balance.

I argue that striking Iraq in 2003 was a major error. To be sure, it does not reach the level of history’s major, self-inflicted military misadventures that altered the global balance, like classical Athens’ Sicilian expedition in 415 bc or Imperial Germany’s gratuitous bid for power in 1914. If it does not match those levels of casualties and financial cost, it was still a consequential overreach. It wasted scarce resources and created significant opportunity costs, for the bad overall return of intensifying the turmoil of a region, making international security problems worse, and damaging the moral authority of the countries involved. The Iraq campaign did not finish off Britain as a major power, just as classical Athens after its calamitous Sicilian adventure found fresh timber and built new ships after the retreat from Syracuse.² Both Athens and Britain, and the world, could still have done without these blunders. If it did not match worse historic wars in scale of harm and self-harm, it did match those blunders in type. A major power driven by a mix of fear and optimism gravely injured itself—and others—by gratuitously launching a war that was not triggered by a pressing need, and when there were alternative and workable strategies on offer. That premise still needs defending. Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Telic, still have eloquent advocates. Those of us who judge it a blunder must honestly confront the price, and the implications, of our stance. In this chapter, I lay out a test, informed by classical realist tradition, on which we can make a provisional judgement. I then develop the strongest possible arguments, both the claims made at the time and retrospective ones, and test them against considerations of cost, gain, and as far as possible, counterfactual speculation. I then address each line of defence.

In Part I, I establish a standard or benchmark by which we can evaluate the decision, and develop a ‘prudential’ test. In Part II, I construct the strongest possible arguments in defence of the invasion, and the counterfactual scenarios they depict. In Part III, I demonstrate that those arguments fail to meet the test. In Part IV, I argue that there was an alternative strategy available, one that steered a course between passivity and overreach, one of containment and deterrence, that would have enabled the international community to monitor and disrupt Iraq’s weapons programme and checked any future aggression. In Part V, I refute one of the most forceful arguments in favour of war, made in hindsight by the Labour political advisor John McTernan. McTernan’s suggestion that without an invasion, the world would be ‘ruled by dictators and jihadists’ is the kind of counterfactual argument that anti-war critics often fail to confront, and deserves return fire.

PART I. BY WHAT STANDARD?

Some will regard this chapter’s inquiry as banal. Of course it was a blunder, as one strand of post-Chilcot opinion assumes. Those who dismiss the Chilcot Inquiry regard the issue as obvious, the inquest merely confirming what was already self-evident. A cabal of decision-makers, they allege, forced a conflict on an unwilling people and against international sentiment.³ That Iraq was an error is a position now held by the balance of opinion at home and abroad. With this stance, critics take on the closed-minded attitude they criticize in warmakers. The case should not be considered closed. A proper reckoning is due.

Firstly, we are trying to learn something from the experience. We are doing so to guide future judgements when we find ourselves again in the fog, where we won’t have the vantage point of hindsight. By what standard should we arbitrate the issue of whether the war was defensible or disastrous? Cases of military action gone wrong draw lamentation, but so do cases of inaction or restraint, such as Rwanda. If we are not content to retreat into unreflective consensus, or conformity with majority folk memory, or wait until afterwards to commend wars that seem to succeed, and denounce those that fail, we need to ask what exactly makes Iraq a blunder and offer an accounting of how we are to judge in the first place.

The issue deserves closer scrutiny also for another reason. Without a counterfactual case, the indictment against the war is inadequate. Arguments about war are intrinsically counterfactual. To argue that a party ought not to have gone down one path is implicitly and necessarily to suggest that alternative paths were preferable. Yet critiques all too often fail to offer a spelled-out counterfactual assessment of the decision. Alternatives were not self-evidently wiser. As one hawk suggests,

the basic decision to use military force to remove from power a man who had overseen a regime of unspeakable barbarity and cruelty remains, in my view, the right one. And I mean morally right. The failure to implement that choice competently does not, for me, change that basic moral conclusion. That view has, of course, been badly tested over the last 14 years, but I still hold it for the simple reason that I’ve yet to hear a convincing counter-factual, not least since most anti-war people can’t be bothered to construct that scenario. They should work harder: just shouting ‘Blair is a mass murderer, don’t you watch the news?’ isn’t an argument.⁴

Indeed it is not. Hawks pose serious ‘what if’ questions: what were the alternatives to war? What risks and costs would US-led allies have borne if they had refrained from invading? They deserve answers.

Sceptics should explicitly make the case that is too often left merely implicit: that Britain and its allies could have better coexisted with Saddam’s regime or its successors left in power, on acceptable terms. Alternatively, they would have been better off coping from a distance with an imploding post-Saddam Iraq. Altruistic concerns also demand a counterfactual evaluation: would Iraqis have fared better if the US-led coalition had avoided war? Those who argue that Iraq was a blunder and a warning against future preventive wars of this kind must confront these questions, or abandon the field to those who would repeat such experiments.

There are divisions too among the war’s critics. For some, the error lay in its conduct, not it’s conception. Even if it was incompetently waged, Iraq for this group should not cast doubt on the cause of armed interventionism itself. The West, they say, must still be prepared at times to overthrow regimes, occupy territories, and use force to transform regional orders. For those attached to armed idealism as a general orientation, the main response to Chilcot is not to ponder the errors of liberal wars. Counter-intuitively, it has become an occasion for them to reaffirm their belligerence. They do so by quarantining Iraq as a special and atypical case, from which we learn little beyond the limited and technical ‘lesson’ that it is better to plan thoroughly. For others, the separation of the war’s execution from its conception represents an ‘incompetence dodge’, an alibi for what is, in fact, a suspect idea.

The case is not dead within influential opinion circles and especially in the Anglo-American debate. Defenders of the invasion remain vocal.⁵ They defend the original decision and regularly update their defence. Subsequent developments, such as Libyan disarmament in 2003, the Arab Spring revolutions and the civil war in Syria from 2011, and the rise of the Islamic State in 2014 have called forth fresh apologias for the conflict. Blair in particular has made several interventions in the debate. Some critics dismiss these defences out of hand. Abrupt dismissal risks leaving the case for war unanswered, and reproduces the unreflective dogmatism that critics claim to oppose.

When the Iraq Inquiry finally published its report, hawks accused it of misjudgement. They maintain that the war was based on a sound calculus, despite its disappointments. It was ultimately the right thing to do, strategically and morally, even if it proved to be harder and more distressing than expected. Compared to alternative possible worlds in which the invasion did not take place, they maintain the invasion is defensible. If there was a failure, it was in the words of Fouad Ajami a ‘noble failure’, given the hazardous alternatives and what was at stake.⁶ There was nothing inherently ‘wrong’ or misguided about the decision to eliminate Saddam Hussein.

For unrepentant hawks, the main question for the West is not one of judgement, but one of will. They charge that the error was Western abandonment. Iraq may have been a long and bloody slog, they recognize, but by 2010 and thanks to the leadership of President Bush and General Petraeus, the US wrested a victory out of crisis, a victory that was then spoiled by a feckless President Obama for the sake of domestic politics. A counter-history has now formed.⁷ With echoes of ‘rightist’ American accounts of the loss of China after 1948 and Vietnam after 1975, this is the narrative of the ‘lost victory’. For those who blame Obama, the main lesson of Iraq is not to focus on the original sin of its beginning but the failure of its ending, when the US in December 2011 abandoned Iraq prematurely to the Sunni Islamist wolves of the Islamic State and left it vulnerable to violent sectarian breakdown. There was indeed a blunder, only it was Obama’s blunder of premature withdrawal. As one defence correspondent wrote in the wake of the Chilcot Inquiry, if we are asking who lost Iraq, we should blame Obama, not Blair.⁸

From the perspective of those who take the ‘abandonment’ interpretation, the main lesson is precisely not to overlearn the instinct for caution or to agonize over the invasion. If Iraq holds out lessons, they argue, it is two different ones, technocratic and moral. The technocratic lesson is that we need more careful and coordinated planning next time. The moral lesson is that we need the strategic patience to see it through. Advocates of counter-insurgency often begin from the premise that ambitious expeditionary wars like Iraq and armed nation-building efforts are almost inevitable, making it imperative to optimize the West’s ability to wage them again.⁹ This is a fatalistic stance, that seeks to shift debate from ‘whether’ to ‘how’ to conduct similar campaigns in future. It assumes, also, that the choice about when to leave is overwhelmingly the West’s to make. As we will see, Iraqis also had a say.

How we remember Iraq, whether we judge the war ‘worth it’, who or what we blame for failure, will shape contests over diplomacy for a generation at least. It will affect how high a threshold for belligerence is set by states like the UK. Historical verdicts will shape how British policymakers perceive crises that look similar. Iraq has already cast its shadow over subsequent decisions. The reluctance of intervening powers to insert ground forces into post-Gaddafi Libya in September 2011 reflected a disinclination to repeat the experiment of occupying countries against likely resistance. In the autumn of 2013, led primarily by the Labour opposition, whose leaders have renounced the Iraq War, the UK Parliament voted not to launch punitive airstrikes against Syria’s Assad regime in response to its apparent use of chemical weapons against civilians. To some, this represented a calamitous collapse of internationalism that can be attributed to the memory of Iraq. To others, it reflects a prudent presumption against the recourse to war for liberal surgery, a wariness about using force beyond defence or deterrence. The stakes are high.

Any judgements about Iraq must be provisional. Arguments in favour of the war have shifted as circumstances have changed. Avowed supporters of the war, many of whom contributed directly to its public justification, have since shifted their reasoning, repented of some aspects of the policy, while raising fresh justifications. Former Bush speechwriter and neoconservative intellectual David Frum, for instance, judged that Washington overstated the threat that a disarmed Iraqi regime posed, noting the heavy costs of the war and the failure to establish a stable, Western-oriented government for all of Iraq, while pointing to the liberation of the Iraqi Kurds and shifting some blame onto Iraqis for the choice of sectarian misbehaviour.¹⁰ Acknowledging five years after the invasion that the war inflicted worse suffering than he expected, Richard Perle prophesied that ‘Iraqis will look back and say, we paid a terrible price, but it’s worth it.’¹¹ The outward public reasoning of Tony Blair, especially, has proved flexible. Blair initially made disarmament the central justification and declared, in Parliament, that the movers of UN Resolution 1441 would delay it ‘to give Saddam one further final chance to disarm voluntarily’.¹² He has since claimed that he would have invaded Iraq even in the event that Saddam fully disarmed,¹³ and that his main aim was nothing less than to advance the modernization of the Middle East.¹⁴ For a brief period, some hawks credited the war for making possible the Arab Spring revolutions of North Africa and the Middle East.¹⁵ This line of argument has since receded, given what became of the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and the attempted revolution in Syria. It is not clear that Iraq did ‘cause’ these revolutions. Even if it did, the closeness of war with revolution is not an unambiguously good thing. The debate will doubtless evolve again. Ever since it began, the Iraq War has been a decision in search of a justification.

There is more to this than cynicism or the desire of the war’s apologists for self-vindication. The shifting of rationales is inherent to the politics of war. Opinion about wars changes over time because circumstances and contexts change, and these changes condition judgement. At first, many Britons regarded World War I as a hard-won, noble victory over Prussian militarism. It was not until the Great Depression and Europe’s interwar crisis that opinion shifted towards regret and disillusionment. As late as 1929, patriotic nationalist poets like Rupert Brooke vastly out-sold poets who stressed waste and futility, like Wilfred Owen.¹⁶ In our own time, only in the light of the crisis in Iraq after 2003 did the Gulf War of 1990–1 (and President Bush I’s decision to halt the ground campaign at the Iraqi border) become rehabilitated in collective memory, from missed opportunity to wise restraint. As former commander and Secretary of State Colin Powell observed in 2007, ‘in recent months, nobody’s been asking me about why we didn’t go to Baghdad.’¹⁷

The purpose of this chapter, then, is not to offer a final verdict. It is to refine the critique of the war in order to strengthen our ability to form judgements. I do so by offering the strongest possible ‘case against’ to counter the strongest possible ‘case for’ the invasion. I re-evaluate the decision to go to war, against both the contemporary calculations and post hoc rationalizations that have emerged since. As far as possible, we must assess the plausibility of what are counterfactual claims from what we can know and infer, and judge whether they are better or worse.

In conducting this audit, auditors must be especially wary of one particular rhetorical trap. A temptation for either side of the argument over Iraq is to emphasize the violence resulting from policy they opposed, and to ‘play down’, euphemize or de-emphasize the violence that resulted from policy they support. To guard against that bias, here I deliberately identify the extent and quality of violence at its height, both ‘before’ and ‘after’ regime change, as impartially as possible and in plain terms.

Through this exercise, I demonstrate that the defences of the war rest on counterfactual historical claims that are implausible and, in any case, less grave that what actually happened, even on ‘worst-case’ calculations. The strongest retrospective case for war still involves fragile gains made at costs so heavy, with such serious unintended consequences, that decision-makers would have judged them prohibitive, had they known them in advance. The West, I argue, could have coexisted with and contained a weakened Iraq even in a situation where sanctions were breaking down. There was already evidence, before March 2003, that Saddam’s regime could be deterred and restrained by clear Western signalling, there are strong reasons to assume that a ‘rogue state–terrorism nexus’ had not and would not form in Iraq, and that there was time and capacity to disrupt any rearmament or threatening behaviour. Between ‘regime change’ and ‘doing nothing’ there was a workable middle way of vigilant ‘overwatch’ available to US-led forces.

No inquest happens in a vacuum. Though critiques of the war often cast judgement without acknowledging their own assumptions, assumptions are inevitable. They ought to be surfaced. Before we judge the issue, it is best to come clean.

To debate whether a particular war is a blunder is to accept the distinction between wars that are and are not blunders. This premise would be nonsensical to both pacifists and militarists. For pacifists, wars are inherently blunders. For militarists, no war is a blunder, because a state of war (or at least a continual warlike state of being) is intrinsically valuable, regardless of its utility in any one case. These are prior and subjective value judgements that cannot be easily resolved analytically.¹⁸ To take a pacifist stance, that the application of violence is always illegitimate and never worthwhile, is a position that gives absolute precedence to the sanctity of life and anti-violence, a principle that not even the most lopsided balance sheet and cost–benefit analysis could overturn, by definition. At the opposite end of the spectrum, militarism, like pacifism, is an absolute stance that no account of the costs of war will refute. There are other ‘absolute’ stances that also preclude a debate about whether war is a blunder. For legalists, a non-negotiable precondition is war’s legal status. If we estimate that a war is ‘illegal’, this makes it illegitimate and wrong regardless of all else. For pacifists, militarists, and legalists, there is little to see here.

My argument is pitched at everybody else. I proceed from an alternative and equally subjective value judgement, the premise that there are occasions when the use of force is warranted. Most participants in the Iraq debate contest the issue within this general framework. This position flows from the ‘just war’ tradition, rooted in classical and medieval Christian thought, that the use of force can be justifiable if it is waged with just cause, if it secures a better state of peace than if force had not been applied, if waged under legitimate authority, and if it is proportional to the costs involved. Believers in the ‘just war’ tradition are not necessarily optimistic about the utility of force. Applied violence can, and often does fail because of its brutally tragic nature. Paraphrasing the Prussian soldier Carl von Clausewitz, war’s purpose is to serve policy, but its nature is to serve itself. Conflict inevitably harms innocents. It almost always has unintended consequences, some of them damaging. The threshold for justification, therefore, is high. But in principle, in classical and mainstream Christian traditions, it can be met. We can legitimately construct a ‘balance sheet’, where credits outweigh debits.¹⁹

To guide the exercise, I will attempt a prudential evaluation of Iraq. Prudence is the pursuit of practical wisdom. Defined by the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, prudence is the ‘supreme virtue’ that weighs the consequences of competing choices in concrete situations, and negotiates the conflicting demands of interest and principle. Ideally, it is animated by a humane scepticism, always aware that choices are bound to produce unexpected results.²⁰ It weighs the expenditure of resources against outcomes, compared to likely alternative scenarios. Whether war is wise, or a blunder, cannot be determined only or even primarily from the purity of intentions, or through mechanistic devices such as the letter of international law. The wisdom—or unwisdom—of decisions for war rests on hard consequences and weighed alternatives, measured against both immediate circumstances and the wider context of the national interest. In the classical and the later Christian Thomist tradition, prudence is a virtue that forbids action which is likely to be disproportionate.

Prudence, as I attempt to apply it here, flows from a particular worldview of classical realism.²¹ Realism is an ancient and pessimistic tradition of political thought, with several different permutations. In common, realists regard the world as an inherently insecure place defined by the possibility of war, where human behaviour is constrained by certain realities that are inexorable, and where states compete for security in a state of anarchy, where there is no transcendent, supranational authority to enforce the peace. In doing so, states cannot have clean hands. They will deploy human beings as instruments and will practise deception. Classical realism is distinct from amoral realism, the attempt to maximize one’s material interests regardless of all else. It is also distinct from a more recent scientific realism that assumes states operate as rational actors responding to the structural pressures of the world, impersonal forces that operate almost like laws, where agency, the domestic or the non-material only take effect at the margins.

