06/07/2016 Newsnight

There was no secret commitment to war. Intelligence was not full set

fight and the decision was made in good faith. -- intelligence was not

falsified. There were no lies. Parliament and Cabinet were not

misled. We were discussing this literally,

26 times I think we discussed it in Cabinet and a lot of these were

detailed discussions. Look me in the eye and tell me you did not mislead

the nation. I can look not just the families of this country but the

nation in the eye and say, I did not mislead this country, I made the

decision in good faith. There is one terrorist in this world that the

world needs to be aware of. His name is Tony Blair. The world's worst

terrorist. APPLAUSE

I accept full responsibility for these points of criticism even where

I do not fully agree with them. Well, we've had a sense

in the last two weeks of an old political establishment

taking a beating, but today it suffered another really hefty blow,

with the Chilcott Inquiry's excoriating findings on the build up

to the Iraq war and the conduct It is no surprise that it makes

sober reading: the war led to the deaths of over 200

British citizens and over But the catalogue of mistakes,

the mismanagement, the misjudgements,

Sir John Chilcot's summary puts the system of British

government to shame, however generously you interpret

the intentions of leading players. We have concluded that the UK chose

to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament

had been exhausted. Military action at that time

was not a last resort. We have also concluded that:

The judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq's

weapons of mass destruction - WMD - were presented with a certainty

that was not justified. Despite explicit warnings,

the consequences of the invasion The planning and preparations

for Iraq after Saddam Hussein of the Chilcot report as a study

in confirmation bias. We all have it, the tendency

to see only the evidence The best you can say of Tony Blair,

is he was suffering from a particularly severe case

of that affliction. He is not called a liar, but he set

out the intelligence on WMD, with more certainty

than the Intelligence merited. He used the phrase "established

beyond doubt", which was his belief, it was not what the

intelligence showed. And Mr Blair omitted

to give the full picture. In the House of Commons on 18 March

2003, Mr Blair stated that he judged the possibility of terrorist groups

in possession of WMD was "a real and present danger to Britain

and its national security" - and that the threat

from Saddam Hussein's arsenal could not be contained and posed

a clear danger to British citizens. Mr Blair had been warned, however,

that military action would increase the threat from Al Qaeda to the UK

and to UK interests. Tony Blair himself gave

an emotional response His defence was that he acted

in good faith, that the intelligence services clearly did believe

there were WMD, that he was worried about the threat that terrorists

might get weapons from Saddam, and that even if we hadn't gone

into Iraq, tragic consequences Above all the politics back in March

2003 was about making difficult decisions. We had come to the point

of binary decision, right to remove Saddam or not, with America or not?

The report itself says this was a stark choice. And it was. Now the

inquiry claims that military action was not a last resort although it

says it might have been necessary later. With respect, I did not have

the option of that delay. I had to decide.

Tony Blair is not the whole story,

perhaps not even the main story, there is so much

And a lot of reaction too, today - the families of the soldiers

But let's follow up on some of these themes starting with

Here's our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban.

EXPLOSIONS It was a war of choice. Something

Britain did not have to do but with which Tony Blair, a few of his

allies and the service chiefs felt they had to get involved with. The

meeting, one year before the invasion, at President Bush's ranch

in Texas would prove pivotal. When Mr Blair met President Rush at

Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, the formal policy was still to contain

them using -- President Bush. But by then there had been a profound

change in the UK's thinking. The government was stating that Iraq was

a threat that had to be dealt with. It had to disarm or be disarmed.

Three months later Tony Blair wrote this to President Bush.

Britain joined the US in trying to bring the matter to a head via the

United Nations by sending weapons inspectors into Iraq. But when that

did not produce the evidence, they started to plan for war. In the

absence of a majority in support of military action we considered that

the UK was in fact undermining the security council's authority. As the

forces got ready to in fate Iraq the Cabinet was kept on the sidelines.

