The media in the UK is awash with news and commentaries about the report of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq 13 years ago on the ostensible grounds that the Iraqi president, Saddam Husain was in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). We all know that the intelligence report presented to both the American and British publics was fabricated and false. I can still see in my mind’s eye, General Colin Powell, the American Secretary of State waving a piece of paper in the UN Security Council (UNSC) in which it was allegedly stated the volume of uranium imported from the Republic of Niger and with which Saddam Husain was planning to make nuclear weapons.
A UN weapons inspection team was sent to Iraq but found no evidence. George Bush, the American president supported by Vice President Cheney, Wolfowitz, General Schwarzkopf and the defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the so-called new conservative group were determined to go to war to illegally remove a sitting head of state based on spurious grounds that Iraq was trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.
In order to make the invasion look like an international operation in consonance with the UN idea of collective security, the United States government got the unquestioning support of the British government led by Tony Blair. Public opinion in the UK was against the war.
A demonstration of about one million people converged on Hyde Park to try to prevail on the government not to join the war. Even the governing Labour Party was split down the line but the then Prime Minister Tony Blair apparently operating with the spirit of special relations withthe United States was determined to demonstrate more loyalty to the USA than to the British electorate.In actual fact, the reason for war was more personal to George Bush who felt Saddam Husain planned to kill his father.
Secondly after the 9/11 attack on the most important American institutions like the World Trade Centre in New York,the Pentagon in Washington DC, failed attempt to bomb the White House,the American government was looking for a way to demonstrate power to impress the American people. In spite of the fact that almost all the 19 members of the Al Qaida group involved in turning civilian planes into weapons of war and terrorism that killed about three thousand people in the USA were Saudis, America decided to visit their sins on hapless Iraqis. Reasons were cooked up and an assemblage of the willing was put together to support American invasion of Iraq.
It is now academic whether the decision of the British to join the invasion was as significant as the British public is now being made to think. I am personally convinced that the Americans were determined with or without Britain to go to war.
The war was a mistake no doubt about it and the consequence of the war has left the world unsafe and dangerous.
The British are now up in arms against Tony Blair for causing the deaths of 170 soldiers while not recognizing the250 thousand civilians who were incinerated through carpet bombing and the use of indiscriminate force against a legitimate government that posed no threat to the USA and Great Britain.
Iraq was destroyed. Saddam Husain and his sons and grandson and several members of the Baathist party were killed. The most stupid thing the invaders did was the dissolution of the Iraqi army and all its security forces and the promotion of Shiites to replace the Sunnis who under Saddam Husain were the dominant force in Iraq.
They may have been driven by the ideals of liberal democracy but the Middle East as it has now been realized is not the place to experiment with democracy.The consequence of the war is the destruction of the entire Middle East. The same thinking that outsiders have the right to dictate to other countries how to run their countries is still prevailing in the chancelleries of most countries in the West.
This was what led to western instigation of so-called Arab Spring the result of which was the intervention in Libya, the support for rebels in Syria, Oman,Yemen ,Tunisia even Algeria. Only Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and theEmirates were spared from western meddlesomeness. The question to ask is whether the world is safer today than in 2003 when this whole thing began. No part of the world is safe today. The recent attack on the prophet’s mosque in Medina shows that no place is safe or sacred from attack by these non-stateactors.
Our own problem in Nigeria with Boko Haram is not unconnected with the NATO intervention in Libya which led to the killing of a sitting head of state and the dispersal of a stockpile of weapons across the Sahara desert being used by Al Qaida in the Maghreb, Al Qaida in West Africa and Al Shaba in the Horn of Africa.The African Union tried to persuade NATO not to get involved in Libya but they were brushed aside. I am not proud that the Jonathan administration connived with the West in its intervention in Libya.
Intervention in Libya took place under the Obama and Cameron administrations. This is why the Cameron government understands the predicament of Tony Blair who is being threatened withprosecution by families of soldiers who died in the Iraqi war. Some are even asking that he should be dragged before the International Criminal Court in Hague in Holland.
I am afraid Tony Blair will be protected by the Anglo-Saxon establishment in the UK and the USA .The kind of public opprobrium Tony Blair is being subjected to compares sadly with the almost total acquiescence and approval for George Bush in the USA. This shows the difference between American and British politics. British politicians are more accountable to the public because of the parliamentary system in which members of cabinet are subjected to questioning during debates and question time in parliament. The American system epitomizes more the Montesquieu’s idea of separation of power and the cabinet is not directly answerable to Congress except during special hearings in Congress. Perhaps the most important thing is that the USA is a world power and not answerable to any power but itself. American deference to the UN is a matter of convenience. Of course Russia also only pays regard to the UN when its own national interest is notinvolved.
Unfortunately one of the recent tendencies in international relations is for powerful countries operating either under UN auspices and cover or even without it to take unilateral action against those they have problems with.This has led to most countries that feel threatened now to resort to nuclear armament as a deterrent as is the case with Israel, Pakistan,North Korea and clandestinely Iran. In all this, it is the poor people who suffer. One of the double standards people allege in the case of the Iraq war was that unlike post Second World War Germany and Japan, no thought was given to post conflict reconstruction in Iraq. We now have a situation in which a country with an old civilization has been destroyed and the contagion has spread to Syria with her own old civilization destroyed and the rest of the Arab world and other countries in the world living in fear of non-state terrorism whether in the garb of Islamic State (IS) or various variants of Al Qaida and theiraffiliates.
In the meantime the world has witnessed massive migration and dispersal of people not seen since the Second War. Millions of Arabs have been reduced to beggary, destitution and even prostitution. Europe has also witnessed instability as a result of massive migration causing disaffection in many countries in Europe and leading to the rise of right wing fascist parties or tendencies in France,Hungary Britain, Slovakia, TurkeyGreece, Germany and Austria that have borne the weight of these migrations. The recent BREXIT vote in Britain is directly related to the possible fear of migration from Turkey and the rest of Europe. These are difficult times. The future political development of the world is pregnant and no one knows what it will bear.
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