In contrast, classical realism rejects amorality. Realism only makes sense as a dialogue of power with morality. The ultimate political act, war itself, descends into mere slaughter if it is waged without purpose. This kind of realism begins from the recognition of the constraints of material power, but it also looks beyond the material. It acknowledges the force of what people most want: to be secure, to be materially prosperous, and to feel good about themselves. These considerations all count in decisions about war. Classical realists are wary of utopian visions of what war is ‘for’, or what it can achieve. The world tends towards competition. States should therefore keep their swords sharpened. Even so, prudent accommodation with other states is possible and sometimes vital to prevent catastrophe, while it is almost always difficult, impermanent, and fragile. There is an altruistic element to classical realism, but it is a negative altruism of minimizing excess harm, presuming against actively ‘doing good’. From a classical realist lens, the inquest into Iraq must be broad in its regard for national, regional, and international security, for honour as well as material interest.

Classical realism places greater weight in human agency and ideas. Rationality, or the capacity to link means and ends in coherent ways, is more an ambition than a given fact. History demonstrates that states often ‘screw up’ and miscalculate, fall prey to bad ideas or gamble recklessly, and the international system has a way of punishing imprudent behaviour. Realists of this school accord greater historical importance to consequential diplomacy and the choices made by decision-makers, for good or ill.²² The future is not a set of regular patterns waiting to be discovered in advance by scientific study. It is unwritten. The pressures that create insecurity are powerful, but states and especially major states have enough latitude to make meaningful choices and to respond to domestic politics and act on non-material interests such as national honour. Iraq was not, in this tradition, primarily the kind of thing states simply ‘do’ in response to the pressures of the international system. It was a voluntary undertaking, made possible by the West’s capabilities, but driven by ideas about how to respond to the structural environment.

‘Just war’ theory and classical realism are not identical. Realism, though, resonates with central aspects of the just war tradition. As a recent ‘just war’ theorist observes, the ‘just war’ worldview draws on a threefold realism: an anthropological realism, that observes the reality of intractable vice on the international stage; a practical realism that is concerned for the realizability of ideas when put into practice; and a moral realism, a view of the moral order rooted in the nature of things as they objectively ‘are’, as far as we can perceive it.²³

Turning to Iraq itself, a prudential approach requires that we assess the decision to invade by weighing the costs, gains, and consequences, according to the strongest possible counterfactual arguments. From a classical realist lens, this must place the national interest at the centre of the equation. The nation state’s first duty is to secure its own citizens. Did Iraq effectively serve this purpose? We cannot be satisfied, however, by judging whether ‘we’ benefited even if others did not. The British national interest does not, and ought not, be narrowly selfish or insular. The consequences for Iraqis and the wider region also matter. It matters in terms of material security. We have limited but real interests in the Middle East, and don’t want a hostile imbalance of power to develop in ways that could empower international terrorism or disrupt the flow of oil. And it matters in terms of collective conscience. If the net effect of the Iraq War was to inflict avoidable surplus death, injury, and terror on a population, in circumstances short of a supreme emergency, then our honour is harmed in our eyes and in others’. On the other hand, if the net effect was to prevent worse suffering and destabilization, and if the hypothetical security threat was of the first order, then the war is defensible and the grounds for shame are weaker.

A second reason for judging the national interest broadly is that the war’s architects asked us to. Advocates of the war mostly did not argue that the invasion was justified by narrow national interest. They argued something more ambitious, claiming that the Iraq War was just and necessary because there was a harmony of interests—what was good for Iraqis was good for us all—and a merging of interests with ideals: our principles and our security interests were synonymous. Disarmament, democratic liberation, and the defeat of terrorism were, they argued, mutually consistent and reinforcing. That values and interests had become ‘one’ was foundational to the Bush Doctrine, to Blair’s ‘Chicago Doctrine’, and to the reasoning both gave before and after the invasion.²⁴ This is a harder test, but a self-imposed one, so it is only fair that they are judged by this standard.

Should we judge ‘with hindsight’ or without? Defenders of the war have at times cautioned against hindsight bias.²⁵ They claim that their support for overthrowing Saddam Hussein should only be judged circumstantially, by what they could be reasonably expected to know or perceive at the time. In making this historicist argument, they cite the consensus across intelligence agencies at the time that Saddam probably had an active weapons programme, and reasonable and shared suspicions that his record of concealment and non-cooperation suggested grounds for precautionary action. In doing so, they chide others for judging in the rear-view mirror, a luxury that historical actors did not have.

This will not do, however. Even if what we know is only a product of hindsight, it is still reasonable to ask how prudent their risk calculus was in the face of uncertainty. Given a lack of sufficient knowledge, should they have presumed in favour or against military action? Should they have judged more wisely even if they were in the dark? It is also open to us to make post hoc evaluations, because hawks use hindsight themselves. Looking back, they point to subsequent developments to make a retrospective defence, claiming that what happened afterwards vindicates their decision. They invoke the Arab Spring and the civil war in Syria, for example, to argue that the creation of a better order in Baghdad released the democratic impulse, or prevented an even more dangerous crisis. If the war had turned out well, it is hard to imagine the same hawks urging us to avoid hindsight bias in the war’s favour.

In any event, the notion that the case against the war can only rest on hindsight knowledge is faulty. There were dissenting voices at the time who warned precisely of the war’s possible consequences. The civil strife and conflicts that actually happened after invasion were not especially unforeseeable ‘non-linear’ and shocking events. If anything, to be shocked that violent disorder follows the overthrow of a government is a commentary on the assumptions of the shocked. Here we will probe both kinds of argument, evaluating decisions against the state of knowledge and debate at the time, and against what we learned since.

PART II. BALANCE POSITIVE? WEIGHING THE ARGUMENTS

Here I lay out the strongest possible case for forcibly removing the regime from power, bearing in mind both what could reasonably have been known at the time, and what we know now. I draw together the strongest rationales that have been advanced, from policy experts such as Ken Pollack, Iraqi exiles and regional authorities such as Kanan Makiya, and from the practitioner who has most persistently defended the decision, Tony Blair.

The strongest possible case would proceed as follows. Looking out from London in March 2003, Britain and the established international order was threatened by a dark form of globalization that had revealed itself on 9/11. If globalization is the circulation of people, capital, ideas, and things, the government’s risk calculus in the face of such forces was reasonable. Simply put, the West’s security was increasingly threatened over time. Given that decision-makers could not know the future, it was reasonable to suppose that the 9/11 attacks were not an aberration but part of a serial wave of assaults. It was reasonable to judge that the most prudent response to an increasingly dangerous world was decisive anticipatory action. Striking Iraq amounted to anticipatory war, to forestall an emerging future threat before it could fully manifest itself. The world we inhabit cannot afford the luxury of ‘last resorts’, as required in the Thomist tradition. As some strategic minds advise, we must adapt our conceptions of prudential and just war to a world where time is against us. Regime change in Iraq was an application of the ‘precautionary principle’. This principle holds that where an uncertain but potentially catastrophic risk is at hand and where we lack extensive or final knowledge, it is better to err on the side of caution. In the context of Iraq, precaution favoured action over inaction. It placed the burden of proof on opponents of action. In the words of Australian former prime minister John Howard, ‘if you wait for perfect proof, you could end up with another Pearl Harbor.’²⁶ Or as Blair put it,

The point about this act in New York was that, had they been able to kill even more people than those 3,000, they would have, and so, after that time, my view was you could not take risks with this issue at all, and one dimension of it, because we were advised, obviously, that these people would use chemical or biological weapons or a nuclear device, if they could get hold of them—that completely changed our assessment of where the risks for security lay.²⁷

Saddam’s Iraqi regime represented the sum of all fears, namely the possibility of nuclear terrorism. His regime embodied a potential confluence of several dangerous trends: the pursuit of ultimate weapons technology, the aggressive and genocidal intent entailed within emerging radical and religious forms of terrorism, and the collaboration of rogue states. In assessing the new threat environment, the 9/11 Commission reported that globalization put lethal weapons in the hands of actors in ways that weakened the force of time and space, making deterrence, containment, and geographical barriers almost irrelevant.²⁸ Neither was this only America’s problem. The 9/11 terrorist attacks killed sixty-seven British subjects, revealing a transnational threat. The illicit arms trade, too, was a cross-border and cross-ideological phenomenon. In the early twenty-first century, the traffic in nuclear materials through entrepreneurs like A.Q. Kahn and regressive states like North Korea, Libya, and Iraq itself was dangerously ecumenical. Radical Islamists, like the Al Qaeda network, had been historically willing to collaborate even with ideologically hostile ‘godless’ states, like the Soviet Union, to wage their jihad. Having endured the 9/11 atrocities, it was not fanciful to recognize that such a threat could metastasize.

By early 2002, Saddam was rightfully becoming the prime candidate for elimination, now that al-Qaeda’s host government, the Afghan Taliban, was toppled and reeling. Saddam oversaw an uncommonly sadistic abattoir regime of torture, purges, and state terror. To genocide he added ecological atrocities, such as the draining of the Mesopotamian marshes. He was one of the few states in the world to deploy chemical weapons, both at home (against the Kurds) and abroad (against Iran). These instruments are regarded internationally as abhorrent to the point of taboo. That he turned them against his own subjects indicates that he recognized few limits. His barbarity was exceptional, even judging by the competitive standards of Middle Eastern dictators.²⁹

All this would be bad enough, if the Ba’ath Party had confined its predatory behaviour to Iraq. Saddam was also a serial aggressor beyond Iraq’s borders. He had invaded Iran in 1979, launching one of the worst conflicts the Gulf had seen in living memory. He waged genocidal war on the Iraqi Kurds. He had invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990, bombing Saudi Arabia and Israel in the process. This regime was historically willing to collaborate with terrorists. Saddam was a known sponsor of Palestinian suicide bombers in the West Bank. He offered bounties for the murder of UN relief workers in northern Iraq. His regime had also had sporadic contacts with al-Qaeda. The same regime had pursued weapons of mass destruction. Its persistence was a source of conflict and destabilization. His regime was virulently anti-Semitic and was one of the main ‘rejectionist’ forces in the region, an obstacle to the effort to end the Arab–Israeli conflict. Indeed, Saddam regarded himself as the leader of a historical pan-Arab movement that would fight and annihilate Israel. Saddam was not an Arab ‘Stalin’, brutal at home while cold, calculating, and deterrable abroad. And the Hitler analogy is ill-suited and overworked. He was more the Mussolini of the Gulf, head of a risk-taking revisionist regime driven by grandiose visions of empire-building, with a penchant for reckless military adventurism. The regime and system he had built promised to perpetuate oppression at home and aggression abroad, long after his passing. His sons Udday and Qusay, who would be his likely successors, had a record of sadistic brutality that appalled even their atrocious father. This held out little prospect of moderation, reformation, or constructive détente.

What of Saddam’s WMD capabilities, or as it turned out, non-capabilities? While the regime turns out not to have possessed a WMD stockpile, reason and evidence persuaded a range of international observers that it did, and these observers included opponents of war. All intelligence experts advised that the regime retained some ‘CBW’ (chemical and biological weapons).³⁰ There were also good reasons to suppose that Saddam would probably reconstitute his weapons programme in future. The ‘Duelfer Report’ of the Iraq Survey Group concluded that though he had disarmed his WMD arsenal and programmes, Saddam still had WMD ambitions.³¹ And in an age of non-state actors moved by apocalyptic ideology, without a return address and unconstrained by the traditional logic of deterrence, Saddam might donate WMD to such a group in order to ‘cheat’ the threat of retaliation and empower a fanatical group which could not be easily targeted for retaliation and didn’t care about the threat of punishment in the first place.

Western-led international measures to counter the Iraq threat were proving to be increasingly inadequate and unsustainable. Over a decade of blockade had crippled the Iraqi economy and hurt and killed civilians. According to a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) survey, child mortality was at the same level as the Congo.³² This was not directly the consequence of sanctions, but the misuse of food and medicine aid by the regime for its own purposes. Perversely, the same sanctions strengthened the regime and fed anti-Western grievance. This, as well as America’s garrisoning of Saudi Arabia to check Iraqi aggression, created the kind of resentment that nourished Islamist incitement. The status quo of sanctions and near-permanent military presence left a dangerous enemy intact while enabling propagandists to portray the West as an imperialist interloper. At the same time, those sanctions would become progressively less capable of keeping Saddam in his box. The international programme of sanctions was breaking down, and the regime was noticeably becoming bolder in its defiance. Iraq fired on US and British aircraft patrolling it’s no-fly zone. As sanctions eventually disintegrated, we know that the global oil price would rise, linked to the economic surge in India and China after 2004. This would enrich Saddam, who would resurface as a dangerous predator, with the added legitimacy of a defiant ruler who had faced down the West’s air war and economic strangulation. The regime’s hostility to the US and its allies was open. Saddam was the only state leader to openly celebrate the 9/11 attacks. Under his aegis, Iraq was emerging as a possible centre of what Blair called a ‘loose’ but ‘hardening’ nexus between WMD, terrorism, and rogue states. In recent years, Saddam had reinvented the Iraqi state, away from the cause of secular pluralism and towards a realignment with militant Islamism. In an era when violence could be projected by means short of large-scale industrial and military power, and at relatively low cost, Western governments were now on notice.

In removing Saddam from power, the US-led coalition replaced a hostile regime with one that is flawed and corrupt, certainly, but also broadly pro-Western. Unlike the overthrown order, the new government in Baghdad respects international borders. Iraq’s small Gulf neighbour, Kuwait, is no longer threatened with predation or annexation, as Saddam attempted in 1990–1 and as he threatened to do by mobilizing on the border in October 1994. In turn, the example of Saddam’s demise accelerated Libya’s peaceful disarmament of its chemical weapons stockpile in December 2003 and the abandonment of its nuclear programme. The US Air Force and the Royal Air Force were no longer required to patrol the skies above Kurdish areas. The invasion removed one of the foremost obstacles to any eventual Arab–Israeli settlement. More broadly, the process of change, though fraught, inspired the wider region. By releasing the Iraqi movement for political liberty, it helped inspire the democratic impulse in subsequent revolutions across North Africa and Middle East.

The price tag for these gains was higher than wished for or expected. Given what subsequently happened in Iraq after 2003, any retrospective case for invasion must contend that the gains were still worth the unexpectedly high costs. Compared to Iraq’s prior condition, the cost did not, however, exceed the value of the object. With an oppressive regime gone, Iraqis were free to choose a better future. It brought forth a new constitution, free elections, and open debate. Trade and oil embargoes that had devastated the population were lifted, making possible the economic reconstruction of the country. By 2010, GDP per capita was three times what it had been, and child mortality had improved dramatically. There was a brutal escalation of violence in 2005–7, which gave international terrorism a foothold in the country. Yet the descent of the country into civil war was reversed by an American-led ‘surge’, as an infusion of troops and resources as well as a renaissance in counter-insurgency technique that depressed levels of violence, defeated al-Qaeda’s bid for power in Anbar province, and created space for political conciliation. This was a victory that gave invaluable experience to US and international forces in ‘minor wars’, nation-building, and stabilization missions. It was also a victory that could have become the basis for an Iraqi national rebirth. By 2010–11, as American troops drew down, Iraq was relatively stable, had consolidated its new democracy, and was rebuilding its economy.

The violent fracturing of the country since then, with the spread of the Islamic State into Iraq, de facto partitioning, and sectarian violence, is not the responsibility of the governments that originally decided on invasion. Iraqis themselves are responsible for their collective decisions. They are agents, not objects, are no longer wards of the international community, and are able to pursue their own course. The West helped created an historic opportunity that Iraqis squandered. As David Frum tweeted after the release of the Report of the Iraq Inquiry: ‘US-UK intervention offered Iraq a better future. Whatever the West’s errors, the sectarian war was a choice Iraqis made for themselves.’³³ Or as Charles Krauthammer reasoned,

We have made a lot of mistakes in Iraq. But when Arabs kill Arabs and Shiites kill Shiites and Sunnis kill all in a spasm of violence that is blind and furious and has roots in hatreds born long before America was even a republic, to place the blame on the one player, the one country, the one military that has done more than any other to try to separate the combatants and bring conciliation is simply perverse. It infantilizes Arabs. It demonizes Americans. It wilfully overlooks the plainest of facts: Iraq is their country. We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.³⁴

Consistent with this line of argument, weighing agency over structure, is the blame that apologists place on the Obama administration. As the argument goes, if there are other guilty parties, they are the later Western governments. By 2011, US and allies, both foreign and Iraqi, had won the war and wrested the country back from the brink, securing a stable, friendly new order in Iraq that was still fragile, that needed Western strategic presence to survive. This was squandered by President Obama in his inflexible determination to withdraw all forces, creating a vacuum for the conflict and destabilization that followed. Indeed, there is a link between the two developments. Without the assurance of Western support as a security provider, Iraqis lost faith in their state and the political process, and turned on each other.

