The Iraq War: 20 Years On
The US Army in Baghdad, May 2003. (The U.S. National Archives)
The decision to go to war in Iraq was opposed by millions. The consequences of the invasion were catastrophic. Embrace CEO Tim Livesey reflects on the legacy of the Iraq War.
Twenty years ago the war in Iraq began with an overnight bombardment by the US which President Bush proudly described as a demonstration of ‘shock and awe’. In other words, as much a demonstration - to Iraq and, in truth, to the entire world – of US power, as about the pursuit of precise and justified military objectives.
Did the US have something to prove, post 9/11? Was this unfinished business from the first Gulf War when a UN backed international coalition ejected Saddam’s troops from Kuwait but then stopped at the Kuwait border, rather than succumbing to the temptation of mission creep. On that occasion, the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was instrumental in persuading George Bush Senior against further action to secure regime change without a legal mandate. In 2003, the only other significant world leader signed up to the US’ war aims in Iraq was UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. And, in fact, he didn’t even know that the Cruise missiles were going in the night the war began. His close ally George Bush junior had failed to warn him in advance.
Anti-war march in London, February 2003.
At the time I was working for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales - on a secondment from the Foreign Office. Until February 2002, a year before the war, I had been working in Downing St, responsible for Tony Blair’s foreign policy related communications. I had gone from a place where my outright (I used to say 120%) opposition to a war in Iraq would have meant me resigning from my job, to a place where I was free to voice my opposition, at least privately. I marched against the war in London with my 11-year-old son and, probably, one and a half million others. It was a seminal moment. An unprecedented display of public anger and concern. The numbers were so great that it took us two hours to navigate the length of Piccadilly. We never made it to the speeches in Hyde Park.
Clare Short, then Secretary of State for Development recalled last week her own son phoning her from the same march. He was there with his daughters, her grand-daughters. He, like me, was stunned by the sheer scale of the march, and the telling diversity of those protesting. There was no way we can go to war now, he said to his mother; who secretly agreed, and was delighted. Tony Blair, would now have to think again; surely? Added to his failure to secure a second UN Security Council Resolution which might have made an invasion legal in international law, he hadn’t persuaded the British people this was the right thing to do.
But Blair did not think again. He, and President Bush, went ahead anyway. Yes, he secured a handsome majority in Parliament in support of ‘military action’. However, a quarter of his own MPs voted against the motion; and another 69 abstained. Just under 40% of Labour MPs refused to support the Prime Minister. History has vindicated their refusal to bend to the pressure put on them by the government’s Whips. Leaving to one side the faulty intelligence used to persuade his MPs, many of us believed then, and know now for sure, that the case for war was exaggerated at best, and erroneous at worst. There was no legal base for intervention. The war lacked both moral and political legitimacy – internationally, as well as domestically. The consequences proved catastrophic; worse even than the most pessimistic predicted. Hundreds of thousands died. Iraq remains dangerously unstable, as does the entire region.
The foreign policy failure of the Suez crisis in 1956 scarred my parents’ generation. The Iraq war scarred mine. I left the Foreign Office in 2006. In 2022 I finally got to visit Iraq. I took with me feelings of shame, and mental images of the terrible violence that engulfed Iraq after 2003. And yet I met only warmth, kindness and a resilient determination on the part of young Iraqi Christians (those few that are left) to rebuild their country, and their communities. This might have contributed to an even more acute sense of shame. Their strong Christian values and identity have been forged in a crucible of death and destruction for which we were, in some way, partially responsible. Instead, it left me feeling immense admiration, and a sense of hope for the future: their future, but also ours.
But the lessons have to be learned and remembered. We cannot let something like the war in Iraq happen again.
Tim, Embrace’s CEO, is writing here in a personal capacity. He previously worked for nearly twenty years as a UK diplomat, including two years in Downing Street 2000-2002.
