Politics

Have we learnt more from Iraq than Campbell has?

January 21, 2010
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To a hammer, every problem is a nail. Alastair Campbell tells us, in today’s Financial Times, that the main lesson we should take from the Iraq debacle is that next time we invade a minor third world country, government officials need to spin it better. Considering that Bush and Blair, back in 2003 were able to drag our countries into war, despite little genuine cause and massive popular opposition, I would have thought that spin was one of the few Iraq war government policies that actually succeeded.

Let us not forget: Saddam Hussein, although a despicable tyrant, had no weapons of mass destruction.  He was a threat to no one but his own people and few of them, by the way, are now grateful for our invasion. Our optimism, brute force, cowardice and pathetic planning turned a totalitarian state into something even worse, an anarchic hellhole. I will never forget, in 2006, being told by a man who had spent 6 years in Saddam’s jails how much better things were under the Ba’athist regime. Today, much of the Iraqi middle class is in exile, hundreds of thousands have died, violence still endemic, the economy in tatters.

The war devastated Iraq; it damaged us as well. The international reputation of Britain and the United States have suffered, we have wasted trillions of dollars, thousands of our soldiers lives, and accomplished almost nothing.  The big winner in Iraq is Iran and the fundamentalist Shia groups allied with it.   If the war’s purpose was to control Iraq’s oil, that plan too was a failure. The civil war years cut Iraqi production to a fraction of its pre-invasion levels and in the recent oil field auction, Russian, Chinese, Angolan oil companies secured more of Iraq’s oil than American and British companies, without their militaries having to go to the trouble of invading.



I remember watching Tony Blair on Newsnight in the company of retired British Army officers, a few weeks before the 2003 invasion.  These men, most of who ended up making good money from the “war on terror” working as private security consultants, scoffed at the Prime Ministers excuses for invading.  They knew better, actually almost all of us knew better. The tragic thing is, the spin was unnecessary. It didn’t convince us that Saddam was a real threat, it just convinced us that our governments would go to war anyway. The war in Iraq was unnecessary, it was badly executed, and we would be better off if our leaders recognized that.

The lessons I would like us to learn from Iraq are: don’t go to war unless it is worth your son’s life, plan for the worst case scenario (not just the best), and, sadly, don’t trust your government. Campbell’s article tells us he hasn’t learned anything from Iraq.  Please God, I hope we have.