Even allowing for these terrible developments, counterfactually, Iraq escaped a worse alternative world than would likely have come about had war not been waged. Had the Arab Spring come to Iraq, as surely it would have, a rearming and resurgent Saddam Hussein would probably have responded to it with the repressive behaviour that he had used in previous cases of rebellion or dissent. Either he would have crushed the rebellion and emerged as a ‘North Korea of the Gulf’. Or Iraq would have suffered a Syria-style implosion. Ba’ath Iraq would have unravelled like Ba’ath Syria. This would have created a vortex into which other regional states intervened with gold, arms, and proxies, against a Sunni supremacist order fighting with an existential stake in the struggle. If Iraq in this alternative world developed as Syria has, in a war that had longevity as well as intensity, this would have killed and wounded civilians on a magnitude comparable or worse than what actually happened. Westerners would be debating the missed opportunity to tip the balance. A major intervention would be possible and increasingly demanded, not to remove a regime and achieve something more stable and acceptable, but to impose order on a more multipolar and more chaotic situation. And, as with Syria today, an imploding Iraq would set the scene for a possible collision between global and regional powers, including the US, UK, Gulf Arab states, Turkey, Iran, and Russia.

British security interests are implicated in each of these considerations. Failure to follow through in March 2003 would have damaged the Anglo-American relationship, and reduced Britain’s capacity to shape Washington’s behaviour. Leaving it to the US would have spurred American unilateralism. Taking part at least reinforced a norm of collective multilateral effort. Capitulating to Saddam Hussein’s defiance would have emboldened other adversaries. An increase in violent chaos in the Arab-Islamic world, especially in the Gulf, or alternatively the emergence of a North Korea–like state there, would have threatened the stability of a region regarded as critical to the UK. The types of threat might vary, though could interlock in dangerous ways: the disruption of energy and commercial flows, the increase in international terrorism, and the collision of major powers all seeking to impose order on the region. If ‘major wars can begin as an aggregation of lesser wars’,³⁵ a breakdown in order across Iraq would increase the chance of dangerous escalation. Iraq today is a deeply troubled state, and host to a number of misdevelopments such as sectarian conflict. It has, though, avoided becoming a ‘Syria mark two’.

PART III. MORE HARM THAN GOOD: THE CASE(S) AGAINST

Here I outline the strongest possible case against the Iraq War, and offer a critique of the arguments above.

The main indictment of the invasion is that it inflicted more harm than good. In some respects, it perversely brought about and aggravated the very security threats that it was supposed to counter. It brought excess and disproportionate costs, in return for only fragile and modest returns. The decision to strike Iraq fails to satisfy the proportionality requirement, central to prudential judgement, as it harmed the West’s security interests in return for insufficient security gains.

Invasion did not confer liberty but anarchy on the Iraqi population, at least for a critical time period. It had perverse results, making Iraq a more lethal environment for many of its inhabitants, worsening rather than reducing terrorism, and demonstrating the value of acquiring a nuclear deterrent. And there were realistic alternatives to war. A ‘North Korea scenario’, where Iraq’s regime survived in the absence of war, would still have been preventable if the invasion had not occurred. With regards to the ‘Syria scenario’, where Iraq imploded in the absence of war, the actual war helped to create the conditions for wider sectarian breakdown in the region, established a new form of abusive sectarian rule in the country, and thereby ultimately empowered Sunni Islamism and its most radical offshoot, the Islamic State. The ‘abandonment thesis’ is also historically false: the West did not have the politically realistic choice after 2008 of maintaining a large-scale and lasting presence in Iraq. Regime change unleashed forces that are not the West’s to control.

It is sobering to compare what did happen in Iraq with what was supposed to happen. The architects of the venture expected a lightning strike campaign with light casualties, rapidly leading to a peaceful transfer of power to a constitutional Iraqi government, and an estimated cost of £2.5–3 billion.³⁶ Inspectors would locate the WMD stockpile and the interveners would confiscate it. Saddam’s overthrow would eliminate a major sponsor of terrorism who probably would have strengthened his relationship with al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Onlooking states would distance themselves from international terrorism and eschew illegal weapons proliferation. Liberated from an atrocious regime, Iraqi civil society would create a new and more humane order. To the extent that the West was historically implicated in the regime’s atrocities, by omission and commission, the gift of liberation would repay its debts. With sanctions then lifted, Iraq’s oil revenue, trade, recovered assets, and investment would mostly pay for the war and quickly finance reconstruction. Iraq’s liberation would promote the cause of human rights and democracy worldwide. The United Nations, through Anglo-American leadership, would have its authority restored. It would avoid the humiliation it was about to suffer, in May 2003, of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq taking over the chairmanship of the UN Committee on Disarmament. Anticipating the future verdict on the Blair government’s decision, historian Andrew Roberts prophesied that Blair, like Winston Churchill, would be vindicated. The historical act of removing Saddam would reveal the horrifying extent of the threat. Iraqi expatriates who also urged for the war, congregating around Ahmad Chalabi’s London-based Iraqi National Congress, were likewise optimistic.

All these expectations have been disappointed. Contrary to the WMD claims that were the centrepiece of the case for war, the US Duelfer Commission found that Saddam Hussein had abandoned his WMD programmes. He ended nuclear weapons research in 1991 and biological and chemical weapons research in 1995. In measuring the human costs of war, the first and paramount step is to count the dead. Planners wildly underestimated the levels and type of violence that would occur from 2003 onwards, from insurgent resistance to civil disorder to proxy and communal conflict. Measuring surplus deaths is a difficult and imprecise exercise, and estimates vary. There is no exact point in time to ‘stop the clock’ on causation, but a reasonable starting point is to track mortality over a ten-year period from 2003 to 2013, given the magnitude of the change in the removal of the Ba’ath regime, and the causal link suggested by the persistence of many of the same actors who took up the opportunity to exercise power (such as Nouri al-Maliki, prime minister from 2006 to 2014, and the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army). The total casualties caused by the conflict over a decade according to the website Iraq Body Count were 174,000; according to PLOS Medicine they were 461,000; according to the Associated Press they were more than 110,000. At its climax, the violence that followed the overthrow of the government between 2004 and 2007 reached 1,700 civilian casualties per month.³⁷ To be sure, the occupying powers were far from the only ones implicated in this violence. Their culpability is not directly for each death or casualty, but for the structural situation. In the vacuum that invasion made possible, criminal activity, sectarian conflict, and the Al Qaeda–backed Sunni insurgency all thrived.

How does this compare with life before liberation? Over the duration of his reign, 1979–2003, Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the killing of approximately 200,000 people, according to Western human rights groups collecting accounts from defectors and émigrés (this figure does not include the fatalities of the Iran–Iraq War that he launched).³⁸ His body count total represents a rate of 8,333 people a year. If we consider that casualties from 2003 onwards at the most conservative estimate of 110,000, Iraq’s annual post-war fatality rate rose to 11,000. In other words, for a decade during the invasion and occupation, Iraq was a more lethal country to its inhabitants even than during the Ba’ath tyranny. In turn, this drove a refugee exodus. Initially, the toppling of Saddam led to a return movement of 300,000 Iraqis. The surge of internal conflict from 2006 drove many to flee, especially after the polarizing event of the bombing of the shrine in Samarra and the surge of violence it generated. By July 2014, according to the United Nationals High Commission for Refugees, an estimated 1.9 million Iraqis were external refugees, including approximately half of the country’s doctors.³⁹ This was one of the worst refugee crises the region had seen in living memory.

A prior order of state repression, destructive sanctions, and occasional genocide yielded to a new order of sectarian cleansing, multisided combat in urban areas, rampant criminality, and the continuous damage and destruction of civilian infrastructure. This is not necessarily proof, on its own, of the war’s imprudence. It does at least heavily qualify the claim that Iraq was liberated. That the war left the country a more dangerous place to live in even than under Saddam is a mark solidly in the debit column.

As for the child mortality claim, it has been revealed that the claim of an abnormally high pre-war infant death rate and subsequent dramatic reduction is overblown. It was based on a UNICEF report of 1999 (the ‘Iraq Child and Maternal Mortality Survey’) that was compiled with the support of Iraqi government officials, not a source above suspicion. Four subsequent surveys from UNICEF, the UN Development Programme and the World Health Organization, as well as the 1997 Iraqi census, found no evidence for a spike in child mortality in the 1990s.⁴⁰ In Kurdish areas that were also subject to sanctions but not under Saddam’s control, there was no such rise. Moreover, the Foreign Office (FCO), with the confirmation of the Department for International Development (DFID), had advised that there was no reliable answer about child mortality and that the figure of 131 deaths per 1,000 children under the age of five was suspect.⁴¹ Yet in February 2003, Matthew Rycroft advised Blair that the alleged pre-war high mortality rate was sound, and did not burden the Prime Minister with the doubts raised.⁴² Ironically, Saddam Hussein’s regime and the Blair government reinforced each other’s efforts to persuade opinion that pre-war sanctions had been lethal to children. Incuriosity prevailed, as did the search for evidence to bolster a prior decision.

Torture is another revealing comparison point. Saddam’s regime made torture the apex of its system of rule through fear, described by the United Nations’ Commission for Human Rights as an ‘all pervasive repression and widespread terror’. Amnesty International listed the torture methods, from the gouging out of eyes to tongue amputation, electrocution, and rape, killing some victims and leaving others physically and mentally damaged.⁴³ Saddam even had a secret torture chamber installed in the basement of the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations in New York. The Ba’ath Party elite enthusiastically ordered torture and at times personally carried it out. We know much about Saddam’s tortures, because the regime deliberately exhibited its victims’ broken bodies as a public deterrent. Mutilation of targets in order to exhibit the price of transgression was a favoured technique. As Kanan Makiya’s authoritative account of ‘the republic of fear’ graphically demonstrated, after defeat in 1991, the repertoire of barbaric punishments and rewards increased and led to new and bizarre kinds of degradation:

The number of ways in which the state was publicly disfiguring the bodies of its citizens was mushrooming. Depending on the crime, the foreheads of offenders got branded with a horizontal line three to five centimeters long, or with a circle, along with the X spelled out in Law 109. Some army deserters and draft dodgers, and those who sheltered them, got special treatment: the outer part of one ear was to be cut off for the first offence; a repeat offence resulted in the amputation of the other ear and a circle being branded on the forehead … Only after being caught for desertion a third time would a soldier be executed … The reaction of ordinary Iraqis to the new laws was also unprecedented. Two men whose ears had been cut off immolated themselves in central Baghdad in October 1994. Following the murder of a doctor in the southern city of Nassirriyya by an amputee, and the storming of the headquarters of the Ba’th party in the city of Amara by a crowd that cut off the ears of the Ba’th officials it got its hands on, several hundred doctors went on strike to protest having to carry out the new punishments. Upon being threatened with having their own ears cut off, the doctors called off their strike. Law 117 was then promptly issued, directed at the whole medical profession. It threatened immediate amputation of the ear for anyone who insisted in the cosmetic improvement of an officially disfigured body part. The law’s wording ends with this strange acknowledgement of the public’s outrage: The effects of the punishment of amputation of the hand or ear and branding ‘will be eliminated [by the state] if those so punished go on to perform heroic and patriotic acts.⁴⁴

After Saddam’s overthrow, torture did not end. Against expectations, it became increasingly difficult to assume that ‘at least’ the invasion alleviated Iraqis from repression. Instead, now that torture was no longer a state monopoly, it proliferated and at a higher rate even than under the old order. It was carried out by security forces, insurgents, and militia groups. Consider the report in 2006 of UN officials who examined the bodies of kidnap victims in Baghdad’s morgue:

64. UNAMI HRO [United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, Human Rights Office] has consistently documented the widespread use of torture in Iraq. This matter has regularly emerged as a major concern and has been widely acknowledged as a major problem by Iraqi officials. Periodically, information has been received by HRO regarding the use of torture in detention centres. The bodies that regularly appear throughout the country bear signs indicating that the victims have been brutally tortured before their extra-judicial execution.

65. UNAMI HRO has received reports and documentation showing the type of torture inflicted on detainees, particularly during interrogation. Detainees’ bodies show signs of beating using electrical cables, wounds in different parts of their bodies, including in the head and genitals, broken bones of legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns. Bodies found at the Medico-legal Institute often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones (back, hands and legs), missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails. Individuals who escaped death in such incidents reported that saw [sic] others being tortured to get information about their sect. For example, an individual reported that he was beaten by members of a Sunni extremist group with electrical cables and iron bars to make him confess the sect to which he belonged. The body of another man kidnapped by Shi’a militias bore signs of facial mutilation, had fingers missing from his hands and had a significant perforation—presumably from a power drill—below his left shoulder.⁴⁵

Iraqis reported to the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq that the new realities of torture were ‘worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein’.⁴⁶ It may not be easy to evaluate that claim. That post-war conditions were even credibly comparable is a judgement against the invasion, given that it was supposed to relieve civilians from oppression. Long occupation of Iraq also became the occasion for Western torture. Allegations of British prisoner abuse were upheld in the case of the Baha Mousa Inquiry, with more still under investigation by the Iraq Historic Allegations Team.⁴⁷ Torturers, whether American or British, actively contributed to the terrorization of the civilian population, and by doing so, degraded themselves and the states they represented. This damaged the moral authority of the United States and Britain. It created a recruitment tool for Islamist terrorist groups, making it easier for hostile propagandists to portray Western campaigns not as liberation efforts but as colonial domination.

Given the extent of post-Saddam terror, what of the argument that this was primarily Iraqis’ decision and agency, choosing civil war over enlightened nation-building? The flaw in this argument is that it wrongly separates the act of breaking the state from the violent forces that were subsequently unleashed. It is true that other developments before the war are causally implicated in the civil strife that followed, including the deliberately divisive and intentionally terroristic nature of Ba’ath Party rule. The invasion, though, was the proximate cause of the subsequent sectarian conflict and breakdown of order, the mobilization of radical Sunni militias, and the spillover of radical jihadist groups into Syria.⁴⁸ To characterize the invasion as an act that ‘midwifed their freedom’ is a perverse account of what happened when invading forces overthrew a government. If it midwifed anything, it was a state of grave mutual insecurity between Iraqis, spiralling not into liberty, a condition that requires a minimal level of security and social cohesion, but instead into anarchy. Without a Leviathan to restrain competing groups, frightened Iraqis turned to their primary groups for protection and succour. In those conditions, both sides found themselves in a security dilemma, where they armed, organized, and competed in order to ensure their security, only to heighten one another’s insecurity. In such conditions, the ‘choice’ of taking up arms was not the irrational awakening of ancient hatreds. With the right triggering event, namely al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Golden Dome mosque, an escalation of atrocities followed.

Regarding the net humanitarian and strategic results, the fact that life over a decade became more lethal and torturous even than under Ba’ath Party rule might arguably be less weighty if it could be shown that these horrific developments were at least positively productive, that they purchased a more humane order that was beneficial to British security interests. As things stand, however, we do not know that, and there are disturbing signs pointing in the other direction. Amnesty International reported in October 2016 that Popular Mobilization Units, or Hashd al-Shaabi (an Iraqi government–backed organization made up of myriad Shia Muslim militias) now torture and execute Sunni civilians who escaped the Islamic State.⁴⁹ The post-Saddam killings and tortures were not the birth pangs of what would become a pluralistic state under a restrained constitutional government. They marked the creation of a sectarian Shiite ascendancy that continues to commit grave human rights violations. British military forces are now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan to counter the Islamic State, the worst by-product of the regional turmoil that the Iraq War helped to generate.

These distressing outcomes also came at significant costs borne by the US and Britain. According to the Iraq Inquiry, the direct cost to the UK was £9.2 billion for the 2003–9 campaign.⁵⁰ Overall costs are greater when we factor in indirect costs, such as the costs of through-life medical care for veterans, and the costs of military replenishment such as the replacement of equipment. It is impossible to quantify objectively or precisely how many casualties or how much expenditure is ‘too much’ in isolation. Evaluations are inevitably value-laden. We can at least inform judgement through relative rather than absolute measures. The total cost was £7 billion more than anticipated, and as we shall see, for a return of decidedly more mixed results than expected, including perverse and undesired outcomes. Without the distress of the Iraq War, £9.2 billion could have been allocated more productively, in capital stock such as education or infrastructure, in different combinations. The UK government hypothetically could have not spent it, reducing the budget deficit. If spent elsewhere, it could have covered the cost of retaining public services that were reduced in later ‘austerity budgets’ from 2010, sparing for years local government budgets to be spent on British public libraries (reduced in total by approximately £150 million in 2010),⁵¹ maintaining the flood defence budget (reduced by £30 million),⁵² and the legal aid budget (reduced by £350 million).⁵³ These alternative uses of money have a concrete and direct impact on the populace. Alternatively, the costs of Iraq could have offset the large-scale defence spending reductions in 2010, such as the reduction in army personnel, or could have contributed to the recapitalization of the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, or covered annual expenditure on operations in Afghanistan for five of its twelve years.⁵⁴

These financial sums are hardly crippling. They do not equal the major cases of imperial overstretch, such as the ruinously exorbitant campaigns of Hapsburg Spain’s King Philip II.⁵⁵ As the figures suggest, the Iraq War still represented non-trivial opportunity costs. Those costs should weigh more heavily given the larger consequences of the war for British security interests. To dismiss these costs as relatively inconsequential or easily affordable would be to betray an insouciance about scarce resources. Even marginal reductions or reallocations of such resources strongly affect the vulnerable. Money spent on military operations in Iraq not only contributed to an overall worsening environment for Iraqis, but was money not spend preventing flood damage, maintaining a public library, funding police, or supporting under-resourced troops in Afghanistan.

