Robin Cook resigns over Iraq war, March 17,2003. PA Archive/Press Association. All rights reserved. A death toll in the hundreds of thousands, an entire region catastrophically destabilised. Whichever way you look at it, the Iraq war has been the crime of the century so far. The only question mark is over the nature of the offence: was it criminal negligence or something worse? In anticipation of the publication of the government’s long-awaited Chilcot Report into the decision-making process that led to Britain’s involvement in the war, Peter Oborne has published Not the Chilcot Report, a succinct j’accuse – a mere 179 pages, all the more withering for its brevity – against Tony Blair and his duplicitous machinations in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.
In November 2000, Tony Blair told parliament: "We believe that the sanctions regime has effectively contained Saddam Hussein in the last ten years. During this time he has not attacked his neighbours, nor used chemical weapons against his own people." By early 2002 his position had shifted from containment to explicit support for regime change. In a March 2002 memo to Blair, the British Ambassador Sir David Manning records an exchange with Condoleezza Rice: "I said… that you would not budge in your support for regime change." The Bush presidency, and the bellicose atmosphere in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, had changed everything.
Regime change alone can never constitute legal grounds for the invasion of another country. In order to sell the mission to parliament and the public, Blair knew he had to link any military action to Saddam’s non-compliance with United Nations resolutions. Cue a rushed and shambolic attempt at securing UN approval for an invasion, on the spurious grounds that Saddam Hussein’s alleged failure to disarm had reactivated or ‘revived’ UN Security Council Resolution 678 – which had ended the first Gulf War in April 1991 – authorising military action against Iraq.
