Mourners carry the Iraqi flag-draped coffin of a bomb victim during the funeral procession in Baghdad, Iraq, July 5, 2016. Hadi Mizban /Press Association. All rights reserved.
Did we really need 2.6 million words and 7 years of investigations to be told we should be making better decisions when we go to war? Oxford Research Group and many colleagues writing for openDemocracy were clear – as is now decidedly stated in the Chilcot report – that invasion would intensify the risks of internal strife and Al Qaeda activity in Iraq. But there was no room for critics of the war as a small sofa cabal of advisors to Tony Blair were already convinced of its efficacy.
The Chilcot report now clearly states that all peaceful options were not exhausted prior to the invasion, and it is time to learn lessons from the myriad mistakes that were made. The mechanisms and reasoning behind decisions to go to war in Iraq have been exposed, by a series of ex post facto inquiries including now the Chilcot Inquiry as well as published memoirs of political and military figures. They have all highlighted that the way decisions were made were inadequate at best, and, at worst, dangerous for UK and global security and certainly for the people of Iraq. Over the last decade the UK has been involved in three major military engagements, now characterized as ‘strategic failures’.