The expenditure of the United States, on the other hand, does stand comparison with major historical episodes. A war whose total direct and indirect costs amount to approximately $3 trillion helped accelerate America’s relative decline, adding a legacy of debt to its already unsustainable liabilities, adding to the ratio of public debt to GDP, worsening the strain on scarce resources in the competition between debt, military commitments, and social welfare, and depleting its relative strength as a unipolar power, although it remains a major power.⁵⁶

British casualties in Iraq were also excessively high, if judged against expectations, and if judged against the modest gains of the war, especially the absence of Saddam’s WMD programme and thus the non-imminence of the threat. Casualties are also high against another revealing measure. Britain suffered 179 service personnel fatalities and three UK civilian officials. Of these, 138 were killed as the result of hostile acts, rather than illness, suicide, or blue-on-blue accident.⁵⁷ Many thousands were wounded. The full figures have yet to be released. According to the Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) official figures, since 2006, there were 5,791 total.⁵⁸ These numbers—182 killed, 5791 injured—amount to the equivalent of a major terrorist attack, brought on by inserting forces in Iraq.

Two caveats are in order. Firstly, these were volunteer personnel electing to put themselves in harms’ way, rather than civilian bystanders, and they were doing so on expeditionary operations away from the mainland UK, in contrast to a major attack on a city in the British homeland. This arguably lessens the severity to an extent, but the military character of the losses and the fact that they happened ‘over there’ does not negate the point. Most Britons would certainly regard a terrorist attack on a military facility in the Middle East that killed 182 personnel and inflicted thousands of non-fatal casualties as a major and distressing episode, comparable to America’s reaction to the Beirut barracks bombing of 1983. The prolonged duration of the losses matters. Spreading these losses over a decade may be preferable to single attack concentrated on one day, given what a shock of that magnitude could do to the state’s functioning and to social cohesion. Given this time period, a better comparison might be to serial, smaller scale attacks over a decade. Going by the casualty figures we have, British losses in Iraq are quantitively the equivalent of terrorist attacks killing approximately eighteen people a year and inflicting non-fatal casualties of almost 580 people a year. This is higher than the annual rate of terrorist-inflicted casualties Britain has actually suffered at home over the longer period dating back to 11 September 2001, of 145 fatalities (fifty-three in Great Britain, ninety-two in Northern Ireland), an average of almost ten per year.⁵⁹ Given that suppressing and defeating international terrorism was one objective of the Iraq War, and given that it turned out that the Iraqi regime did not collaborate with al-Qaeda, suffering the equivalent of a major terrorist attack or a series of smaller terrorist attacks as a direct result of the war is disappointing.

Tony Blair might respond that removing Saddam at the expense of hundreds of dead and thousands injured is still justifiable proportionately, given that it disrupted a potential link that could have resulted in an unthinkable, catastrophic terrorist attack. Though distressing, the losses Britain suffered were still an expenditure of resources that lowered the chances of a complete disaster, even if the odds of that disaster were low. As Blair implored the Commons in March 2003,

what was shocking about 11 September was not just the slaughter of innocent people but the knowledge that, had the terrorists been able, there would have been not 3,000 innocent dead, but 30,000 or 300,000—and the more the suffering, the greater their rejoicing. I say to my hon. Friend that America did not attack the al-Qaeda terrorist group; the al-Qaeda terrorist group attacked America. They did not need to be recruited; they were there already. Unless we take action against them, they will grow. That is why we should act.⁶⁰

In the context of urging for anticipatory war, this position rests on the same bedrock assumptions of the Bush Doctrine: that the Iraq regime was a prime candidate for collaboration with the Al Qaeda network or equivalent, and that strategies of deterrence and/or containment and ‘raiding’ were unrealistic against such threats.

The most immediate objection to Blair’s argument is that Saddam Hussein’s regime did not have a direct, collaborative relationship with al-Qaeda, and showed no signs of doing so. The most thorough and exhaustive investigation of this issue was issued by the Institute of Defence Analyses (IDA), based on 600,000 captured Iraqi documents. Saddam’s regime did have a long-standing programme of supporting various Islamist and other revolutionary groups when their goals coincided, and there were limited communications between his government and al-Qaeda, just as there were overlaps in short-term goals. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the future leader of AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq) did operate in northern Iraq as part of Ansar al Islam (a linked organization) with the knowledge of Baghdad, but this was Kurdish territory that Saddam could not directly control, Ansar’s conflict with Kurds coincided with the regime’s interests, and the regime had attempted to locate and capture Zarqawi in vain. The relationship was overall ‘one of innate caution and mutual mistrust’, and there is no evidence of a direct collaborative connection.⁶¹ According to debriefs from detainees who were ex-officials, Saddam distrusted al-Qaeda and issued a general order that Iraq should not deal with al-Qaeda, and rebuffed requests for operational and material support. This verdict supports the independent findings of the 9/11 Commission, the CIA, the Defence Department in its declassified internal report, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.⁶²

The war had not only human and financial costs. It also imposed geopolitical costs, affecting the distribution and use of power in the wider region in ways that bear negatively on British security interests. As Blair himself has partially conceded, without the Iraq War, there would be no Islamic State. One of the war’s legacies, and most profound failures, was that it created conditions for sectarian government that persecuted a large Sunni minority, leading to the collapse of large swathes of the country in face of the Islamic State in 2014. Because a Shiite regime governed in sectarian ways to alienate Sunni communities, $26 billion of US investment in the military, police, and justice system (including about $12 billion on supplying the Iraqi army)⁶³ over a decade created a force that collapsed and fled in the face of the Islamic State’s offensive. The net result was to create an army that refused to fight to defend the state. At the same time, the Iraq War directly contributed to the growth of the Islamic State and its precursors. By effectively installing into power Shia supremacists who were backed by Iranian patronage, the US and UK persuaded aggrieved Sunnis that they were undertaking ‘a historical pivot towards Iran and the restoration of Persian hegemony’. Mass detention, and the prison system in Iraq that evolved under international occupation, in particular Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, became an incubator and organizing structure for Sunni jihadis.⁶⁴ Former detainees liken camp Bucca to an ‘al-Qaeda school’, producing jihadists in a factory-like environment. Camp Bucca housed about twenty-four-thousand men … [who] sat at the feet of Salafi-jihadists, who mentored them and converted them en masse to their Islamist ideology’.⁶⁵

The Iraq War disrupted the balance of power in the Gulf, empowering Iran, ironically a state with more extensive ties to terrorist groups. Indeed, decision-makers underestimated the prospect that a post-Saddam Iraq may create a vacuum that would attract Iranian influence. More immediately, invasion opened up a new front in the struggle with al-Qaeda, enabling it to establish a foothold in Sunni territories, to move in and stoke a sectarian war with Iraqi Shiites. Allegations of extensive pre-war Ba’ath–al-Qaeda collaboration proved false. ‘Regime change’ made this a self-fulfilling prophecy, however. It drove al-Qaeda, former Ba’ath regime officials, and disaffected Sunnis into one another’s arms. A similar nexus formed in and around the Islamic State.

Invading Iraq, then, made terrorism worse. Whether or not it energized motivations to attack Britain at home and added to the impetus of the men who carried out the 7 July London bombings, it generated a straightforward and concrete benefit for al-Qaeda. It handed opportunities to al-Qaeda that it otherwise would have lacked, and established the ideological and material conditions for the Islamic State to grow to the point where it could seize control of Iraq’s ‘second city’, Mosul. These were perverse outcomes.

Removing a tyrant from power, a process that led to his prosecution and execution, had another perverse consequence. Blair recalled his ‘primary consideration’ was to send an ‘absolutely powerful, clear and unremitting message that … if you were a regime engaged in WMD, you had to stop’.⁶⁶ Yet overthrowing Saddam, and then Gaddafi of Libya, signalled the value for hostile states of maintaining, accelerating, or acquiring a nuclear deterrent. Saddam’s inability to prevent his overthrow, trial, and execution, having disarmed, affirmed the reality that disarmament or even ambivalence around the issue makes a state a possible target. This was supposed to be a counterproliferation war that, by disarming a leading rogue, would dissuade other would-be proliferators.⁶⁷ Instead, removing a pre-nuclear Saddam demonstrated that consensual disarmament was simply too dangerous, strengthening incentives for other regimes to pursue their nuclear ambitions.⁶⁸ The overthrow of Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, another adversary who had disarmed, has reinforced the pattern. Looking back, President Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence has acknowledged the probability that Kim Jong-un’s regime calculates ‘The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes … is, unfortunately: If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them’.⁶⁹ North Korea has also explicitly referred to these examples while justifying its nuclear and ballistic missile testing. To accompany its fourth nuclear test in January 2016, a commentary published by the official KCNA news agency claimed:

History proves that powerful nuclear deterrence serves as the strongest treasured sword for frustrating outsiders’ aggression … The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programmes of their own accord.⁷⁰

Iran’s nuclear ambitions are more ambivalent. When the US-led coalition struck Iraq, Iran temporarily suspended its nuclear programme, only to restart it later, probably to pursue ‘nuclear latency’, the breakout ability to produce bomb at short notice. The presence of US and coalition forces on its western and eastern borders, in Iraq and Afghanistan, heightened the regime’s sense of insecurity. Motivations for proliferation and disarmament in both cases are complex and are not reducible to reactions to the Iraq precedent. We can confidently judge, though, that all these regimes care strongly about survival, and the Iraq and Libyan wars did nothing to dampen the powerful incentives for proliferation, and dealt a strong blow to the message that adversary states can securely renounce their nuclear capability.

What of the ‘Syria’ counterfactual argument? But for regime change, would Iraq have faced a worse future, where a Ba’ath Party regime brutally repressed an Arab Spring uprising in Iraq, resulting in a Syria-style civil war?

The ‘Iraq as Syria’ hypothetical is flawed. Firstly, it overlooks what actually did happen. Any notion that ‘regime change’ spared Iraq an internally devastating and regionally destabilizing civil war that would have required international intervention is eccentric. In 2006–7, as a direct result of invasion, the country did descend into civil war, and one with an Islamist presence. It prompted a second intervention, led by the United States, in the form of the ‘surge’ to restore stability and give the new state some breathing space. The surge was itself a costly effort to wrest back control of a crisis, at the price of five additional brigades totalling 20,000 extra troops. That such a meltdown could have happened independently without an invasion does not change the observation that the actual invasion contributed to the meltdown that did happen, and made it more likely and brought it forward. Secondly, the Iraq and Syrian wars are not separate things. The invasion and aftermath in Iraq contributed directly to the later Syrian conflict, inspiring the creation of new jihadi groups in Iraq and neighbouring countries, such as the Jabhat al-Nusra Front, drawing on veterans from the AQI network. The al-Nusra Front, along with other Islamists, seized control of significant parts of the rebellion against Syria’s Alawite regime, and the Islamic State was strengthened by its ability to operate and find sanctuary on both sides of the dissolving Syria–Iraq border.⁷¹ This is not to claim that the Syrian crisis would not have erupted without the invasion of 2003. It is to say that the conflicts unleashed by the Iraq War were the precipitating event for the dramatic increase in militant jihadism, and this played a major part in radicalizing opposition forces within Syria.

Rather than suggesting that invasion spared Iraq a Syria-style civil war, others such as David Frum turn to fatalism to exculpate the invaders of responsibility, arguing that Iraq was destined for an internal struggle regardless. His developing assumption is that Iraq had an historical appointment with internal conflict that it could hardly avoid, and that ‘the deluge was coming in Iraq, whatever outside powers did.’⁷² This is at odds with his other major claim, that regime change in 2003 offered Iraqis the chance for a better future. Did tectonic forces present for Iraq a historical rendezvous with a bloodbath, alleviating invaders of responsibility, or did Iraqis have the agency to wilfully make bad choices? We can’t have it both ways. If Iraq was heading for an implosion that was impossible for outside powers to arrest, then it would have been better not to place American, British, and other lives and treasure in the middle of it, conserving those resources instead for where they could make a positive difference. If not, and if invasion was supposed to give them the chance of a better future, given the sectarian and fractured state of the country, the odds were poor, and the costs were high.

Who Lost Iraq? The Abandonment Thesis

It is necessary also to deal with an argument that has become increasingly prominent since Iraq’s implosion in the summer of 2014. This is the claim that the original error was not the invasion, but the premature abandonment of Iraq. We can call this the ‘abandonment thesis’.⁷³ Abandoning Iraq was the source of chaos, allegedly. The US-led West could have stayed, with South Korea and Japan as the model. As Senator John McCain recommended in 2008, ‘We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed’.⁷⁴ Paul Wolfowitz likewise argued that Korea in 1955 offered a model for Iraq in 2010, whereby America would retain a stable and stabilizing presence in a strategically vital region in the long term.⁷⁵

This thesis is triply flawed, however. It assumes that Iraq was ‘America’s’ to lose, in the sense that it overlooks the political reality that this was an Iraqi decision, and the Iraqis that wielded power had a different idea of their interests. It overestimates the restraining effect of America’s strategic presence beforehand. Already by 2010, Iraq was on the road to sectarian friction and escalating internal conflict. And it loses sight of the fraught geopolitics of the region, which made the Gulf nothing like the Korean peninsula.

If the ‘abandonment’ charge were true, this would shift culpability from President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to President Barack Obama. Yet Obama cannot plausibly be blamed for the decision to withdraw the main body of US forces. That was pre-decided by the Status of Forces Agreement between the Bush administration and Maliki’s government in December 2008. The more developed accusation is that Obama could have tried harder and possibly kept a smaller residual force in Iraq in a non-combat role to exert a restraint, to signal continuing US security assurance, to keep Iraq’s political condition stable, and to stiffen the backbone of its security forces. It was the absence of guarantees to the fledgling ‘new Iraq’ that loosened restraint, and enabled the Maliki government to indulge its sectarian impulses.

Would it have been politically possible to leave forces on terms acceptable both to Washington and to Baghdad and the Iraqi parliament? The short answer is no.⁷⁶ Iraqi politicians insisted on American forces not being protected by legal immunity from local prosecution. Such terms, for such a commitment, were unacceptable to the American Congress and White House, and certainly would have been a deal-breaker for any Republican president. The obstacle to any appreciable military presence, whether a division or a few thousand trainers, was that Iraqis overwhelmingly opposed it. A continuing US presence was opposed by Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose support was vital for Maliki’s ruling coalition. The emergence of an Iraqi sovereign democracy created not an accommodating US client state but a Tehran-leaning government.

There is also a deeper problem with the suggestion that a continued presence was necessary for stability. The state was not respectably peaceful and settled when the US drew down. Sectarian abuse and corruption was already rife in Iraqi governance, and the seeds were already planted for civil strife. Before the last scale-downs from August 2010 to the final withdrawal in December 2011, there was widespread corruption in the officer corps and the withholding of oil revenues from Sunni communities. Prime Minister Maliki was already sectarianizing the army with Iranian-backed Badr Corp fighters. Once the US began drawing down its combat role from 2009, Maliki refused to hire the majority of Sunni Awakening Council fighters, only employing 17,000 and excluding 83,000. There were already crackdowns on demonstrations and torture of detainees. The Erbil power-sharing agreements were already stalling, and the March 2010 parliamentary elections triggered struggle for control over security services, government ministries, and oil wealth. Maliki was already exercising state power both to dole out and withhold patronage, favouring Shiite populations and neglecting to provide sufficient services such as electricity to Sunni Arab cities. Data from the US National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) shows that Iraq had a consistently higher level of violence than Afghanistan during 2009–11, with no consistent reduction in violence since mid-2009.⁷⁷ As even military advisor Rick Brennan concedes, who blames US withdrawal in 2011 for the state of Iraq, even during the ‘surge’ with the climax of America’s on-the-ground commitment, Maliki ‘mostly ignored American pleas to govern in a less divisive manner and find ways to bring the Sunni minority into the political process’.⁷⁸ If 160,000 troops at the height of the occupation were not enough to curtail the Iraqi state’s abusive behaviour, it is hard to see how a smaller force could have made a meaningful difference. If we accept the analysis that the rise of Islamic State in Iraq is rooted in Sunni alienation, this is causally linked more to Maliki’s refusal to work for an ‘inclusive, tolerant, multi-confessional democracy’ than to whether the US deployed a small counter-terrorism force.⁷⁹ A return of US combat and advisory forces was only permitted years later, once the emergency of the Islamic State’s rise moved Baghdad to let troops back in.