Four months before it up and the Cabinet Secretary told the inquiry

preparations were becoming public with no discussion in Cabinet. The

reservists had been given notice, purchases were being made, and

assets, troops, had been moved, and ships had been dispatched on

manoeuvres, or on exercises. The next day, that is reported to

Cabinet. OK? So you can see that the extent to which they are brought

into the story lacks a long way behind the degree of firstly,

thinking, and by this time, preparation. If there is a key

takeaway from this it is the degree to which Tony Blair kept vital

decision-making to himself and one or two close allies. Sir John

Chilcot flags up 11 occasions when he said Tony Blair should have had

close consultations with Cabinet colleagues and officials and allowed

them to have their say but did not do so. As drafts of the government

's WMD assessments evolved towards the dossier of September 2002, many

of those steeped in the intelligence started to be alarmed. The claims of

the threat were massaged in London, I do not know by whom but I can

guess that they were massaged in London to present a more certain

picture than that we believed. And those of us or worked on it

including weapons inspectors like David Kelly in the defence

intelligence staff were surprised by this process. As to the extent to

which the intelligence services for the doomed to group- think, today's

report reveals this. Worth, Chilcot discovered that and

MI6 Iraqis by whose reports were breathlessly circulated by the

service, was found and reliable even before the war started and MI6 did

not tell anyone -- worse. One of the conclusions that Lord Butler came to

was that those who were doing the assessment of what all this means,

trying to get an explanation of what is going on in a country like Iraq,

need to know more about the raw material that they building the

assessment on. That did not happen in particular case. -- in that

particular case. As for the legal basis for war,

honed down and changed a few days before fighting broke out, Chilcot

says this. We have however concluded that the circumstances in which it

was decided that there was a legal base for UK military action were far

from satisfactory. Tony Blair and his chief of staff, as late as 12

days before operations started, asked that the Attorney General's

legal advice should be tightly held and not shared with ministerial

colleagues without No 10's permission. And when push came to

shove, the Attorney General simply said that the key decision, whether

Iraq was in material breach of United Nations resolutions, was Tony

Blair's call. Once that determination was made the way was

clear for operations to begin. Mark bourbon that, more from him later.

Sir David Omand served as security and intelligence coordinator

in the Cabinet Office from 2002 until 2005.

That meant he was a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee

I asked what went wrong with UK intelligence concerning Iraq.

It went wrong both at the level of intelligence collection and in terms

of the assessment. But given the intelligence that was in front of

the joint intelligence committee, I think the conclusion that we all

reached, that Saddam had retained material unlawfully, and that he was

anxious to keep this capability, was a perfectly reasonable judgment on

the basis of the information. Chilcot does save the intelligence

services should have pointed out to the Prime Minister that the evidence

does not suggest it was beyond doubt that there were these weapons -- he

does say this. It was in the foreword to the document, not in the

document itself but we all know... As I said in my evidence, with

hindsight we would have spotted this difficulty and we would have done

something about it. But we didn't. We didn't really put together what

the implication of that kind of language in the mouth of the

premised and other senior politicians would be. -- the Prime

Minister and other senior politicians. There is a big lesson

there for the future. Bluntly, the intelligence services, MI6 in

particular, filed under enormous pressure to deliver to their client,

the Prime Minister. The example of the rogue agent, who early in

December 2002, getting very excited about evidence coming from one

particular agent and by November they realised that he was picking

stuff up out of movies. But was not good practice. Another example was

the curve ball, the Iraqi engineer, the defector, who was interrogated

by the German intelligence services. And they produced lots of reports,

all extremely plausible but we were never allowed to speak... That's the

kind of material. You guys see the government, the Prime Minister, as

the client, not the public. There was a lot of political pressure and

the Chilcot Report is very good at explaining that. But it did not

distort the intelligence. The intelligence was not spun. And again

Chilcot comes to the same conclusion as Robin Butler. It is not about

making up intelligence. Not about trying to please political masters

by inventing stuff. But the trade craft was not as good and part of

the explanation for that is the pressure everyone was under.

What should the public think? They pay for this intelligence service,

it is not Tony Blair's David Cameron's. How good is the

intelligence service? A lot of people think the brand was

tarnished. The brand is tarnished, no doubt. I think what the public

should remember is that in the last 18 months, seven attempts to attack

the United Kingdom by terrorists were stopped by those same

intelligence agencies. That is a pretty successful record. Thank you

very much. I'm joined from Barcelona

by Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's communications chief

at the time of the Iraq War, and in the studio by Clare Short,

the former International Development And Sir Jeremy Greenstock,

who was Britain's ambassador to the United Nations

at the time. Alistair Campbell, if I may start

with you, we have what looks like the definitive account of everything

now. I wonder whether you accept the conclusion that intelligence

evidence for WMD was not beyond doubt. Well, I actually agree with

virtually everything that was said there, but ended it is only fair to

accept that a Prime Minister does rely on the intelligence services

and it is not fair to say that none of that was challenged or tested. I

think the other thing I would say in Tony Blair's defence about the

intelligence is that he was seeing this, and developing in his own

mind, a judgment that Saddam Hussein was becoming more of a threat, not

less. It is true that a lot of that was based on the intelligence but I

think David was being fair are there in saying that yes, the intelligence

agencies were under pressure, but not under pressure to come up with

evidence that did not exist. It is fair for me to say, talking to a

programme on the BBC, that the accusations went to her than that.

