The Chilcot report
on the Iraq War has rightly criticised former UK prime minister Tony Blair for
misrepresentations on a consistent basis. Blair exaggerated threat levels of
non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), backed the United States’
war plans regardless of diplomatic initiatives seeking peaceful outcomes, and
improperly equipped British troops once the occupation began. This has led to the
denunciation of the war as neo-colonial by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and
renewed calls for Blair to be charged with war crimes or crimes against peace
by others.
While Tony Blair
was pivotal in British decisionmaking that led to aggression against Iraq in
March, 2003, he was hardly alone in promoting close alliance with the United
States and the case for outright military intervention for regime change. Not
only did the then Tory opposition support war on Iraq, Conservative leader
David Cameron endorsed violent regime change. Indeed, apart from Robin Cook,
who resigned as Leader of the House of Commons in opposition to the ‘false
prospectus’ on which the Labour Government pinned its strategy, support for the
war was strong throughout the political and state elite – military,
intelligence, and other. And Iraq was hardly the first time that Britain had
hitched its war machine to the United States.
Indeed, if we place
Iraq in the sweep of post-1945 history, and in the context of a powerful
British foreign policy establishment that sprang from the imperial era and
became allied with US power elites after 1940, Blair appears as another example
of Conservative and Labour leaders’ attempts to hang on to global influence
through a one-sided ‘special relationship’ with the United States. Far from
being exceptional, as Chilcot claims, the Iraq War stands in a long line of
Anglo-American imperial violence in the global south in increasingly desperate
bids to maintain Western supremacy. We need only to think of the Korean War,
Vietnam (in which Labour leader Harold Wilson provided diplomatic and other
support to the US), the first Gulf War, and support for repressive regimes the
world over, including the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi and ensuing chaos in
Libya since 2011, to see that the Iraq war and Tony Blair are part of a broader
pattern of Anglo-American military violence. Focusing on Blair alone obscures
the bigger picture and makes impossible, by venting against one man alone, a
truly illuminating understanding of British foreign policy.
"The UK's
commitment of resources - financial, military, diplomatic - in support of US
global priorities remains unparalleled", according to a (Wiki) leaked
US state department cable. Britain, it went on, is able and willing to fight
wars in faraway lands alongside the United States and mobilising allies. This
makes Britain almost indispensable to the US. To former Conservative foreign
secretary William Hague, America was the "essential" nation to which Britain
turned. The Anglo-Saxon powers had broadly shared interests in the global order
which, after all, they had constructed during and after the Second World War –
Bretton Woods, United Nations, IMF, World Bank, Marshall Plan, NATO, among
others. While these arrangements suited the West, global poverty in the ‘Third
World’ continued apace.
The foundations of the post-1945 order were laid during
World War II. According to Cabinet papers, the key decisions were made in 1944
over whether to pursue a pro-empire or pro-American foreign policy. Choosing
the empire “will be regarded by the Americans as a Declaration of War…” at a
time when the empire itself was disintegrating and its parts leaning towards
the USA. And the USA would “certainly make economic war upon us. So much has
been made clear to us. And the armoury of the United States is a very powerful
one.” Britain signed up to the US-dominated Bretton Woods system because it
seemed the best means to preserve its global influence as its imperial power
waned.
This is why ‘socialist’ Labour leader Clement Attlee sent to
Korea thousands of British servicemen despite the military chiefs of staff
indicating that Korea was of little economic or strategic value to British
interests. The war – waged under the banner of the fledgling United Nations –
lasted three years and led to over 3 million Korean and Chinese deaths, tens of
thousands of American and British fatalities. It ended in stalemate – a
cease-fire remains in place today dividing the north from south. Using the
precise words used by Tony Blair in 2003, Attlee announced that Britain would
stand “shoulder to shoulder,” with the US; wherever the Stars and Stripes flew,
the Union Jack would be alongside it.
Two imperial powers – one in denial about its decline, the
other hubristic, inexperienced imperial masters of the universe – trying to
order the world to maintain a ‘liberal order’ through unrestrained violence –
featuring napalm and relentless aerial bombing of a rural country with
rudimentary weapons – teaching the communists a lesson, and repeating the same
thing in Vietnam a few short years later.
Decades later, not much had changed. Concluding his
unofficial enquiry into the first Gulf War, former US attorney general, Ramsay
Clark, declared the Anglo-American bombing campaign as “the most sophisticated
and violent air assault in history against a virtually defenceless people.”
Chilcot’s narrowness of vision is probably understandable –
one could hardly expect it to look at a broader pattern of history or the place
of Iraq in the world order after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But on that
basis to declare the Iraq war exceptional and therefore no source of lessons
for the future, and for the media to focus so intently on the person of Tony
Blair, pivotal though he was, is a major flaw both practically and for our
understanding of the dynamics of Anglo-American power. It renders Iraq unique,
and places blame on one man, when it is plain to see that Blair’s behaviour
fits a long historical pattern within an imperial world view that continues to
saturate the British foreign policy establishment.
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