The ‘Iraq as South Korea’ analogy is also flawed. South Korea is a cohesive society where the majority wanted long-term US protection, whereas the majority of Iraqis did not in 2010–11. South Korea is a relatively homogenous society, whereas Iraq is fraught with ethnic and confessional divisions. South Koreans are strongly motivated by the proximate and direct threat of a hostile North Korea, whereas Iraq faced no equivalent of a large-scale threat on its borders to unify the population. As one critic notes, ‘When one thinks of a long-term occupation of Iraq (even with reduced forces), a closer analogy is the dangerous and frustrating British mission in Northern Ireland from the late 1960’s through the 90’s’.⁸⁰

The ‘abandonment thesis’ plays off a common and seductive argument, that Iraq unravelled through poor execution. We can avoid error in future, this implies, if we organize better. Western military activism is a generally good thing, this perspective suggests, only more resources and preparation would have given outside powers a solution to the security problems that beset post-Saddam Iraq. A more efficient and careful invasion would have been made the decisive difference, in particular avoiding a large-scale De-Ba’athification programme and keeping civil service and army intact.

There are good reasons to be sceptical of this mechanical interpretation of the problems of intervention. The alternative course, of avoiding De-Baathification, of limiting institutional impact, not purging the bureaucracy or security services, and preserving greater continuity in the state, may well have made Sunni alienation and resistance less likely. Conversely, how would Iraqi’s majority of Shia perceive this development? As we have seen, Shia leaders had broadly supported De-Ba’athfication. The absence of a post-invasion reckoning with the crimes of the Ba’ath Party, and the continuation of Ba’ath officials in power, would probably have been tantamount to confirming Sunni supremacy and re-enthroning the old order, only with Saddam removed and this time, with the support of an international occupying force. It is not hard to imagine how this move, effectively presenting the Shia majority with the dispensation of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’, probably would have increased their insecurity, and their disaffection with the process of reconstruction, and incentivized them to turn to violent self-help. A concerned Iran would not have looked on such developments passively. Could a fractured population that was mutually suspicious have been bought off with more jobs and functioning services? Not when they held a more basic fear, the need to survive against potentially violent threats. Given the state of the country as Western troops and diplomats found it, we cannot afford to adopt a naïvely developmental account of the crisis that ensued. The invasion was a blunder in the most important sense, not as a sound idea badly executed, but an unsound idea built on unsound assumptions. From these errors of judgement, failures of execution flowed.

PART IV. ALTERNATIVE STRATEGIES

It is incumbent for the war’s critics to articulate an alternative strategic pathway, if not to prescribe how international powers could have ‘solved’ or terminated the confrontation with Iraq, at least to suggest how the antagonism could have been handled more prudently.

Pro-war arguments about the counterfactual future in 2003 rest on a number of fallacies: that without the invasion, the sanctions programme would have broken down, leaving Saddam free to reconstitute his weapons programme; that the regime could not be contained or deterred; that time was urgently working against the West as the danger rose significantly; and that the choice for the US and its allies was a polar one, between ‘regime change’ and ‘passivity’. Robert Kaufman makes a representative statement of this argument:

Without Israel’s preemptive attack of May 1981 on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, Saddam Hussein almost certainly would have possessed nuclear weapons when he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, which would have made the cost of liberating it prohibitive. Without the Gulf War of 1990–1991 … Saddam might have achieved a nuclear capability within two years, according to the inspectors of Iraqi facilities … Saddam’s propensity for risk taking also fell closer on the spectrum to Nazi Germany’s under Hitler than to the Soviet Union’s during the Cold War … the Kay Commission and Duelfer Report also affirm that it was only a matter of time before Saddam obtained such capabilities once the sanctions so painful to the Iraqi people inevitably broke down. WMD exponentially increased the potential danger of waiting too long to eliminate Saddam, prudently viewed through the prism of 9/11 and Saddam’s refusal to abide by the inspection regime.⁸¹

As Kaufman then argues, opting for continuing inspections and the status quo rather than fighting would have kept the United States ‘paralyzed’ and Saddam ‘defiant—all while the danger mounted’. Four assumptions are visible in Kaufman’s portrait of the situation: a reckless aggressor, a collapsing sanctions programme, the West working dangerously against the clock, and a stark choice between decisive combat and paralysis. All four do not survive interrogation.

In the summer of 2001, the Joint Intelligence Committee and the UK Permanent Representative to the UN did indeed fear that the existing strategy of shackling the Iraqi regime would prove impermanent, that it ‘continues to erode’.⁸² The UK, France, Russia, and US were exploring ‘smart sanctions’ at that time precisely through the concern that existing ‘hard’ sanctions would unravel. Not only had they not successfully broken the regime, they had inflicted human cost that fed Islamist propaganda against the West. Oversight in the region and the military presence to support it also came at significant costs, involving a US garrison in Saudi Arabia that focused Bin Ladenists on America as ‘the far enemy’.

These fears arose before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and therein lies the first difficulty with the claim that existing strategies were bound to disintegrate. The 9/11 attacks altered the decision environment not just for those who opted for all-out war, but for states whose political will to contain Saddam increased. For those reluctant to support regime change, the 9/11 attacks raised incentives to maintain a modified and more discriminate containment programme. Accordingly, in May 2002, in the wake of fresh apprehensions about Iraq’s weapons programme, the Bush administration successfully rallied the international community around new ‘smart sanctions’, imposing a tight import control system while allowing more civilian goods, under Security Council Resolution 1409.⁸³ Selectively tightened sanctions were possible, such as prohibitions on imports of materials for military use and the illicit export of oil, as well as increased monitoring and increased inspection of cargoes.⁸⁴ A revised sanctions programme of Resolution 1409, confined to military and dual-use equipment, Jack Straw told cabinet, would also help ensure that sanctions could not be blamed for humanitarian suffering in Iraq.⁸⁵ More could have been done to interdict illicit finances, such as Saddam’s bank accounts in Jordan, and to curtail smuggling through Jordan, Syria, and Turkey, as Carne Ross attested, the First Secretary for Middle East at UK Permanent Mission to the UN in New York.⁸⁶

There was still a ‘menu’ of intermediate choices available to the US and its allies, including continued vigilance, aerial and on-the-ground monitoring, shipping patrols, and punitive air strikes. These remained possible, as the 9/11 attacks had focused international attention on the need to disrupt and shut down the traffic in nuclear materials. Alternatively, the US and its allies could have attempted a bolder new settlement with Iraq after 9/11, organized around the common adversary al-Qaeda. Whether disarmament has taken place is difficult to prove, given it involves proving a negative. But there were other diplomatic goods to trade. In return for actionable intelligence on al-Qaeda and its affiliates, as well as Iraq suspending support for Palestinian suicide bombers, Washington could have informally relaxed its prior commitment to regime change in Baghdad and exchanged comprehensive economic sanctions for focused antiproliferation sanctions. Saddam’s writ still ran strongly in northern Iraq, and denying that territory from Sunni Islamist terrorist networks would have been a valuable contribution to countering al-Qaeda’s spread in the region. In return, Baghdad would benefit from the easing of economic strangulation and enjoy the credit for surviving in a lowered threat environment, but only in exchange for joining other authoritarian regimes in assisting the campaign against al-Qaeda. So there were other choices that deserved to be entertained, modifications of containment of varying ambition. Either way, the alternative to going ‘all in’ on Iraq was not to walk away from the table and hope for the best, as hawks imply.

Counterproliferation strategies do not always succeed, however. Arguably, the Iraqi regime that had a record of deception and non-cooperation could have resumed an underground weapons programme. If so, the road to constructing a deliverable nuclear bomb would have been expensive, technically demandingn and conducted under the glare of international observation. Running a clandestine programme impedes and complicates proliferation. It would have been years yet before Saddam’s regime could complete the job. Saddam’s nuclear programme was often self-sabotaged and self-disrupted, falling prey to coercive management and inefficiency. In 1991, inspectors had discovered that Iraq possessed nuclear facilities but not weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU), and even before sanctions and safeguards were imposed, ‘after years of coercive, authoritarian mismanagement, Iraq’s scientific and technical workers had become exhausted, cynical, and divided.’⁸⁷ By 2003, sanctions had gravely damaged the possibility of weapons programmes being restored, as approximately three hundred interviews by the Iraq Survey Group with Iraqi scientists, engineers, and officials revealed.

Scepticism about Saddam’s capacity to reconstitute a nuclear programme to completion is not just a retrospective judgement. The hurdles Iraq would have to overcome were known, and knowable, at the time. Firstly, evidence suggested that if there was such a programme, it had made little progress and had to be conducted in extremely clandestine ways, itself an inhibiting factor. On the eve of war, on 7 March 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency Director General ElBaradei and the UN Special Commission on Iraq led by Hans Blix declared to the UN Security Council that there was no evidence of resumed nuclear activities or nuclear-related prohibited activities, and noted the deplorable state of Iraq’s industrial infrastructure. They reported progress from more than one hundred visits to suspect sites and interviews with Iraqi scientists, finding no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq. They predicted that the agency should be able to provide the Security Council with an objective and thorough assessment of Iraq’s nuclear-related capabilities ‘in the near future’. Destruction of the al Samoud ballistic missiles, which had exhibited ranges beyond that allowed by the UN, were also underway. There were no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons found, though it was not yet possible to document destruction of all weapons produced since before the 1991 Gulf War. The Bush administration’s response was swift and negative. In the absence of hard evidence of rearmament, it fell back on the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, citing Saddam’s history of aggression and criminality.

Further progress in WMD rearmament by Saddam would face difficult hurdles. In March 2002, the UK MOD had identified the obstacles Iraq would have to overcome in order to acquire a nuclear capability. According to its Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), Iraq lacked the fissile material to make a weapon, to rebuild its uranium enrichment programme could take ‘years’ and require ‘extensive foreign procurement’ which would ‘not be possible with effective sanctions in place’. To make a weapon quickly, Iraq would need to acquire HEU from the ‘black market’, which would be ‘very difficult’ though ‘credible’. In addition, Iraq would need to acquire a neutron initiator, and had lacked a nuclear reactor since 1991. It would then need the ‘theory and practicalities’ of how to use such a component, and this could only be quickly done with ‘outside expertise’. A missile warhead would take ‘at least two years longer’. Alternatively, it could acquire a crude nuclear device that would be large and unreliable and would have to be delivered by large unconventional and unreliable means (such as a lorry).⁸⁸ A second opinion broadly agreed, adding that if Iraq against the odds acquired HEU and a neutron initiator from a third party, it would also require engineering integration and explosive trials, with a ‘low’ signature for detection.⁸⁹ This expert’s rough estimate for the highly unlikely achievement of all these steps was a period of two to three years. In the meantime, Saddam would need to have achieved the nearly impossible task of indigenously producing enough fissile materials, and this would produce ‘relatively large signatures’. While the ‘clock’ on the worst-case estimates was reasonably brief, note the formidable technical hurdles identified, and the difficulty of keeping it undetected. It would have required tests to make any bomb deliverable, and a functioning infrastructure of facilities and capable personnel. Should an alert international community have suspected proliferation activity and attacked his facilities, Saddam did not have the deterrence capability that North Korea does, and could not credibly threaten a neighbouring state’s cities.

Even if Saddam did rearm covertly but nevertheless successfully, with chemical and biological if not nuclear weapons, how far can we assume that he was a reckless actor, who may have collaborated with al-Qaeda and transferred technology or expertise into their hands? Even if he failed to acquire a deliverable nuclear bomb, might he have donated chemical or biological instruments to terrorists?

The war’s defenders suggest Saddam and the regime were almost impossible to deter because of a general aggressive risk-prone irrationality, bordering on madness, exhibited by the historic persecution of their ‘own people’ and their attacks on other states. Such a regime was not capable of being restrained by the logic of deterrence-via-punishment. In the words of the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee, Saddam’s ‘thought processes did not work in a recognisably Western, rational and logical way’.⁹⁰ This contention rests on two errors, a historical error and an analytical error. Historically, Saddam was deterrable from the most high-risk aggression with unconventional weapons. And analytically, a regime’s repressive quality at home does not necessarily make it pathologically aggressive abroad against major powers with the means to retaliate.

As the recently uncovered tapes of internal regime deliberations suggests, Saddam’s government was capable of being deterred once a threshold of first-order interests and significant threat of retaliation was reached. While the exact point of deterrability is not easy to determine, there was a sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit calculation that Iraq’s nuclear adversaries could and might well inflict a price that was too high in return for WMD use. His regime was demonstrably not successfully deterred from everything. Saddam was prone to ‘shooting the messenger’, at times distorting information to fit his predetermined goals. But the evidence recently revealed suggests that despite his regime’s suboptimal decision-making and inefficient processing of information, American threats of punishment for the most reckless behaviour remained credible and focused the mind.⁹¹ Saddam had committed notable aggressions on his neighbours, but on both occasions (against Iran from September 1980 and Kuwait in August 1990), the US did not actively try to deter the aggression, and Saddam calculated that he could attack his targets without a consequential intervention by major powers. In the Iran case, he was correct. Though Washington gave no explicit ‘green light’ to his attack, Saddam forecast that the US, while disapproving, would not step in, and that Iraq would inflict a quick and decisive victory on a weakened Iran to seize territory, and thus implicitly did not expect the US to enter the conflict as a belligerent.⁹² In the case of Kuwait, Saddam counted wrongly on Washington’s aversion to a ground campaign, after meetings with US envoys appeared to signal US reluctance to intervene. When he was given clear signals by the West with the threat of punishment in return for attacks on first-order interests above a threshold of aggression, he was demonstrably deterrable. In the course of the Gulf War 1990–1, Washington threatened him with an unspecified but definite threat of punishment should he use chemical and biological weapons, and he accordingly refrained. Tariq Aziz, along with two defectors (the Head of Iraqi Military Intelligence and the Head of the Iraqi News Agency), recalled that Saddam believed the US would retaliate with nuclear strikes if the Iraqis used chemical or biological weapons on US forces.⁹³ Saddam’s senior ministers feared even threatening to use chemical weapons would lead to a nuclear strike. At a secret meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) in the autumn of 1990, Saddam’s trusted deputy Izzat al-Douri warned that ‘It is dangerous for us to reveal our intentions to use chemical weapons. We should not do that’. Tariq Aziz at the same meeting suggested that Iraqi use of chemical weapons would ‘give [the Americans] excuse for a nuclear attack’.⁹⁴ Atomic threats were credible in Iraq. Saddam believed there was the real possibility of Anglo-American nuclear attacks in any event, practised civilian evacuations, and his deputies warned of behaviour that might increase the chances of it.⁹⁵ If the regime was reluctant even to threaten chemical weapons use publicly for fear of raising the probability of atomic retaliation, it is hard to envisage it transferring WMD to actors who had sworn to attack America, actors who were also beyond Iraq’s control. Saddam in 1990–1 also wished to reserve his chemical stockpile to deter the invasion of Iraq, and by aiming to be a deterrer as well as deterree, this also suggests he ultimately understood the logic of deterrence.⁹⁶ The same logic defined his stance towards Israel. Saddam intended his future nuclear weapons not for ‘first use’ against Tel Aviv, but to neutralize Israel’s nuclear capability with the threat of retaliation, in order to enable him to prevail in a conventional struggle with the state he obsessively hated. Again, this suggests a capacity to understand threat-and-response in a ‘rational, logical way’. Once it had been expelled from Kuwait, the Baghdad regime grew capable of being dissuaded, by credible threats, from repeating such aggression. In October 1994, when Saddam’s forces mobilized and advanced on the Kuwaiti border, probably to pressure the United Nations to remove sanctions, President Clinton deployed marine and naval forces into the region, along with French and British warships. Saddam backed down in the face of this imposing correlation of forces, whose credible threat was buttressed by America’s prior willingness to act on Kuwait, and Saddam soon afterwards recognized the sovereignty of Kuwait.⁹⁷ True, threats of retaliatory punishment did not deter Saddam from some provocations, such as burning Kuwaiti oil fields, firing SCUD missiles at Tel Aviv and Riyadh in the Gulf War of 1990–1, or suspending cooperation with UN weapons inspectors. Saddam and his regime were, though, deterred from attacks on US core interests. The main threat scenario suggested by the war parties in Washington and London, whereby Saddam would hand over WMD to terrorists, is therefore wildly unrealistic. He was an imperfect calculator who was ultimately willing to limit his risk-taking, not a one-dimensional, reckless adventurer indifferent to the threat of punishment.