They were that we falsified intelligence, and I am glad that

that has been laid to rest. Well, do you accept Chilcot, not David Omand,

finding that the evidence for WMD was not beyond doubt? I ask because

the words, not beyond doubt, was used as the foreword in the

document. Do you accept that? I accept that the intelligence

agencies did not offer the foreword to the dossier. Tony Blair did with

help from the officials. The intelligence agencies did see it. I

also think we're going over every word, and I do understand that this

is a big report, on an extra narrowly serious issue. But at the

time, let me remind you, the general media reaction, between you and your

colleagues at the time, was that there was not that much new in it.

Tony Blair was entitled to make judgments and he did make judgments

and ultimately this is what leadership at the top level is

about. He had to make judgments, and many people disagreed with that

judgment. Ultimately only he could be in that position. Chilcot think

the judgment was incorrect and the public mistook his belief that it

was beyond doubt with the intelligence services. But you have

now conceded, I think, that that was his judgment and that you can accept

Chilcot believing the judgment was wrong. Can I ask a second one? But

also, I think it is important to say that the document itself was the

work of the intelligence agencies. It was not the work of Downing

Street, it was not the work of people like me or Tony Blair. It was

Tony Blair's attempt to share with the public why he was more

concerned, because of the intelligence he was seeing. The

forward we are talking about, and I accept that the intelligence

community was responsible for the body of the report. But the second

thing, Mr Blair had been warned that military action would increase the

threat from Al-Qaeda to the UK and UK interests. That was not reported

to the public. You have today said that there was no lying or deceit,

do you at least accepted that there was a selective presentation of the

evidence, because Mr Blair did not tell us that by the way everything

he has been told, there is actually more danger from military action

than from terrorists? I think there was a live debate about that at the

time. There were people making that point in Parliament. I know of -- I

know that there were people of that opinion. But we did not know the

intelligence services was saying that was a view they shared. I mean,

we are all able to make that judgment ourselves, but we did not

know that the official advice was that. OK, but the dossier that Tony

Blair presented to Parliament was about our assessment of Saddam's

weapons on mass destruction programme. But that debate was

lively and there were people advising Tony Blair that might well

happen. Equally, as he has said today, I think one of the threats he

was most concerned about is actually the indiscriminate threat of,

regardless of whether the decay was involved, that countries would come

under attack by this virulent form of global terrorism which is real

and does exist. Let me put these points to Clare Short. You were in

the Cabinet. I want to know whether you felt deceived or whether you

ought to have known you were being deceived, because at that time you

went along with that. I went along with the view that we should get the

inspectors back in and that we should examine, and get rid of WMD,

which we believed was there, although not an imminent threat.

Chilcot says the certainty was exaggerated. That is very settled. I

supported the strategy to get inspectors back in, to try to

disarm, to get sanctions. What happened, and what's Chilcot has

said, is that the imminent threat was exaggerated, and the rush to war

was not necessary, Hans Blix was not allowed to complete his job, and we

could have taken longer to prepare afterwards. All of these things,

Chilcot has spelt it out. Did you ask to see the legal advice at any

point? Yes. I asked repeatedly about it because there was a rumour around

Whitehall that the Attorney General had said there was no legal

authority and the military had said they would not go in that case. So

you were willing to basically back a war, unclear about the legal advice?

That is not the case. Because I believed that we were going to go

for the second resolution. And I believed that what we were seeing in

the media was that there would be doubts about the authority without a

second resolution. And then at the last minute, stunningly, the

Attorney General says there is absolutely no doubt, there is

unequivocal authority for war without a second resolution. That

was surprising. He said it in a cabinet meeting. No, he read out

something that was then tabled as a Parliamentary answer. The Cabinet

was supposed to see the legal advice and that was not done. Did you have

reservations at that point? I had enormous reservations right through

but I believed in what was meant to be the strategy, which was to get

the inspectors back in, to let them complete their inspection, and as

Chilcot said, they were not allowed to complete it and was no imminent

threat. And Blix could have completed his job, he was starting

to report doubts about whether were any WMD. Ballistic missiles were

destroyed through his process, and suddenly they started to smear Hans

Blix because they were determined to go to war on the American timetable.

Were you aware that this government was dysfunctional? Yes, but there

was not a cabinet government at that time. You were there too long, in

hindsight? I'm not saying that. I am saying that I had booked my place to

make my resignation speech the same day as Robin. But then on the

reconstruction, there was the promise that we would get a UN

resolution which would have given it more legitimacy and not have been an

occupation. I stayed for that but that did not happen. So many aspects

of this to talk about. Look, the finding is that actually the UK

undermined the security council's authority while taking the guise of

being supportive of the UN protocols. As the UN ambassador,

were you aware of that being the case? It was not the case. I think

Chilcot is being too categorical. Where is the US in that statement?

