War no crime for leaders: Chilcot Report prompts UK protests

Former prime minister tells then US President George W Bush ‘we’re with you all the way’.

I happened to be in London this week when the Chilcot report came out. Seven years in the making, it’s a comprehensive evaluation of British involvement in Iraq, from well before 9/11 and right up until British troops withdrew in 2009. The report is gargantuan — at 2.6 million words, it’s the size of a Hindu epic, four times longer than War and Peace — so I doubt any analyst has fully absorbed it yet. But even a quick glance highlights several aspects of Britain’s experience that apply to Australia, too.

In London the report was greeted with small but strident street protests, calls to impeach former prime minister Tony Blair, and anguish over the Iraqi civilians killed, injured, and made refugees by the conflict. Pub talk on Wednesday night amounted to resigned bitterness, though, with Iraq seen as a horrible mistake and a milestone in the collapse of strategic confidence that culminated in last month’s Brexit and the associated economic and political chaos.

The next morning there was consternation from soldiers’ families when the International Criminal Court said it would scour the report for evidence of war crimes by British troops and would prosecute any it found but would take no action against the war’s architects since the decision for war was outside the court’s remit.

It turns out there’s no “crime of aggression” under the Rome Statute (the legislation under which the court operates), though prosecutors said they were thinking of introducing one in the future to cover “illegal invasions”.

But as the Chilcot report’s thorough accounting makes clear, the decision to invade Iraq was taken in accordance with British law. It was decided by the full cabinet, and endorsed by a vote in parliament. Likewise, in the US, an overwhelming and bipartisan majority in congress voted for war.

(In Australia, by contrast, parliament never formally debated the decision, which the government argued was solely a cabinet responsibility. As James Brown points out in his recent Quarterly Essay, Firing Line, the concentration of war powers in the hands of the Australian prime minister is something few Australians think about but which needs far more discussion.)

In any case, when a properly elected democratic government decides, in accordance with its constitutional processes, to go to war, it’s hard to question the war’s legality. Its strategic wisdom is another matter entirely.

A complicating argument — one that president Bill Clinton and Blair invoked during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Barack Obama used to justify intervention in Libya, and still provokes heated argument over Syria — is the “responsibility to protect”: the notion that the international community can use military force against a sovereign country to protect its people against their own government.

As the Chilcot report shows, this can be a slippery slope. The arguments used in Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor and Libya also were deployed to support the Iraq invasion, even (indeed, especially) after the fact, when intelligence proved faulty, the war’s rationale was exposed as false and the occupation descended into bloody chaos.

For the Hague court now to say it may prosecute soldiers sent to fight the war, without questioning its overall legality or justification, is dangerously close to scapegoating the military for decisions made by elected leaders that (as the Chilcot report notes) were thoroughly criticised by professional soldiers before the war.

Criticising the errors of the occupation (which were many and serious) is perfectly legitimate. But it would be a travesty to indulge in a post facto blame game without also critiquing the master error, the original sin, that led to that occupation in the first place. The Chilcot report covers both aspects in great detail.

This issue applies equally to the US. But a second issue mainly affects its junior alliance partners, including Britain and Australia. The Chilcot report makes clear that Blair thought he could shape American thinking and somehow moderate George W. Bush’s instincts even as he hitched himself to Washington’s wagon.

Time and again in the report, British policymakers come across as going along with American decisions in full knowledge that these could lead to disaster, but in the often vain hope that by working from a position of alliance loyalty (in Blair’s words, “we’re with you, whatever”) they could influence them. But as the report shows, this is fantasy.

American decision-makers were determined to invade Iraq, and they were contributing by far the lion’s share of resources and taking the largest risk. Their willingness to listen to junior partners was already limited — and, if anything, by committing so fully to the invasion, British political leaders arguably were reducing their leverage.

That, in and of itself, doesn’t mean the decision to join the invasion was mistaken. As I was told before the war, “The question is not: ‘Should Australia invade Iraq?’ The question is: ‘The Americans are invading Iraq — should Australia be in it or not?’ ” The same, of course, applied in Britain.

I think it’s possible to argue that the answer to that question — purely for reasons of alliance credibility — might have been yes. But it’s equally possible to argue that no amount of alliance credibility is worth the life of a single Aussie Digger, or to ask what the purpose of that credibility might be if not to help stop an ally from making an egregious and predictable mistake.

And this points to a key difference between the British and Australian experiences in Iraq.

Both Britain and Australia did commit to the invasion, and both ultimately preserved their reputations as reliable allies.

But whereas Australia suffered not one combat death during its entire commitment (only three Australian troops died, one during training in Kuwait, one in an apparently accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound, and one in a plane crash while serving in the British forces), Britain lost 179, including 136 combat deaths.

British losses, in large part, occurred in the grinding and ultim­ately unsuccessful battle to stabilise Iraq’s southern city of Basra, an experience analysed in detail in the later chapters of the Chilcot report. Those casualties, and the temporary loss of credibility that followed the withdrawal from Basra, prompted British military commanders to take a long, hard look at themselves.

To their credit, that soul-searching made them stronger: those of us who served alongside British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan emerged with heightened respect for their commitment and skill, largely because they did learn successfully from early losses.

My strongest impression of British forces I encountered, when I served in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, was their low-key professionalism, as they got on with a difficult and unsought job during the war’s most murderous phase, and despite often inadequate gear, an issue the Chilcot report also examines in detail.

This included body armour with tiny ceramic plates that only just covered vital organs. I rem­ember being astounded the first time I saw one, and a British Special Forces colleague in Baghdad joked darkly that it would take a real Iraqi marksman to manage to hit the part protected by the plate.

It also included lightly protected “snatch” Land Rovers designed for Northern Ireland, when the insurgents were laying enormous roadside bombs that could tear apart such vehicles.

The Australians, with their superior equipment, more thorough preparation for improvised explosive devices (and, of course, a far quieter area of responsibility) were not just luckier than the Brits but also, initially, better supported. As in other aspects of the conflict, the British did adapt, fielding dramatically improved vehicles, equipment and counter-IED systems after learning from early losses.

That may be a comfort to professional soldiers, but it’s little consolation for the families of Britain’s dead, many of whom attended the Chilcot report’s release. Their anguish drove the inquiry and in large part prompted its exhaustive and unsparing report.

By contrast, Australia’s few casualties — and minimal involvement in the war’s major combat operations, whether in Basra (though under British command, Australian forces largely avoided that battle) or during the brutal surge, when for a time US forces in Anbar and the belts around Baghdad were losing more than 100 every month — perhaps explains why no similar inquiry has been held in Australia.

It also has meant that the ­Australian Defence Force has yet to undertake the same ruthlessly honest self-examination as the British.

For that reason, for anyone with time to read it — or even to scan the executive summary, which is 150 pages long in itself — the Chilcot report makes sobering but very worthwhile reading.

David Kilcullen was a senior adviser to US general David Petraeus in 2007-08, when he helped to design the Iraq war coalition troop surge; he was also a special adviser for counter-insurgency to former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. He is the author of the Quarterly Essay Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State.