The notion that Saddam’s domestic oppression, namely his assaults on Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and Shia dissidents, indicates that he was an irrational and undeterrable actor is also flawed. It is based upon the false inference that the slaughter of a regime’s ‘own’ subjects with conventional and chemical weapons, relatively vulnerable weak targets not in a position to inflict serious punishment, necessarily means that (short of immediate self-defence) Saddam might elect to use them against targets that can retaliate at high cost. History is full of authoritarian oppressive regimes who nevertheless limit their aggression against major states outside their borders: Francoist Spain, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s China (once it had acquired nuclear weapons). Indeed, the commitment to survival is the logic that ties together their inward cruelty and their outward caution, putting down resistance that can be neutralized at acceptable cost, while avoiding external threats that cannot. Proponents of war in 2003 argued that Saddam might use his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, either directly or via a transfer, to attack Western targets. Without the knowledge that he had already disarmed, however, the reasonable objection was that if Saddam actually still possessed a WMD arsenal and was such an incautious and undeterrable rogue, why had he not already used them in this way? His regime was already in a state of continuous conflict and confrontation with the US and its allies, yet had not taken these risks. Saddam was not cautious when he saw opportunities and calculated he would not be overthrown and could ride out the international response. He was cautious when direct and credible threats from major powers focused the mind. He was homicidal, not suicidal.⁹⁸

The post hoc estimate that counterfactually Saddam could have raced to a bomb if left in power, is implicitly modelled on the Iraq of the 1980s. Even the Iraq of that earlier period had experienced almost prohibitive difficulties in conducting its nuclear programme. Blair’s estimate does not take into account the cumulative degradation wrought by sanctions, or the likelihood of continued international vigilance, and it falsely assumes a well-resourced, externally undisturbed weapons organization. This is part of a wider problem with the justifications for war ever since the British government was making the case in 2002, that the severe threat assessments assumed Iraq in its earlier, pre-sanctions state, rather than an Iraq depleted over time. Iraq by 2003 was generally weakened, and this information was available in open source. According to the assessment of Daniel Byman in 2001, based on the expertise of Anthony Cordesman,

As Iraq depended on imports for logistical and supply assistance, as well as for complete systems, its military readiness and effectiveness has plummeted. Efforts to meet shortfalls through smuggling and by increasing domestic production have largely failed. Iraqi forces have not been able to conduct routine maintenance, let alone modernization. Iraq’s military capacity is less than 20 per cent of what it was in 1990. Information on the progress of Iraq’s WMD programs is limited, but an intuitive argument can be made that a regime under tight international scrutiny, with its dual-use exports being controlled, has made at best limited progress on these programs, particularly when compared to their rapid development in the 1980s.⁹⁹

And as Robin Cook observed of the British dossier in September 2002, around half of it drew upon information about Saddam’s weapons capacity before 1998 as though this were a guide to its state by 2003, failing to take into account the decay of biological and chemical agents, and the rest presuming present capacity from historic capabilities.¹⁰⁰ On the same issue looking back, regarding the state of Saddam’s Iraq by 2003, consider the argument of Jacques Hymans:

even if, hypothetically, Saddam had resumed pushing for the bomb as hard as he could, and even if the aluminium tubes had indeed been destined for a reconstituted gas centrifuge uranium enrichment effort, nonetheless the Iraqi state was no longer organisationally strong enough to make any progress toward that objective. A decade of crippling sanctions—and more to the point, two decades of Saddam’s misrule—had predictably brought both Iraq’s society and its state to a shocking level of decomposition. The rising corruption—indeed the criminalisation—of the regime had devoured even its core national security apparatus.¹⁰¹

The supposition that if Saddam was left in office, this would lead to a nuclear Iraq wrongly suggests that his weapons programme would be undisturbed, as though there were nothing the US and its allies could have done to disrupt any revived programme short of removing him from power. This injects a false polarity into the argument. As Kaufman’s own analysis above concedes, measures such as airstrikes on facilities, the turning back of expansion beyond Iraq’s borders, and imposing inspections backed by force, measures short of outright invasion and occupation, could successfully disrupt, delay, and deter. In the Gulf War of 1990–1, US bombing severely degraded Iraq’s Tuwaitha nuclear facility.¹⁰² Using such alternative and more limited measures of force would not be risk-free. And it would be hardly satisfying in its inconclusiveness and its concession of time to the Iraqi regime. Down the track, the US and its allies would have had a further debate about how to suppress a revived programme. They may have had an appointment with the ‘Osirak dilemma’, whereby striking can set back a programme physically, while raising the target’s motivation to nuclearize.¹⁰³ Given the alternative, however, this was still the best way of limiting and degrading any threat while avoiding the hazards of occupying a state. There was enough time to manage the risk without embracing the graver risk of occupying the country. Sustained vigilance, over a long time period, and against a higher standard of proof, was warranted.

Taken together, these observations suggest that a containment and deterrence strategy was the least bad option. Treating Saddam’s hypothetical rearmament as ‘only a matter of time’ avoids the reality that this was a weakened state with a demoralized officialdom whose capacity to reconstitute a nuclear programme was depleted. There was still significant time within which other more limited measures could be applied. For the regime to ‘go nuclear’, it would have had to pull off extremely difficult and multiple challenges within that time. And it would have had to have done so undetected, and even then, to behave so recklessly would have invited devastating retaliation. Given the availability and development of surveillance technologies, and the attentiveness of states to early warnings, it would have been extremely difficult to develop nuclear capabilities undetected.¹⁰⁴

Alternative strategies and warnings against the unintended consequences of invasion were articulated at the time. In September 2002, thirty-three American scholars laid out the case for vigilant containment, the logic of deterrence, the lack of credible evidence for Saddam’s ties with al-Qaeda, and gave a warning that Iraq was a deeply divided society that would require occupation and policing for years, and that invading would damage US interests.¹⁰⁵ In the same spirit, the British government was publicly warned. Sir Michael Quinlan, former Permanent Undersecretary at the MOD, warned in August 2002 that striking Iraq would be an ‘unnecessary and precarious gamble’, that ‘deterrence can be brought to bear’, that containment could be refreshed by a clear declaration that WMD use would be treated as a crime against humanity, that governing Iraq afterwards would be difficult, given the difficulty of finding a regime that suited US interests and held popular support, and that while UN Security Council assent should not be an absolute condition, an attack would breach the tradition of just cause, proportionality, and right authority.¹⁰⁶ Time has vindicated these judgements.

PART V. JOHN MCTERNAN’S CASE FOR WAR

In June 2016, former Labour political advisor John McTernan made the case in hindsight for invading Iraq.¹⁰⁷ His broadside made a number of counterfactual claims that the war’s critics ought to engage with, but often don’t. Here I respond to his claims, ad seriatum, which are italicized:

What would have happened if we hadn’t invaded Iraq? Tony Blair’s pre-emptive framing of the Chilcot Report proceeds apace. The latest instalment is an interview in which he finally responded to the accusations made against him, and often repeated by Jeremy Corbyn: ‘I’m accused of being a war criminal for removing Saddam Hussein—who by the way was a war criminal—and yet Jeremy is seen as a progressive icon as we stand by and watch the people of Syria barrel-bombed, beaten and starved into submission and do nothing.

The use of Syria as a counterfactual foil against criticism of the disastrous invasion of Iraq is now commonplace among hawkish defenders of the war. It joins ‘Rwanda’ in the arsenal of analogies deployed by the war parties of London and Washington, being repeated by advocates of war in Iraq from The Economist to George Osborne MP in the Commons.¹⁰⁸ McTernan’s statement implies that in order to prevent crises like Syria or Rwanda, wars like Iraq are an occasional necessary price, a doctrine that would repeat the experiment with all its costs and unintended consequences. Not only is that price excessive on any reasonable measure. It is self-defeating. For as we have seen, the invasion of 2003 played a central role in the energizing of Islamism in the region, contributing to the chaos across the porous Syria–Iraq border. Consider also that the invasion of Iraq demonstrably did not deter the Assad regime nor Islamist rebel groups from committing atrocities, even though McTernan is about to argue that such wars are necessary to impress and inhibit dictators and terrorists.

In any event, it is not the case that Britain or the US did ‘nothing’ about the Syrian crisis that erupted in 2011. Both governments openly declared in July 2011 that President Bashar al-Assad was no longer the legitimate ruler of Syria, and that ‘Assad must go’. It is not clear exactly how much this contributed to internationalizing and hardening the conflict. Given the proximity of the West’s decrees to the beginning of defections, armed resistance, and increasing repression, and given that the rebels and regime were intransigent in their negotiating afterwards, we can reasonably assume it raised the stakes and prolonged the war.¹⁰⁹ No ruler in 2011 could afford to treat such declarations from these two countries as hollow, given their recent track record of toppling adversaries. Assad was a committed survivor with determined backers in Russia and Iran, and even when cornered would not agree to be shown the door by any international fiat. Yet once again, Western officials underestimated the possibility of resistance to their demands. As well as strengthening Assad’s existential stakes in the conflict, the statements emboldened the Syrian opposition and precipitated defections from the regime and the formation of the Free Syrian Army. The UK and US then followed up on their pronouncement by providing further formal encouragement through recognition of the Syrian National Council, and through material support to rebel groups: arms, finance, and sanctuary in Turkey, a NATO ally, and granting a licence to an NGO in Washington to raise money for the rebels. Whether these measures were wise is open to debate. But they amounted to a significant early intervention. A larger intervention may have been more catastrophic, as the downfall of Assad or his heirs may have prompted an implosion in Syria that would likely have created a vacuum for combat-seasoned Islamist groups, endangering Alawites, Kurds, Druze, Christians, secularists, women, and any Muslims averse to the severe demands of militant groups. The experience of other ‘regime change’ experiments suggests that it was reasonable to presume against it. Wary of the costs of a larger intervention, outside powers did enough to prolong and escalate the conflict. Clashes about who is, or is not, a ‘war criminal’ or ‘progressive’ are a poor substitute for judicious analysis of what happened, and why.

This provokes the thought—what if the Stop the War march in 2003 had been successful? If the display of public opinion had swayed the Commons and the vote had ended up like that on Syria. What would that alternative universe look like? What would have happened if these marchers had had their way? First, it would have been the end of Tony Blair. His resignation in the face of a rebuff would not only have been followed by a new Labour leader—probably Gordon Brown—but also by a Tory victory in 2005. Michael Howard would have been swept to power by his campaign on immigration. And, paradoxically, the UK would probably be firmly ensconced within the EU—an early referendum, held well before the current refugee crisis would have seen an easy endorsement of the status quo. Also, Jack McConnell would have been returned in a minority government in 2007 in Scotland, halting the ineluctable rise of the SNP. It wouldn’t be a pleasant world, but at least there would be no British forces deployed abroad.

In the event of Britain abstaining from Operation Telic, there would have been forces deployed abroad. Britain’s principal deployments in the period April 2003 to April 2004 ranged across twenty-eight countries apart from Iraq, from Afghanistan where the UK contributed to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), to the NATO Stabilisation Force and Kosovo Force in the Balkans, to security sector advice and reform in Sierra Leone, as well as deployments from Brunei and Nepal to Northern Ireland and the Caribbean. British forces were also deployed continuously at sea in the form of the Trident nuclear-armed submarine force, and the Royal Air Force recorded approximately 19,000 hours on operations outside Iraq.¹¹⁰ We can forgive McTernan’s sarcastic quip, suggesting that non-invasion amounts to global withdrawal, as an error of haste.

Defeat in the Commons may well have ended Blair’s premiership. It isn’t clear that this would have led to the fall of the Labour government. As Iraq and its chaotic aftermath was an electoral liability for the government in the election of 2005, would non-participation really have induced the British electorate to embrace the Opposition that also supported the war? To the extent that voting motivation can be measured, immigration exerted only a limited salience in the 2005 general election, as those who ranked the issue most highly were either already Conservative voters or were disaffected non-voters, while ‘asylum and immigration’ were surpassed in pre-election polls measuring issue ranking, by health, education, law and order, taxation and public services, and the economy.¹¹¹ Oddly, McTernan claims that the same population that was allegedly so aggrieved about immigration that it would have revolted at the ballot box would have tamely endorsed the status quo in a referendum on the EU and one of its foundational principles, the freedom of movement.

Second, the real change would have been in the Middle East—or rather, the real lack of change. Saddam Hussein, a dictator and a war criminal guilt of genocide, would have stayed in place and would be here to this day, strengthened internally by facing down the United Nations and its sanctions and weapons inspectors. Nuclear proliferation would have had a major boost. Under no circumstances would Iran facing a resurgent Saddam abandon its own nuclear programme. Had Jeremy Corbyn prevailed, Saddam Hussein would still be in power.

McTernan confuses two countries. Britain’s non-participation would not have prevented the United States invading. Had there been no invasion by the US, Saddam Hussein would have remained in power and won some prestige for surviving. This would hardly make him a ‘resurgent’ actor. Iraq would have remained a weakened, encircled, monitored country whose capacity for external aggression was depleted, with no WMD arsenal or ties to al-Qaeda. Saddam’s recovery to restart his nuclear programme would have faced formidable obstacles within a dysfunctional scientific-industrial base. Internally, the survival of his regime and its control of the army and security services would have made it more difficult for the Islamic State to rise in northern Iraq. It is worth considering that this group was also guilty of genocide, also seeks weapons of mass destruction, and is considered too zealous by al-Qaeda. By not invading, the US and its allies would not have destroyed a regime that had effectively disarmed, and thus would not have set a precedent to encourage nuclear proliferation. There would not be American troops on Iran’s western border, and less argument in Tehran that nuclear weapons were a necessary deterrent against encircling powers. The invasion of Iraq did not prevent, and may have encouraged, Putin’s Russia going ahead with the modernization of its nuclear arsenal and its aggressive doctrines of warfighting nuclear use.

Libya too would be well on the way to a bomb—Gaddafi would have had no Blair to persuade him to abandon that programme. Syria would not be the site of a humanitarian crisis with nearly half the population displaced. Not because the country would be more democratic but because of precisely the opposite—Assad would have been an unconstrained hard man. Barrel bombs and gas would have pummelled the Syrian people into submission. The lesson would not be lost around the Middle East and North Africa—the rule of hard men prospers.

One overblown claim follows another. Libya’s nuclear programme was not advanced. The invasion of Iraq may have exerted some marginal accelerating effect, but was not a significant cause or catalyst of Libyan disarmament, and was certainly not a precondition for it. Bilateral talks had begun in earnest four years before the war, indeed Colonel Gaddafi had already offered to disarm and it was US preconditions (over the Pan Am 130 question and chemical weapons) and bargaining over the terms that delayed the resolution.¹¹² While credible force was likely a factor, this was already established, as part of a coming together of concessions, guarantees, and Libya’s own desire to end its pariah status.¹¹³ As one of the leading US negotiators explained,

The Iraq war, which had not yet started, was not the driving force behind Libya’s move. Rather, Libya was willing to deal because of credible diplomatic representations by the United States over the years, which convinced the Libyans that doing so was critical to achieving their strategic and domestic goals. Just as with Lockerbie, an explicit quid pro quo was offered: American officials indicated that a verifiable dismantling of Libya’s weapons projects would lead the removal our own sanctions [sic].¹¹⁴

McTernan claims that the example of Saddam Hussein’s survival would have encouraged regional leaders to rule as ‘hard men’ without restraint, and Bashar al-Assad to act as an ‘unconstrained hard man’. The difficulty with this argument is that in history as it actually happened, Saddam’s overthrow did not prevent those regimes ruling without restraint. It did not relax their authoritarian grip. Saudi Arabia and Egypt remained internally repressive American client states. The government of Syria, according to Human Rights Watch in 2010,

continues to rule by emergency powers. Syria’s security agencies, the feared mukhabarat, continue to detain people without arrest warrants, frequently refuse to disclose their whereabouts for weeks and sometimes months, and regularly engage in torture. Special courts set up under Syria’s emergency laws, such as the Supreme State Security Court (SSSC), sentence people following unfair trials.¹¹⁵

Syria’s regime was not deterred by the overthrow of Saddam. Rather, it acted as a spoiler against US interests in Iraq, hosting and assisting networks of foreign fighters to counterbalance the occupying coalition.¹¹⁶ The Iraq War did not overawe America’s regional rivals like Syria and Iran into self-restraint and caution, but provoked resistance.

Third, multilateralism would have collapsed. A triumphant Stop the War coalition would have carried on—targeting all UK troop deployments overseas. The RAF would have been withdrawn from patrolling the no-fly zone over the Kurdish Region of Iraq. British troops would have withdrawn from Afghanistan—destabilising and, ultimately destroying, the fragile achievement of establishing a democracy. Blair’s Chicago speech on liberal interventionism would not just have been forgotten, the world order would have returned to amoral pragmatism—if you don’t bother us, we won’t bother about what you do to your people. The winner would have been Vladimir Putin. The whole of Ukraine, not merely Crimea, would have been reabsorbed back into the Russian Federation, along with Belarus and Kazakhstan.