We're working very closely with the US and Spain and Bulgaria. It was

not just the UK on its own. Secondly, you can say that the

authority of the Security Council is undermined whenever the permanent

five vie with each other. It is an intergovernmental process. The

security council cannot act if the members do not agree. It does a huge

amount of good when it agrees but it falls apart when they do not.

Thirdly, what was Saddam Hussein doing that undermined the authority

of the Security Council, for the 12 years up till 2003? The security

council was doing nothing about that. That judgment has to be

qualified by the other things. But Jeremy, Chilcot says we could have

taken over, there was no need to rush to war. And that is an

important point, because everything could have been properly done. It

was the inspectors who were undermined. I helped to bring the

authority of the Security Council back into play in the resolution in

May. Did you feel the government's attempts to involve the UN were

sincere? Once we got to January 2000 and three. Clearly they were sincere

in the earlier part, trying to persuade the Americans to use the UN

as a vehicle. But once it was clearly... It was saying to the

Americans, we can only come to you if we go through the UN but we now

know that Blair had said, I will be with you whatever. There is more to

it than that. The Prime Minister was genuine about it, although the

Americans were not. He thought there was a chance that Saddam could be

made to back down before we had to use military force. For a while,

George Bush agreed with them but other people behind Bush did not

agree. It was a genuine attempt by the Prime Minister to see whether

the Security Council could put such pressure on Saddam Hussein that

military force was not necessary. And we failed in that, obviously,

but he did try. You did not because there were in fact no WMD so in

fact, you succeeded. Can I come in here? Just a couple of things that

clear has said, I think it is very unfair to say about Peter Goldsmith,

the Attorney General, that he was lent on and came up with this

opinion. The reason he presented was because he went to Washington and he

had it explained to him the negotiating process. I am sure that

Jeremy was involved in the process, where the French had wanted to

insert an obligation to go back to the second resolution and have

specific go ahead and military action, should that be resisted. So

the logic of 1441 is clear. The Kaz allusion the Kaz allusion -- and I

also think that Clare is wrong to say that Tony Blair had somehow

decided what he was going to do. Read that mammal, the one that says,

I will be with you whenever. It goes on to say, pressuring George Bush to

go down the UN route, and that had considerable success of the time. At

the end, we did not meet our objectives. It is right that the

Americans did not deliver as much as we thought they would, but to land

this on Tony Blair's doorstep... I think it was the right thing to do,

to go with America, come what may, and I think that is what Tony Blair

thought. But I think we should have taken longer, and tried to pursue

the Hans Blix process and it was a big disaster.

Well, let's turn to the war and the occupation.

Now, over the years, we've had a sense as a nation

of things we do well and things we don't.

And we have tended to believe that when it comes to the military,

But today, the standing of our military takes an official knock.

Sir John is clear that service personnel showed great courage

and deserve respect, but the military in a broader sense

did not understand its limitations, was ill-equipped, and the MoD

And, the planning for the post invasion phase was every bit

Did Britain even have to send a large army to Iraq? Today's report

argues that the size of it was largely discretionary.

Immediately the military found itself struggling to control

large-scale looting and disorder. Mr Blair told the enquiry that the

difficulties encountered in Iraq after the invasion could not have

been known in advance. We do not agree that hindsight is required.

Before the war, Whitehall had made live assumptions about the UN or US

taking charge of stability and reconstruction. But instead the task

fell to Britain, which was ill-prepared for it.

