Five Years On, the Hard Lessons That We Must Learn From Iraq

Five years have passed since Tony Blair sent British troops to fight in Iraq. That war altered the course of British politics and changed the global balance of power. To Iraq it brought freedom, terror, poverty, opportunity, renaissance and apocalypse.

Not every consequence of the war could have been foretold in 2003, but it was clear that a serious gamble was being taken with British power and with the lives of British soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Naturally it provoked the most passionate and bitter public debate for a generation.

Some opinions remain entrenched where they were before the bombs fell. At one extreme are those who still insist the war was a noble enterprise, sabotaged by forces hostile to democracy. Then there are those who maintain it was a moral aberration from the start.

With hindsight a more nuanced truth emerges. Tony Blair believed he had an opportunity to marry a principled goal to a strategic one - liberating a nation from tyranny and realigning the Middle East towards Western interests. But his need for public consent led to a process of persuasion that was, in the final analysis, misleading. Terrible miscalculations were made in the preparation for war and a catalog of blunders made in its prosecution. As an intervention, whether for moral or strategic goals, it failed.

The consequences are grave, and not just for Iraq. It will color the decision that future leaders take when they contemplate using military power for any purpose other than self-defence. It is a blow to the idea of 'liberal intervention'. But does that blow have to be fatal?

An optimistic account of what has happened in Iraq is still possible. It starts with the view that the country is no longer ruled by Saddam Hussein, a despot with a proven record of genocide. It is a democracy, at least in so far as ordinary people have chosen their own government. They defied suicide bombers to vote for a better future.

Without foreign intervention, Iraq would still be a nation imprisoned in its borders, perpetually on the brink of war with its neighbors. While the immediate aftermath of Saddam's fall was grossly mishandled by the occupying forces, the modest success of the recent military 'surge' led by General Petraeus hints at what might have been, and at the possibility of redemption. With the right strategy the structures that held civil society together could have been preserved, economic reconstruction could have happened faster, a peace dividend could have been paid promptly to the Iraqi people, reducing their incentive to insurgency.

Many sobering facts are ranged against that view. Only one of the many apparent goals of the war has been met. The Iraqi regime has changed. But the Middle East is less secure and less stable now than in 2003. Iraq is not a beacon of freedom and prosperity, lighting the way for other benighted Arab countries. It was inevitable that allied forces would be caught up in a bloody vortex of nationalist reaction and religious feuding. Confidence that the Iraqi people craved freedom blinded war-planners to the complexity of a society that would always resist foreign occupation, whatever the motive. The potential for conflict between Shia and Sunni, secular and religious society was always there, frozen by Saddam's repression. The surge is a policy of containment. Any truce that now emerges will be sown with the seeds of future civil strife.

Lawlessness and fear have given succor to religious fanatics inside and outside Iraq. Foreign jihadis entered the theatre of war opened for them by the invasion. The beneficiary in the region was Iran, an authoritarian theocracy which - unlike Saddam Hussein's Iraq - can be said with some certainty to sponsor terrorism and covet weapons of mass destruction.

Such a bleak account of the new Iraq is enough to question the wisdom of military action. But that alone does not account for the sense of grievance that the war created in Britain. Just as important is the method by which the government persuaded ambivalent parties to back the war - a position which was endorsed by this newspaper.

The most prominent argument - that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to Britain - has now been refuted. So has the claim that Saddam was in alliance with al-Qaeda. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The Butler review found that the now infamous claim that Iraqi WMD could be mobilized within 45 minutes was 'unsubstantiated'.

Combined, the Butler report and Hutton inquiry create a damning picture: the security services may largely have believed that Saddam had a WMD arsenal, but they were not sure of its scope. Yet Downing Street, when presenting the evidence in public, made a calculated effort to inflate the danger in order to justify possible military action. That amounted to deception of the British people and an egregious abuse of power.

The offense was compounded by the impression that Mr Blair had pledged British troops in early 2002, when a year later he was still claiming that war could be avoided. That made a mockery of the arguments over a UN resolution backing the war. Mr Blair sought political cover from the Security Council, but he did not intend to defer to the UN for moral or legal authority.

As the scale of public manipulation in the build-up to war became clear, it leaked toxin into the body politic. It weakened the bond of trust between the Prime Minister and the electorate and diminished confidence in institutions that might have held the government to account. Although there was vigorous opposition in Parliament and some of the media, too much credence was generally given to the government's account of the need for armed intervention.

There was also a collective failure to scrutinies the military strategy. Not enough questions were asked about US plans for post-war stabilization. It turned out there were none. There was a heavy price for that omission. The war has taken the lives of 175 British and nearly 4,000 US soldiers. It has critically injured many thousands more. It has cost the Treasury at least £1.7bn.

There is also a global cost. When it became clear the original strategic goal in Iraq was lost, Tony Blair fell back on the moral argument about intervention. He presented the battle in Iraq as a confrontation between liberal democracy and terror - the view espoused by President Bush from the start. But the integration of jihadi militancy into the Iraq conflict was a consequence of the war. To present it retrospectively as a justification turned cause and effect on their head.

It was clear to many countries around the world that unseating Saddam Hussein was a distraction from the post-11 September global security agenda of combating al-Qaeda. It should also have been clear to the British government.

But Tony Blair, like George Bush, insisted on defining the war as an expression of Western values. Inevitably, mistakes, crimes, in some cases committed by allied forces - such as the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib - were going to be depicted across the Middle East as evidence of systematic Western hypocrisy. The war undermined the very notion of Western moral authority.

In that climate, can the idea of liberal intervention survive? Should it be salvaged in Iraq.

It would be a mistake to replay the arguments of 2003 to decide what the best course of action is now. If foreign powers failed to bring peace then, it does not mean they must now leave. If Iraq was not the threat to global security it was said to be then, it is now.

If coalition forces lacked a legal mandate to start a war, they now have one to keep the peace. They also have the consent of the elected government. For as long as that is the case, they should stay. If the case for installing democracy by force was flawed, the case for shoring that democracy up now is compelling.

While the mistakes of the last five years will be recalled when confrontation looms in the future, the circumstances will never be quite the same. We must, of course, ensure that the lessons about post-war planning, and political mobilization of neutral intelligence agencies for partisan ends will be learnt.

We must also learn from Iraq the limitations of unilateral action. But we must not retreat, chastened into wound-licking parochialism and diplomatic isolation.

Britain must be in the forefront of moves to restore the authority of international institutions, to reform the United Nations so that it can more effectively intervene in humanitarian disasters.

But the Security Council, with Russia and China in permanent seats, hardly offers hope that the UN can be relied upon to exert pressure on authoritarian regimes.

Securing the national interest is the primary function of government. But far-sighted understanding of national interest will sometimes accommodate foreign intervention, even on occasion pre-emption, perhaps unilateral.

There is a path ahead. On one side is narrow pragmatism that defines national security as ending at our borders. On the other side is doctrinaire arrogation of a moral right to reshape the world in our image.

We must tread carefully. Whatever the tragic consequences of the Iraq war, we must learn from them, and when the circumstances are right, not flinch from using all the power at our disposal. We can be sure in the knowledge that there will be causes worth fighting for in the future.