McTernan’s picture of a ‘Stop the War’ domino wave is at odds with his other claim, that the British people would have flocked to the hawkish and Atlanticist Conservative Party. There is also in McTernan’s alternative history a strangely zero-sum view of foreign policy. To oppose the invasion of Iraq was not to oppose all multilateral efforts. Countries opposed to the war, such as Canada and France, remained committed in Afghanistan. Rival major powers China and Russia, who would have vetoed the final UN Resolution authorizing war, nevertheless cooperated in imposing sanctions on Iran’s nuclear programme. Outside the Stop the War movement, opposition to the Iraq War did not come hand-in-hand with an outright opposition to containing Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the burden of the mainstream anti-war argument was that containment and inspections under the aegis of a military presence deserved more time. Neither does it logically follow that declining to invade one country necessarily entails a universal retreat into ‘amoral pragmatism’. McTernan once again offers a binary morality play, by suggesting that failing to invade Iraq and the subsequent collapse of cooperative security efforts would lead Putin to fall on countries in Russia’s ‘near abroad’. Isn’t it possible, though, that the West could have decided not to invade Iraq, while maintaining NATO and nuclear deterrence and the willingness to use sanctions to impose costs on aggression? But in McTernan’s self-fulfilling worldview, the West’s adversaries are not so much major powers with legitimate security interests to be both bargained with and resisted, but one-dimensional monsters.

It wouldn’t be a pleasant world, but at least there would be no British forces deployed abroad. It wouldn’t be a peaceful world either—the violence would be being done to other people in some far-off country of which we know little. It wouldn’t, though, bring peace to Britain. The signal to the forces of jihad would have been unmistakable—Britain is weak, not up for a fight. We would be targeted, not ignored for precisely that reason. Stop the War isn’t, in the end, about stopping all war—it’s about conceding the right to wage war and inflict violence to some of the nastiest regimes in the world. If Jeremy Corbyn had stopped Tony Blair invading Iraq, dictators and jihadists would rule the world today.

There would be British forces deployed abroad, far and wide, and with more capacity given they would not be sent into Iraq. The world in 2003 may not have been peaceful, but Britain at least would not have taken part in a venture that worsened and spread violence in one region, rather than reducing it. The forces of jihad were not intimidated by the invasion of Iraq. Reeling from Afghanistan, they were inspired and galvanized by it as a rallying point and geopolitical opportunity. The Joint Intelligence Committee warned on 10 February 2003 that the invasion would increase the threat from al-Qaeda at the onset of military action, and lead to attacks elsewhere, especially in the US and the UK.¹¹⁷ This does not mean that any force used against militant Islamists is futile. Wars tend to provoke retaliation, and such retaliation may be a necessary price of long-term measures to suppress a threat. And there are no guarantees of immunity from Islamist attacks. The range of targets chosen by Islamists is wide and varying. But it does suggest that McTernan’s notion of al-Qaeda only attacking the reluctant is false. As it happened, al-Qaeda in Iraq was not impressed by the fortitude shown by the invaders. Among other Islamist groups, it launched continuous attacks on coalition forces. Occupation did not signal strength, but overstretch, with the US appealing for international help by 2004. Unable to defeat insurgent resistance decisively, occupiers were steadily bled to the point of crisis and, in Britain’s case, into humiliation.

At the root of McTernan’s claims is a crude understanding of the world as a system defined only by machismo, where dictators and terrorists are easily impressed by displays of resolve, and where the only decisive test is to appear tough, and the only way to signal toughness is to be continuously on a war footing. That prescription proved false about al-Qaeda. It proved false about Putin’s Russia, which invaded Georgia in the summer of 2008 while the US had over 142,000 troops in Iraq. It proved false in the civil war in the Sudan, which raged concurrently with the Iraq War and led to genocide. Like most international actors, these human organizations are not simply a wolfish killer breed, repelled by strength and preying on weakness. They also wish to look tough, and they also strike to counterbalance or reduce perceived threats. If anything, being attritionally caught in Iraq made the US and its allies appear less capable of intervening elsewhere. Concentration of effort and attention in one area took the question of other major excursions off the table. The worst of two worlds came together: removing Saddam gave a graphic demonstration of why ‘rogue states’ should ruthlessly protect themselves, while occupying Iraq made the superpower again appear, as President Richard Nixon once said, like a ‘pitiful, helpless giant’.¹¹⁸

If Britain had not invaded Iraq, dictators and terrorists would not have ‘ruled the world’, an absurd overstatement of their capability and the distribution of global power. Britain would have remained one of the world’s largest economies, armed with nuclear weapons, a veto-wielding permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and a proven capacity to use force abroad to protect its interests. Some steely self-confidence and proportion would have been preferable to the kind of panicked hyperbole offered by McTernan, an attitude that left Britain prone to the disastrous war in the first place.

CONCLUSION

To summarize this chapter’s arguments, the invasion of Iraq inflicted so much harm, and damaged British security interests to such an extent, that the material and opportunity costs exceeded any gains. There were alternative strategies available. The effort to remove a perceived threatening regime was simply not worth it. It had already discontinued its weapons programmes, whose modest level of capability could have been monitored and contained, and whose hostile relationship with al-Qaeda could have been subjected to greater standards of proof. The price Britain paid for this undertaking was steep in terms of blood, treasure, and honour. In terms of blood, it was the equivalent of self-inflicting a major terrorist attack while opening Iraq to large-scale Islamist subversion, in a campaign that was supposed to suppress such threats. In terms of treasure, it was billions of pounds that could have been productively spent elsewhere. In terms of honour, the unintended consequences and the abuses that the war unleashed damaged Britain’s moral authority and engendered national shame.

Ultimately, the question of whether a war was ‘worth it’ is a value judgement, not a factual finding. This makes it hard to resolve analytically. It is also a never-ending question. Circumstances are bound once again to change, prompting fresh argument. All we can do is refine this imprecise exercise as far as possible. When Iraq comes up again as an analogical case or parable in future debate, as surely it will, we can at least try to ensure our interpretation is as precise and considered as possible. As the story is not yet finished, it is possible to speculate that ‘regime change’ gave Iraqis the chance for a better future in the long term. But in the medium term, it made Iraq even more dangerous a place to inhabit. It unleashed violent disorder that made conditions more lethal and more torturous. It had significant geopolitical costs, opening up a new front for an al-Qaeda terrorist network that had been reeling, and empowering Iran, creating a Shia–Iran ascendency in Iraq that, in turn, abused power and precipitated the formation of the Islamic State. The invasion demonstrated the value of retaining a nuclear deterrent, it probably cemented the rationale for proliferation by other ‘rogue states’, and thus was a blow to the cause of counterproliferation. Even allowing for the possibility that invasion marginally accelerated Libya’s disarmament and suspended Iran’s, the West eight years later cancelled out this potentially useful diplomatic example by undertaking regime change in Tripoli, and on the same basis that we cannot coexist with what Anthony Lake once called ‘backlash states’. Once Iran found itself facing hostile Western forces across both of its borders, it resumed its nuclear programme. North Korea has explicitly invoked these examples in explaining its own programme. If removing Saddam Hussein was supposed to signal a broader warning to other adversaries to submit to the American world order, here too the effects were disappointing.

The central rationale for the invasion flowed from the ‘precautionary principle’, a flawed principle. It has two general failures. Firstly, it prematurely assumes what it needs to prove, that risk lies overwhelmingly on one side of the equation, not the other. And secondly, it is indeterminate. Precaution can just as reasonably dictate restraint, not action. Yet the principle fails to guide the fearful which to choose.¹¹⁹ Blair’s circle identified risk almost entirely on the side of ‘not invading’, and treated the calculation as an absolute rather than comparative risk assessment. Quite simply, he, his advisors and the Parliament badly underestimated the risks attached to marching on an adversary’s capital and overthrowing the state, and in doing so, were blind to the radical quality of what they were taking on. Historically, external intervention and occupation is one of the most politically fraught acts. Except in atypically excellent conditions, it galvanizes resistance, polarizes host populations, energizes radical forces, and invites other interventions, especially in countries with historically porous borders and accessible geography, located at the intersection of antagonistic powers. To offset one risk, the kind of WMD transfer that is a remote contingency by an order of magnitude less likely than proliferation pessimists claim, Blair courted other risks. Tragically, while insisting that decision-makers could not afford to take risks with terrorism and WMD, British hawks lost sight of the profound risks they were running.

¹ See Eliot A. Cohen & John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Free Press, 1990), p. 247.

² As John R. Hale argues, Lords of the Sea: How Trireme Battles Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2014), p. 206.

³ Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘The Tragedy of Tony Blair’, Atlantic 294 (2004), pp. 56–70.

⁴ James Kirkup, ‘Tony Blair did not Bewitch us into backing war in Iraq’, The Daily Telegraph, 6 July 2016.

⁵ Philip Bobbitt, ‘Chilcot’s Iraq War Verdict needs Scrutiny beyond the Headlines’, The Financial Times, 8 July 2016; Niall Ferguson, ‘Tony Blair’s Legacy? Don’t be Too Quick to Judge’, The Boston Globe, 11 July 2016; for earlier defences of the war after the fact, see Oliver Kamm, Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy (London: Social Affairs Unit, 2005); Robert Kaufman, In Defence of the Bush Doctrine (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 2007); Daniel Henninger, ‘If Saddam Had Stayed: Saddam would have joined the nuclear bad-boys club with Iran and North Korea’, The Wall Street Journal, 2 September 2010.

⁶ Fouad Ajami, The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, The Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq (New York: Free Press, 2006).

⁷ Max Boot, ‘What Chilcot Missed about Iraq’, Commentary, 6 July 2016; James Traub, ‘The Mess Obama Left Behind in Iraq’, Foreign Policy, 7 October 2016; Victor Davis Hanson, ‘The Costs of Abandoning Messy Wars’, The National Review, 25 February 2016; Fouad Ajami, ‘The Men Who Sealed Iraq’s Disaster with a Handshake’, The Wall Street Journal, 13 June 2014.

⁸ Con Coughlin, ‘Don’t Blame Tony Blair for the Mess Iraq is in, blame Obama’, The Daily Telegraph, 6 July 2016.

⁹ John A. Nagl, ‘A better war in Iraq: Learning counterinsurgency and making up for lost time’, Armed Forces Journal (2006), pp. 22–8; ‘Unprepared’, RUSI Journal 153:2 (2008), p. 83.

¹⁰ David Frum, ‘Iraq Isn’t Ours to Save’, Atlantic, 17 June 2014.

¹¹ David Kenner, ‘Seven Questions: Richard Perle’s Advice for Barack Obama’, Foreign Policy, 16 November 2008.

¹² Hansard, 25 February 2003, col. 124.

¹³ ‘Blair: I would have removed Saddam Hussein anyway’, CNN, 12 December 2009.

¹⁴ Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Arrow Books, 2010, 2011 edn.), p. 387.

¹⁵ Kanan Makiya, ‘The Arab Spring Started in Iraq’, The New York Times, 6 April 2013; Peter Wehner, ‘Vindication for Bush’s Freedom Agenda’, Commentary, 28 January 2011; Christopher Hitchens, ‘The Iraq Effect’, Slate, 28 March 2011; Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honour: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Broadway, 2011); Colleen Graffy, ‘Iraq was a good war: it sparked the Arab Spring’, The Sunday Times, 11 September 2011.

¹⁶ Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York: Viking, 2003), p. xvi: ‘the first edition of Owen’s poems, prepared for publication by his friend Siegfried Sassoon in December 1920, sold only 730 copies. A further 700 copies, printed in 1921, were still not sold out by 1929. By then the collected poems of another poet, Rupert Brooke, who also died during the conflict, had run to 300,000 copies’.

¹⁷ Colin Powell remark, cited https://www.military.com/undertheradar/2015/09/21-facts-about-the-first-gulf-war.

¹⁸ See further Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 6.

¹⁹ For one such attempt, applied to America’s war in Iraq, see John S. Duffield & Peter J. Dombrowski, Balance Sheet: The Iraq War and US National Security (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

²⁰ Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), p.12; see also Robert Harriman, Prudence: Classical virtue, Postmodern practice (Pennsylvania: Penn. State University Press, 2003).

²¹ For a discussion of classical realism as distinct from its realist cousins, see Jonathan Kirshner, ‘The tragedy of offensive realism: Classical Realism and the rise of China’, European Journal of International Relations 18:1 (2010), pp. 53–75; Joseph M. Parent & Joshua M. Baron, ‘Elder Abuse: How the Moderns Mistreat Classical Realism’, International Studies Review 13 (2011), pp. 193–213; Andrew R. Hom & Brent J. Steele, ‘Open Horizons: The Temporal Visions of Reflexive Realism’, International Studies Review 12:2 (2010), pp. 271–300; Richard K. Ashley, ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’, International Organisation 38:2 (1984), pp. 225–86.

²² See Jonathan Kirschner’s account of Henry Kissinger as both classical realist and diplomatic actor: ‘Machinations of Wicked Men’, Boston Review, 9 March 2016.

²³ Nigel Biggar, In Defence of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 9–12, 328–9. My critique of the Iraq War shares Biggar’s prudential approach, but unlike his more sympathetic evaluation of the decision (at pp. 251–325), judges that the decision falls short.

²⁴ Tony Blair, ‘Doctrine of International Community’, speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, 22 April 1999; before the US Congress in July 2003, Blair argued, ‘The best defence of our security lies in the spread of our values.’ ‘Tony Blair’s speech to the US Congress’, The Guardian 18 July 2003; in 2004 at Sedgefield, Blair used the same line, ‘Blair Terror Speech in full’, BBC News, 5 March 2004; on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, as President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq on 1 May 2003, he observed that ‘American values and American interests lead in the same direction. We stand for human liberty’. ‘Bush Makes Historic Speech aboard Warship’, CNN, 2 May 2003.

²⁵ See B. Fischoff, ‘Hindsight Is Not Equal to Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgement Under Uncertainty’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 1:3 (1975), pp. 288–99.

²⁶ Cited in Brendan Nicholson & Paul Cleary, ‘New 9/11 fears set off Iraq invasion, says John Howard’, The Weekend Australian, 8 July 2016.

²⁷ Tony Blair, IIT, 29 January 2010, p. 11.

²⁸ The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2004), p. 362.

²⁹ For the humanitarian indictment of Saddam and the moral case for war, see Thomas Cushman, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (Berkeley: University of California, 2005).

³⁰ See David Fisher, former senior official with the MOD and FCO, senior defence adviser to the Prime Minister in the Cabinet Office, cited in David Fischer, Morality and War: Can War be Just in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 200.

³¹ The Duelfer Report found that ‘Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability—which was essentially destroyed in 1991—after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized, but probably with a different mix of capabilities to that which previously existed. Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability—in an incremental fashion, irrespective of international pressure and the resulting economic risks—but he intended to focus on ballistic missile and tactical chemical warfare (CW) capabilities’. Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD, 30 September 2004, ‘Key Findings’, p. 1.

³² Mohamed Ali & Iqbal Shah, ‘Sanctions and Childhood Mortality in Iraq’, The Lancet 355: 9218 (2000), pp. 1,851–7.

³³ David Frum, @davidfrum, 12:16pm, 6 July 2016.

³⁴ Charles Krauthammer, ‘Who’s to blame for the killing’, The Washington Post, 2 February 2007.

³⁵ Hew Strachan, ‘ Defence Review: we are as complacent about war as the Edwardians’, The Daily Telegraph, 17 September 2010.

³⁶ £2.5 billion was the initial Treasury estimate in September 2002, while the MOD’s estimate for costs of military action was £2 billion in October, which it then raised to £2.5–3 billion in February. The Treasury’s first comprehensive estimate in February 2003 was £3.4 billion over three years.

³⁷ Casualty figures from ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, iCasualties.org.

³⁸ John F. Burns, ‘How Many People has Hussein Killed?’, The New York Times, 26 January 2003.

³⁹ See the findings of the Watson Institute at Brown University, http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/refugees.

⁴⁰ See Michael Spagat, ‘The Iraq Sanctions Myth’, Pacific Standard, 26 April 2013, at https://psmag.com/the-iraq-sanctions-myth-5b05f6712df5#.i9oh5prjx; ‘Truth and Death in Iraq Under Sanctions’, Significance 7:3 (2010), pp. 116–20; World Health Organization, Iraq Family Health Survey 2006–7 (2008), p. 63, Table 25, at http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr02/2008_iraq_family_health_survey_report.pdf.

⁴¹ Fax Owen to Rycroft, 14 February 2003, ‘PM’s Speech Question’.

⁴² Minute Rycroft to Prime Minister, 14 February 2003, ‘Iraq: Scotland Speech—Additional Points’.