Throughout 2004-2005 militias increased their hold on Basra and

those sent to keep a lid on and increasingly unstable city knew they

did not have the resources to do it. We had treble British Italians to

keep order in Basra until we could generate Iraqi and capability. --

two British Italians. I think in my time there were 13. How it was

thought we could look after Basra with that amount of resource I am

not sure. Got an audience! As the militia started using mob violence

against the British and infiltrated the police the Army's dilemma became

clear, the more it handed over to the Iraqis, the stronger the militia

grip on the city became. Could we speak to this shift commander,

please? GUNFIRE

. By the time the British launched operation Sinbad, trying to regain

control of Basra in 2006 they were too weak to prevail over the

militias. The operation ended with Buster in the hands of the militant

militia and death squads with the Iraqi security forces not able to

impose that alone and maintain the rule of law. With operations picking

up in Afghanistan, another thing the generals had pushed for, the

remaining British force in Basra and dub striking a deal with the militia

and retreating to the airport, awaiting withdrawal and attracting

the scorn of the Americans. It was in mediating that the UK reached a

position in which an agreement with a militia group -- humiliating, a

group that had been targeting UK forces actively was considered the

best option. Mindful perhaps of sacrifices made in Iraq Sir John

chose not to call it all a failure but almost everyone involved would

not claim that all those years in Basra was significant with precious

little cost and precious -- significant cost and precious little

to I'm joined now by General Sir

Mike Jackson, the head of the British Army

during the Iraq War, and by Sharon Turton,

whose husband Kris was killed Sharon, how did your husband die? He

was patrolling the province on the Iran- Iraq border, there was a

convoy from the battle group, the lead vehicle went to the back

because the detectors failed on the vehicle so that made my husband's

vehicle the lead vehicle. There was a daisy chain of eye you de-s. I

believe the first two exploded, and killed my husband instantly. And

killed a corporal. The gunner of the vehicle, only 18, was quite badly

injured, and the commander of the vehicle behind, James Jenkins, was

badly injured as well. Was equipment and issue because Chilcot does find

that we were in prepared and ill-equipped for the conflict. I

don't think the armoured vehicles supplied to the forces at the time

equipped with adequate armour. There were other vehicles out there with

better armour than British military vehicles. Was that correct, general?

We had what we had on a fairly short notice deployment. It is worth

remembering that for domestic political reasons, in the UK, will

not given the green light until Christmas or even perhaps New Year

2002. But our involvement in the war was discretionary. The Americans

would have done it without us. What was your advice? Were you telling

the politicians, we are not ready, let the Americans take this one

because we are not ready? This "Not ready", I'm going to push back a

bit. We got the green light at Christmas- New Year 2002. The

Americans would not delay beyond late March so we had this narrow

window. If the exam question was, can you get the allocated forces in

that time, the answer was a broad yes because that is what happened.

It's very interesting, all of this, that the conventional... We got

there in time but we did not have adequate equipment for all the

troops. Chilcot, you say we got there in time, Chilcot goes through

some of the shortages... We've just heard about Sharon 's husband... We

had Addicks adequate equipment that the conventional fight against

Saddam 's forces. The difficulty came in the aftermath. That is a

different story indeed. In the aftermath, you were one of those

advocating that we also went into Afghanistan. Ramped up into

Afghanistan. Chilcot is clear that we did not have the resources to

fight on both fronts. Would your job not have been to say, listen,

politicians, you are way over stretching the British forces, we

are ill-equipped in Iraq. Would that it was so simple. The commitment to

Afghanistan was a result of Nato taking over the command of the whole

operation. And, at two 2004, or thereabouts, the military presence

in Afghanistan had been, please..., Nato concluded that the military

footprint needed to go over the whole country. And there was a

timetable to do that. Did you warn the politicians? Did you say, you

are overstretching us? Or did you say, we can do it? The assumed

departure date from Iraq was 18 months later. So for 18 months, you

are quite right in this sense, we had to juggle but it was not a lack

of thinking it through, it was events. Sharon, what do you feel as

you hear this description of the mistakes, we thought we would be out

of Iraq in 18 months, two, we are overstretched and we don't have the

equipment and we are not doing it properly? I think they were

overstretched. Chilcot thinks they were. At the time I worked in a

military training camps so I saw the guys and the girls coming through,

day in, day out. Michael Jackson, did they do enough to restrain the

politicians for Britain to be a player in these wars? Honestly I do

not think I am qualified to answer that. I don't think I know enough. I

have a lot of personal opinions but I am not in a position where I have

to make these decisions. I'm not defending anybody they are in

difficult positions, but obviously, being a widow... You are at the end

of it. It is not just me and the other families, it is the guys and

girls came back injured, and physically scarred and their

experiences, what they saw as well. We will leave it there, thank you

both very much. Well, I want to turn

now to Paul Bremer, He was appointed as US

Presidential Envoy to post-invasion Iraq -

a kind of governor general. He ran the Coalition Provisional

Authority, and on his watch, A decision not to use the Iraqi

army after its defeat, and to engage in de-baathification,

purging Iraq of many people who had been running the country

and keeping it secure. Thank you for joining us. . The

de-baathification process is criticised in the Chilcot Report. Do

you accept it was too deep and too ambitious and left the country and

governable? No. I agree there was a mistake made in de-baathification.

It was not the one that the commission focused on. It's

important to remember how it came about. It was part of the prewar

planning, the one part that we got right. It was modelled on the

de-Nazification programme in Germany in 19 90 -- 1945 that more mild. We

are talking about 20,000 people. And all that and said about them was, it

could no longer have jobs in the government. -- they could not. They

were free to set at a newspaper or a radio station if they wanted to, a

business, or become farmers. The mistake I made was turning the

implementation of this narrowly drafted decree over to Iraqi

politicians, who basically used it as a form of political pressure on

their opponents. And I had to eventually... That was the mistake I

made, I should have found a better way to do it. What Chilcot says is

that the British thought it should be a much more limited

de-baathification, 5000, not 20,000. Yet the British had very little say

in this provisional authority government. They were just

informally nudging you, often ignored, and Chilcot said the

British vision was right and your vision was wrong. First of all, it

wasn't particularly my vision, it was the vision of the American

government, the decree was prepared before I was even back in

government, when I was a businessman, it was cleared by the

US government. What discussions they were with the British before the war

I don't know. I wasn't in government. I was very well served

by Abel British civil servants and ambassadors including Jeremy

Greenstock, who you just had on the show, who was one of the three

British deputies in the CPA when I was there. They had full axis to me

at all times. I know the Chilcot commission says there should have

been more formal meetings. I wonder what they were thinking, we were in

a wars, working 18 hours a day with gunfire coming in, was I supposed to

say that we need a table with the green baize cloth and we should all

wear suits and said around the table in a formal way? That is not the way

things work. Jack Straw, in his response today, the former Foreign

Secretary, he gets some criticism, and he describes the decisions made

as an extraordinary unilateral edict to disband the army and other

forces, consequence Iraq is still living with. He says that edict

blindsided key members of the US administration as well as members of

the British government, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. I

wonder if Jack Straw is not pointing a lot of the blame for the mess

afterwards at the decisions that you took them. Well, that particular

decision was approved by the President of the United States, the

secretary of defence, the joint chiefs of staff of the United

States. It was previously discussed by my national security adviser with

The Authority 's in London ten days before it was issued, he received no

objections, and John Cirencester the Chilcot commission that he raises no

objections when I briefed him, the senior British official, on the

ground. So whatever else one can say, as far as I was concerned,

where I was, it had been checked with the British government and with

the American government. And I believe it was the right decision.

Thank you very much. Thank you for talking to us this evening.

You don't need to us to tell you today, of the grim aftermath

of the war and occupation; but if we are learning lessons

from the whole experience, it is worth looking

From apparent chaos did come a surge in American troops,

But Iraq then sadly descended into sectarian division,

becoming one of the hubs of the great transnational battle

Gabriel Gatehouse has been looking at what went wrong.

The invasion in 2003 was supposed to

remove an oppressive dictator and replace him

13 years on, Iraq is a country fragmenting.

Consumed by violence and run by sectarian militias.

This is the story of how that came about.

Not Shock And Awe 2003, but July 2016, last weekend,

a busy shopping area, 250 people are dead.

Chilcot speaks of an intervention that went badly wrong,

In Baghdad this evening at the site of

the explosion people gave their reaction.

When the British Army went into Basra, they were welcomed.

In the overwhelmingly Shia south, the removal of Saddam Hussein,

who had always favoured the Sunni minority, felt like a liberation.

But in the vacuum left behind by de-baathification,

the full scale dismantling of the Iraqi state,

Shia clerics like Moqtada al-Sadr built large followings

Backed by Iran, they began to cause trouble for

In September 2005, two men were stopped at a police

They were SAS operatives dressed as Iraqi civilians.

When they flashed their military IDs there was a confrontation.

They opened fire, killing an Iraqi officer.

He told Newsnight how he and his comrade were dragged

We were taken into an outhouse at the side of the checkpoint,

slowly but surely they removed our clothes, body armour, weapons.

Mock executions, light beatings, interrogation.

And then a chief police officer came in with red lapels,

told us it was mistaken identity and they were going to take

Loaded us into four or five police 4x4s and on the way back

to where the palace was, they took a left instead of a right

and went into the police station and took us in there.

The police had been infiltrated by the militia.

The British military, powerless to get the men released,

In the aftermath, angry crowds surrounded a British

These images shocked a nation that thought it was winning

As Chilcot identified, the militia, not the British Army,

had become the dominant force in Basra.

This event was a turning point certainly in the public perception

It was the point at which many people realised that softly,

And in the ensuing battle between the British military

and the Iranian-backed Shia militias, it was the militias that

Two years later, the Brits cut a deal with the militia

From then until their official withdrawal from Iraq

the British Army was in effect confined to barracks

As Chilcot makes clear, American planning for the postinvasion phase

They faced an insurgency in the West, led by a coalition

of Al-Qaeda and Sunni tribes that soon spread to other parts of Iraq.