⁴³ Amnesty International, 2001 Annual Report on Iraq, 10 July 2001, p. 2.

⁴⁴ Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. x–xi.

⁴⁵ UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), Human Rights Report (1 July–31 August 2006), pp. 15–16.

⁴⁶ ‘Iraq torture worse after Saddam’, BBC News, 21 September 2006.

⁴⁷ The Report of the Baha Mousa Inquiry (London: Stationery Office, 2011), volumes 1–3.

⁴⁸ As Malcolm Chalmers assesses it, ‘The Strategic Scorecard’, in Wars in Peace: British Military Operations Since 1991 (London: RUSI, 2014), pp. 109–35.

⁴⁹ Amnesty International, Punished for Daesh’s crimes: Displaced Iraqis abused by militias and government forces (London: Amnesty International, 2016), pp. 6–7, 13.

⁵⁰ Report of the Iraq Inquiry, v. 10, Section 13.2, p. 580.

⁵¹ Local Government Spending on public libraries, drawn from Institute of Fiscal Studies, Green Budget February 2012, Table 6.2, p. 140.

⁵² House of Commons Library SN/SC/5755, Oliver Bennett & Sarah Hartwell Naguib, Flood Defence Spending in England (19 November 2014), p. 3.

⁵³ Proposals for the Reform of Legal Aid in England and Wales, Consultation Paper CP12/10, November 2010, Cm 7967, p. 5.

⁵⁴ The net additional cost of military operations in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2013 was £20.65 billion, according to Malcolm Chalmers, representing an average annual rate of approximately £1.72 billion. ‘The Sinews of War’, in Adrian L. Johnson (ed.), Wars in Peace: British Military Operations Since 1991 (London: RUSI, 2014), p. 268.

⁵⁵ On this case and the thesis of imperial overstretch, where military commitments exceed and dislocate the state’s economic capacity, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Fontana, 1989), pp. 39–89; Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (London: Yale University Press, 1998).

⁵⁶ On the long-term costs of the Iraq War for the United States, see the cumulative work of Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: W.W. Norton: 2008); Linda J. Bilmes & Joseph E. Stiglitz, ‘The long-term costs of conflict: the case the Iraq War’, in Derek L. Braddon & Keith Hartley (eds), The Handbook on the Economics of Conflict (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011) and ‘Estimating the costs of war: Methodological issues, with applications to Iraq and Afghanistan’, in Michelle Garfinkel & Stergios Skaperdas (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Peace and Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2012), pp. 1–51; Bilmes, ‘The Financial Legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan: How Wartime Spending Decisions Will Constrain Future National Security Budgets’, Faculty Research Working Paper Series, March 2013; see also Ryan D. Edwards, ‘Post-9/11 War Spending, Debt, and the Macroeconomy’, Cost of War Project, Brown University (22 June 2011).

⁵⁷ Ministry of Defence, ‘Operations in Iraq: British Fatalities’, at http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121026065214/http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/FactSheets/OperationsFactsheets/OperationsInIraqBritishFatalities.htm, accessed 12 November 2016.

⁵⁸ I derive this figure from the official MOD figures on British casualties, by subtracting fatalities from the total of Very Seriously Injured (73), Seriously Injured (149), Field Hospital Admissions (3598) and Aero-Medical Evacuations (1971), from Table: Summary of Ministry of Defence Statistics on British Casualties in Iraq, at Casualty Monitor, http://www.casualty-monitor.org/p/iraq.html. Note that these figures are incomplete, as the MOD has not yet released the official casualty figures for field hospital admissions and aero-medical evacuations from 2003 to 2005.

⁵⁹ House of Commons Briefing Paper, Number 7613, 9 June 2016, Terrorism in Great Britain: The Statistics (London: Stationery Office, 2016), p. 4.

⁶⁰ Hansard, 18 March 2003, column 769.

⁶¹ Institute for Defence Analyses, Iraqi Perspectives Project, Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents (November, 2007, vol. 1), Abstract.

⁶² Department of Defence report, cited by R. Jeffrey Smith, ‘Hussein’s Prewar Ties to Al-Qaeda discounted’, The Washington Post, 6 April 2007; Senate Intelligence Committee, Phase II—Bipartisan Report on Prewar Iraq Intelligence (2006) in Senate Reports Nos 330–1 (2007) pp. 105, 106, 108, 109; see also Press Release of the Committee, 5 June, 2008, available at http://intelligence.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=298775.

⁶³ Special Investigator General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), Learning From Iraq: A Final Report From the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (Washington DC, 2013), pp. 90–105.

⁶⁴ See Martin Chulov, ‘Tony Blair was right: without the Iraq war there would be no Islamic State’, The Guardian, 25 October 2015.

⁶⁵ Fawaz Gerges, ISIS: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 133.

⁶⁶ IIT, 29 January 2010, p. 24.

⁶⁷ See the remarks of Under Secretary of State John Bolton on 13 March 2003, US Department of State, International Information Programs, ‘Byliner: Under Secretary Bolton on North Korea, Iraq’, Far Eastern Economic Review, (13 March 2003), cited in Andrew Newman, ‘From Pre-emption to Negotiation: The Failure of the Iraq-as-Deterrent Nuclear Non-Proliferation Model’ Global Change, Peace and Security 17:2 (2005), pp. 155–69, p. 168, n77.

⁶⁸ See Andrew Newman, ‘From Pre-emption to Negotiation? The Failure of Iraq-as-Deterrent Nuclear non-proliferation Model’, Global Change, Peace and Security 17:2 (2005), pp. 155–69.

⁶⁹ Daniel Coats, Director of National Intelligence, Aspen Security Forum, 21 July 2017.

⁷⁰ Cited in Skand Tayal, ‘The North Korea Nuclear Test: Quest for Deterrence’, Eurasia Review, 25 January 2016.

⁷¹ Jessica Stern, ‘The Continuing Cost of the Iraq War: The Spread of Jihadi Groups throughout the Region’, 18 February 2014, at http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2014/The%20Continuing%20Cost%20of%20the%20Iraq%20War.pdf, and ‘Terrorism after the 2003 invasion of Iraq’, at http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2013/Terrorism%20after%20the%202003%20Invasion%20of%20Iraq.pdf.

⁷² David Frum, ‘The Speechwriter: Inside the Bush Administration during the Iraq War’, Newsweek, 19 March 2013.

⁷³ This section adapts parts of my article, ‘Iraq and Libya were not the West’s to Lose’, The National Interest, 3 November 2016.

⁷⁴ ‘John McCain’s 100 Years in Iraq’, CBS News, 1 April 2008.

⁷⁵ Paul Wolfowitz, ‘In Korea, a Model for Iraq’, The New York Times, 30 August 2010.

⁷⁶ See also Colin H. Kahl, ‘No, Obama did not Lose Iraq: What the President’s critics get wrong’, Politico, 15 June 2014.

⁷⁷ See CSIS, Patterns of Violence in Iraq (Washington DC, 2012), p. 3.

⁷⁸ Rick Brennan, ‘Withdrawal Symptoms: The Bungling of the Iraq Exit’ Foreign Affairs 93:6 (2014), pp. 25–36, p. 28.

⁷⁹ Paul Pillar, ‘The Damaging Myth about “Winning” the Iraq War’, The National Interest, 17 November 2014.

⁸⁰ Ted Galen Carpenter, ‘Rapid Reaction: McCain’s Folly’, The National Interest, 1 May 2008.

⁸¹ Robert G. Kaufman, In Defence of the Bush Doctrine (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), pp. 39–40.

⁸² Report of the Iraq Inquiry v. 1, pp. 189–90; Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK Permanent Representative to the UN, 20 November 2009, p. 2; v. 6, pp. 253–4; Joint Intelligence Committee Assessment, ‘Iraq: Continuing Erosion of Sanctions’, 25 July 2001.

⁸³ On the prior success of containment and its prospects for working hypothetically in the future, see G.A. Lopez & D. Cartright, ‘Containing Iraq: sanctions worked’, Foreign Affairs 83:4 (2004), pp. 90–103; Harrer, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme: The Inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991–1998 (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 253–5.

⁸⁴ As Richard Betts argued in advance, ‘Suicide for Fear of Death?’, Foreign Affairs 82:1 (2003), pp. 34–43, p. 42.

⁸⁵ Cabinet Conclusions, 16 May 2002, cited in Report of the Iraq Inquiry, vol. II, part 42, p. 11.

⁸⁶ Carne Ross, IIT, 12 July 2010, p. 4.

⁸⁷ Jacques Hymans, ‘Botching the Bomb: Why Nuclear Weapons Programs Often Fail on Their Own—and Why Iran’s Might Too’, Foreign Affairs 91:3 (2012), pp. 44–53, p. 50.

⁸⁸ Minute, DIS to DI ST, ‘What Does Iraq Need to Do to Get the Bomb Quickly?’, 20 March 2002.

⁸⁹ Minute, Dr Paul Roper, Director Strategic Technology to Policy Director, 27 March 2002, ‘Iraq—Nuclear Weapons’.

⁹⁰ Minutes, 4 September 2002, Joint Intelligence Committee, p. 2.

⁹¹ A point conceded even by a scholar who portrays Saddam as otherwise ‘very, very hard to deter’: Amatzia Baram, ‘Deterrence Lessons from Iraq’, Foreign Affairs 91:4 (2012), pp. 76–90, p. 85.

⁹² Hal Brands, ‘Saddam Hussein, the United States, and the Invasion of Iran: Was there a Green Light?’, Cold War History 12:2 (2012), pp. 319–43, pp. 330–7.

⁹³ See James Baker III, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992 (New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1995), p. 359; ‘Text of Letter from Bush to Hussein’, The New York Times, 13 January 1991, as reprinted in Mark Grossman, Encyclopedia of the Persian Gulf War (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1995), p. 396; Frontline interview with General Wafic al-Samarrai, cited in Vipin Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 294; Victor A. Utgoff, ‘Nuclear Weapons and the Deterrence of Biological and Chemical Warfare’, Occasional Paper 36 (Washington DC, 1997) p. 2, n. 4; ‘Saad al-Bazzaz: An Insider’s View of Iraq’, Middle East Quarterly 2:4 (December 1995); while Tariq Aziz may have had a possible ulterior motive in presenting Saddam as deterrable, in order to weaken the sanctions and inspections programme, the two defectors did not have such incentives, and in fact otherwise presented Saddam as difficult to deter: see David Palkki, ‘Deterring Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: Domestic Audience Costs and Credibility Assessments in Theory and Practice’ (unpublished dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2013), p. 146.

⁹⁴ Derived from the Conflict Records Research Centre, SH-SHTP-A-000-848, ‘Saddam Hussein and his Advisors Discussing Potential War with the United States’, 1990. Cited in Baram, ‘Deterrence Lesson from Iraq’, p. 85; Palkki, ‘Deterring Saddam Hussein’s Iraq’, p. 124.

⁹⁵ See Paul Idon, ‘Saddam Hussein Seriously Feared a U.S. Nuclear Strike During the Gulf War’, The National Interest, 24 January 2017; David Palkki, ‘Calculated Ambiguity, Nuclear Weapons and Saddam’s Strategic Restraint’, in Scott D. Sagan, PASSC Final Report: ‘Deterring Rogue Regimes: Rethinking Deterrence Theory and Practice’, 8 July 2013, Stanford University.

⁹⁶ Hal Brands & David Palkki, ‘Saddam, Israel and the Bomb: Nuclear Alarmism Justified?’, International Security 36:1 (2011), pp. 133–66.

⁹⁷ On this operation, Vigilant Warrior, see Daniel Byman, Kenneth Pollack & Matthew Waxman, ‘Coercing Saddam Hussein: Lessons from the Past’, Survival 40:3 (1998), pp. 127–51, pp. 137–8.

⁹⁸ Also making this argument were John J. Mearsheimer & Stephen M. Walt, ‘An Unnecessary War’, Foreign Policy 134 (2003), pp. 50–9.

⁹⁹ Daniel Byman, ‘After the Storm: US Policy Towards Iraq since 1991’, Political Science Quarterly 115:4 (2001), pp. 493–516, p. 503.

¹⁰⁰ Robin Cook, The Point of Departure (London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2003), pp. 215–16.

¹⁰¹ Jacques E. Hymans, Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians and Proliferation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 120. (My Italics).

¹⁰² Federation of American Scientists, see https://fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/facility/osiraq.htm.

¹⁰³ On the ‘state of the art’ of this debate, about the slowing and the accelerating effects of a preventive strike on nuclear facilities, see Uri Sadot, ‘Osirak and the Counter-Proliferation Puzzle’, Security Studies 25:4 (2016), pp. 646–76; Sarah E. Kreps & Matthew Fuhrmann, ‘Attacking The Atom: Does Bombing Nuclear Facilities Affect Proliferation?’, Journal of Strategic Studies 34:2 (2011): pp. 161–87; Dan Reiter, ‘Preventive Attacks against Nuclear Programs and the “Success” at Osiraq’, Nonproliferation Review 12:2 (July 2005), pp. 355–71.

¹⁰⁴ On the implausibility of most states acquiring a nuclear weapon undetected for these reasons, see Nuno P. Monteiro & Alexandre Debs, ‘The Strategic Logic of Nuclear Proliferation’, International Security 39:2 (2014), pp. 7–51, p. 25, n. 36.

¹⁰⁵ ‘War with Iraq is not in America’s National Interest’, The New York Times, 26 September 2002.

¹⁰⁶ Michael Quinlan, ‘War on Iraq: A Blunder and a Crime’, The Financial Times, 7 August 2002.

¹⁰⁷ John McTernan, ‘If Jeremy Corbyn had stopped Tony Blair invading Iraq, dictators and jihadists would rule the world today’, The Daily Telegraph, 9 June 2016.

¹⁰⁸ ‘The cost of inaction’, The Economist, 24 September 2015; George Osborne, Hansard, vol. 618, 13 December 2016.

¹⁰⁹ As Alexander B. Downes observed, ‘By declaring that Assad has no future as president of Syria, the United States has effectively torpedoed meaningful negotiations to end the war short of decisive victory for one side or the other. The reasons are twofold. First, in calling for Assad’s overthrow, the United States has essentially endorsed the rebels’ principal war aim. The knowledge that the world’s only superpower supports their primary political objective has unsurprisingly made the rebels more intransigent’. ‘Why Regime Change is a Bad Idea in Syria’, in Marc Lynch (ed.), The Political Science of Syria’s Civil War (POMPES Briefings, 2013), pp. 61–3, p. 62.

¹¹⁰ See Ministry of Defence, Annual Report and Accounts 2003–2004 (House of Commons, London: Stationery Office, 2004), pp. 14–19.

¹¹¹ See Robert Ford, ‘An Iceberg Issue? Immigration at the 2005 British General Election’, unpublished paper, 2005. I am grateful to Professor Ford for his permission to cite; see also ICM/Guardian Opinion Poll discussed in Alan Travis, ‘Labour Ahead on Key Issues in Run-Up to Election’, The Guardian, 22 March 2005.

¹¹² Martin Indyk, ‘The Iraq War Did Not Force Gadaffi’s Hand’, The Financial Times, 9 March 2004.

¹¹³ See Bruce W. Jentleson & Christopher A. Whytock, ‘Who “Won” Libya? The Force-Diplomacy Debate and Its Implications for Theory and Policy’, International Security 30:3 (2005/06), pp. 47–86; Lisa Anderson, ‘Rogue Libya’s Long Road’, Middle East Report 24 (2006), p. 46; Gawdat Bahgat, ‘Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Case of Libya’, International Relations 22:1 (2008), p. 107; Joseph Cirincione, ‘The world just got safer: give diplomacy the credit’, The Washington Post, 11 January 2004; Peter Viggo Jackobson, ‘Reinterpreting Libya’s WMD Turnaround: Bridging the Carrot-Coercion Divide’, Journal of Strategic Studies 35:4 (2012), pp. 489–512.

¹¹⁴ Flynt L. Leverett, ‘Why Libya Gave Up the Bomb’, Brookings Institution Op-Ed, 23 January 2004.

¹¹⁵ Human Rights Watch, A Wasted Decade (New York, 2010), p. 2.

¹¹⁶ Matthew Levitt, ‘Syria’s Financial Support for Jihad’, Middle East Quarterly (2010), pp. 39–48; Anthony H. Cordesman, ‘The Department of Defense Quarterly Report on Stability and Security in Iraq: The Warning Indicators’, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., 22 December 2006.

¹¹⁷ JIC Assessment, ‘International Terrorism: War with Iraq’, 10 February 2003.

¹¹⁸ Richard Nixon, ‘Address to the Nation on the Situation in Southeast Asia’, 30 April 1970, at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2490.

¹¹⁹ For critiques of the precautionary principle, see David Runciman, ‘The Precautionary Principle’, London Review of Books 26:7 (2004), pp. 12–14; Cass R. Sunstein, ‘The Paralysing Principle’, Regulation 5:4 (2003), pp. 32–7.