In 2006, a massive bombing in Samarra at one of the holiest

Shia shrines sparked a sectarian Civil War.

By the summer of that year, 100 people were

I got back to Iraq at the beginning of 2007, and every morning

there would be dead bodies found in the street.

And you could tell what sect they were by the way

whether they had been drilled through the head

There was so many dead bodies on the river,

washed up, that people stopped eating fish.

They said the fish were starting to taste differently because they

The United States deployed an extra 30,000 soldiers.

Sunni tribes joined the Americans in the fight against Al-Qaeda.

US troop deaths declined, so too did civilian killings.

Emma Sky witnessed it firsthand as advisor to General Ray Odiemo,

I really felt that the war had been won, and by 2009,

the violence in Iraq had dropped dramatically.

And everybody in Iraq thought the Civil War was behind them.

Iraqis had changed their strategic calculus.

It wasn't that all the bad guys had been killed,

it was that they had decided they could achieve what

they wanted through politics, rather than through violence.

But in the end it was politics that was to be Iraq's undoing.

In March 2010 there were parliamentary elections.

The Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and his coalition of Shia parties,

won two seats fewer than a secular coalition which had garnered support

Neither had enough seats to govern on their own.

Iran saw its chance and seized the initiative.

Behind the scenes the Americans were trying to negotiate a way out

And it was eventually Iran that managed to broker a deal that

would seek Nouri al-Maliki, their favourite candidate,

In return Nouri al-Maliki would demand a complete

So Maliki got his second term thanks to the Iranians.

When he was secure in his seat second term the first

thing he did was go after the Sunni politicians.

He accused them of terrorism and drove them out of

He says he had made to the Sunni tribes, the Sunni awakening that had

fought against Al-Qaeda in Iraq with the support of US forces, and he

arrested Sunni is en masse and in such an environment, Islamic State

was able to rise up out of the ashes of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and present

itself as the defender of the Sunnis against the Iranians backed regime

of Nouri al-Maliki. Today, Islamic State is in retreat, pushed out of

cities like Falluja by a coalition of Shia militia, and Sunni fighters

who have turned against the jihadists. They are backed by US and

British air power but on the ground, it is the divisive Shia militias

that holds sway. In the battle scarred towns, Sunni militias are

subjected to revenge attacks and as bombings last weekend showed,

Islamic State's capacity to kill remains under in. As the Americans

withdrew at the last of their trips in 2011, one man told me that Iraq

is becoming a place where other countries come to settle their

scores. Nearly five years later, that is exactly what has come to

pass. Let's finish by stepping into the

role of future historians and trying to assess what they will say. About

all of this, about Tony Blair and the humanitarian military

intervention. Joining me to discuss

the legacy of the Iraq war, how it shaped the landscape

of our politics and culture, is the novelist and commentator

Will Self, from the Financial Times, Roula Khalaf, and the MP

Rory Stewart who was senior coalition official in Iraq

between 2003 and 4. We have had a parade of people on

the programme who were involved at some level in the run-up to the war

and the conduct of it. Everyone gives a plausible sounding account

of themselves but we know the outcome was disastrous. I'm stuck

wondering whether someone ought to pay for the mistakes or whether it

is just off the difficult and we do our best and things do not always

work out. I think that is too easy. Too easy an answer. This war in

particular was a war that was unnecessary and avoidable. That is

not to say that Saddam Hussein did not deserve to be removed. But if

you are going to invade a country like Iraq, a conjugated country like

Iraq, then at the very least you need to have a plan about what you

do it after. We have heard this evening about big mistakes that were

made, de-Baathification, the dismantlement of the army, but

probably given the state of Iraq, you would have needed more than

that. Now one mistake is enough to explain it. You would have needed

total occupation. I remember covering Iraq before the fall of

Saddam and this was a country that had gone through decades of

dictatorship and ten years of the most crippling sanctions. Rory, help

us out. Should somebody be going to jail for the mistake of the Iraq war

or not? I don't think that is the correct response. The correct

response is for us as a country to be more serious and more honest

about what went wrong. I cannot you, personally being on the ground in

Iraq, the complexity that you were facing, Iranian intelligence

officers coming across the border, new Shia militias emerging that no

one had heard of, there were about 52 new Shia political parties

emerging in my province alone and almost nobody, and this was not a

question of fact, it is true we did not speak enough Arabic or know the

country well enough. We did not have enough troops. But that is only the

beginning of the problem. Within a few months it was obvious that we

should not have been there at all. We were out of our depth and the

same was true for the United States. Even the big stuff that you have

been hearing off, the surge of David Petraeus, it did not have a long

enough effect. The real conclusion is that we need to be much, much

more serious as a country. We need a total reform of the Foreign Office

and the military and our political system if we are going to get

engaged in these kind of things. Basing it on the opinion of one

person is not where you would go. Will self? The trope, punching above

our weight, on the international stage, that says it all. You should

not punch above your weight because you get knocked out, morally or

physically. Iraq was a watershed and glory and I were talking beforehand

and he was saying, what does this amount to? Why are we doing this?

And it is because we are stuck in this embolism of intent are row will

to you. We cannot move on from Iraq. We cannot move on because we will

not be serious, either about failures or about what it would mean

to be the kind of nation that believed it could have done that.

There is an interesting line in Chilcot saying that one of the

arguments for putting three brigades in, which was overstretching us, was

that there would be comment that we were not pulling our weight as we

did in Kuwait. And Chilcot also says that, and I am sure Rory will be

familiar with this, that people lobbied to go. It was perceived as,

we will be home by Christmas. And it is a bit sad, the Chilcot Report

coming out at 8000 pages, and even we you who are interested in this

will not be able to read the whole report. It been about changing the

world and making a difference. And I am afraid it is not, it is not a

rigorous or analytical and often. -- analytical enough. What worries me,

personally I think it is very good that there has been the Chilcot

Inquiry. I think it is extremely forensic and details. Hopefully this

will be kosher. But what worries me is that I feel as if the lessons of

the Iraq war have been over learned in a certain way. In our attempts

today to be so careful and so forensic about all of the

information that we have, in our attempt to over assess, what we risk

is paralysis. I compare Iraq in 2003 with Syria in the last three years.

But truly the true paralysis is in our consideration of this itself. If

Chilcot is damning about one specific thing, and I never thought

that he would be a reading of times -- war crimes trial, if Chilcot is

damaging about one thing it is the idea that they had to do this to

maintain the special relationship. Since Iraq, nobody questions the

special relationship. And you say that there is paralysis in Syria,

but what about Libya? There are other theatres that have gone

disastrously wrong. Libya is an interesting case because everyone

said, OK, Libya, it has to be very limited intervention because of

Iraq. Look at what you ended up with. Syria. We cannot intervene

because of Iraq. The shadow of Iraq permeates everything, everything

that happens. My gut instinct is that the heart of this is winning

back any kind of trust of the British public. I sense that anybody

watching this programme will think, here they are 13 years on, and it is

all the old conversations. We need to convince people, and may be

places like Bosnia and Syria where we did make a difference, and where

you can contribute. -- Bosnia and Serbia. If we are to do that again,

we need to regain trust and part of doing that is showing that we are

actually serious and really having the confidence in the British public

to believe that we have people leading us to know what they are

doing. What about only player? How will history judge him? I think they

will judge him harshly. I think what was clear from his statements today,

this is a man, and those who were out there chanting Blair lie on the

streets in 2003, not even us could deny that this is a man torn apart

by his conscience. You can see it written on his face. Whether his

conscience is made up of his own revulsion, the failure of his

hubristic ambitions, I am in no position to judge, but it does not

look good. In ten seconds, who will they remember a ruck? How will they

look back on it? Some people will look back on it as a form of

liberation that went terribly wrong. Some people will look on it as the

moment when the Sunni of the Middle East became the Sunni franchise --

became disenfranchised. Thank you very much indeed.

Perhaps the best thing you can say about government in Britain,

is that while it makes huge mistakes, it does also

have the capacity for extraordinary self examination,

of which the Chilcot Report is such a good example.

No-one to my knowledge is calling it a whitewash.

Over the next few days, there will undoubtedly be far more

to come out of it, given the length and weight of its conclusions.

Parliament will have two full days of debate next week.

We thought we might leave you with the man who resigned

from the Blair cabinet in protest at the Iraq War,

and who on can safely say would have found

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly

Namely, a credible device capable of being delivered

The longer I have served in this place, the greater

the respect I have for the good sense and the collective wisdom of

On Iraq I believe the prevailing mood of the

They do not doubt that Saddam is a brutal

dictator, but they are not persuaded he is a clear and present danger to

They want the inspections to be given a chance.

And they suspect that they are being pushed

too quickly into conflict by a US administration with an agenda of its

Above all, they are uneasy at Britain going out on a limb in a

military adventure without a broader international coalition and against

the hostility of many of our traditional allies.

I intend to join those tomorrow night who vote

It is for that reason, and that reason

alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.