IRAQ: THE DEFINING CALAMITY OF THE POST-COLD WAR ERA

'We were with you at the first, we will stay with you to the last.'

Tony Blair

On 1 May 2003 President George W. Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, posing in flying gear on an aircraft carrier beneath a banner stating 'Mission Accomplished'.

In fairness to Bush, he was not responsible for the banner. But the image would haunt him, as it became obvious to the American people that his Iraq mission was not accomplished and never would be.

The Iraq War failed in both its immediate and its strategic objectives. Its promoters had depicted Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States and to the international world order.

In fact, Saddam's regime was little threat to any other country, was far from acquiring serious weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capacity, and was never remotely likely to supply such weapons to al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group. Al-Qaeda had no support from Saddam and no base in Saddam-controlled Iraq. His fall, however, allowed them to establish themselves in Iraq. They did not acquire WMD, because there were none to acquire, but they did acquire thousands of WDD – weapons of daily destruction – which cost thousands of lives, mostly Iraqi, but also American and British.

The Iraq War was part of an ambitious 'forward' policy in which the United States would use its power unilaterally to achieve American goals in the Middle East and throughout the world. Saddam Hussein would be replaced by a pro-American, pro-free market democracy (in a key oil producer with a major influence on the price of oil). This new Iraq would project Western values, counter the threat of Iran and underpin a new and stable order in the Middle East.

Instead, the fall of Saddam Hussein led to a long period of violent disorder. This in turn brought about the near-destruction of the Iraqi state, which escalated into a sectarian war between the country's Shia majority and a Sunni minority which felt dispossessed following the fall of Saddam. Iran, meanwhile, acquired new influence within Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Far from embracing Western values, parts of Iraq fell into the hands of terrorist groups who were even more fanatical than al-Qaeda.

Only one cause united militant Sunni and Shia opponents: a common hostility to the foreign occupier. British troops, never given the means to achieve their tasks as an occupying power, became onlookers in southern Iraq. In the summer of 2009 the majority were withdrawn, along with American combat troops, but several thousand allied troops remained as trainers and support for the Iraqi army until the final withdrawal in 2011. By that time, Britain had lost 179 soldiers in Iraq, the Americans over 4,000. Thousands more suffered permanent physical or psychological damage. The number of Iraqi casualties is beyond computation.

The war had some other unintended consequences. The neoconservatives – among whom the most eminent in the Bush administration were Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz – had sought to establish a doctrine of preventative self-defence whereby the United States would act against perceived threats on the basis of intelligence data. Instead the Iraq War gave the American people a strong aversion to preventative war and indeed any foreign intervention which involved the use of ground troops. Today, the United States and Britain prefer instead to intervene by means of air power, as in Libya, or unmanned drones, as against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. These are forms of warfare which inevitably kill innocent people, whose gains are always likely to be temporary and which give the Western powers no means of controlling events on the ground in the countries concerned. The Iraq War also discredited the intelligence services in both countries and made it harder, if not impossible, for future leaders to take their people into an intelligence-led war.

Notwithstanding its terrible aftermath, George W. Bush and Tony Blair – the two leaders who had ordered the invasion – continue to justify their decision on the basis that it dislodged Saddam Hussein, the bloodthirsty dictator of Iraq, and removed a serious threat to their nations and all the Western states.

Like the Bourbons, they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Every year that passes, it becomes clearer that the invasion of 2003 was the defining calamity of the post-Cold War era.

The scale of the disaster can be measured not only by its direct victims – American, British, and above all, Iraqi. It must also be measured in the destruction of Iraqi society and the unleashing of new threats to the world order, threats much more real than Saddam's quite ordinary weaponry. Iraq's decade of civil war has had an appalling effect on the country's many minorities, some of which had been protected under Saddam. The number of Christians in the country, for instance (Iraq contains one of the oldest Christian communities in the world), has fallen from approximately 1.5 million in 2003 to perhaps 250,000 or fewer today.

We can now see that the toppling of Saddam Hussein created a power vacuum that was swiftly filled by al-Qaeda in Iraq. Al-Qaeda in due course became the progenitor of Islamic State (IS). Although IS has drawn its mutant Islamist ideology from Saudi Arabian sources, its military and organizational strength evolved in al-Qaeda's war against US occupiers in the aftermath of 2003. Many Islamic State commanders, including its emir, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, learnt their fighting skills during the US occupation.

Spawned in Iraq, Islamic State has now spread across the Middle East and North Africa. As IS and its supporters carry out atrocities in Europe and around the globe, it has become the most feared terror threat in the world.

This book maintains that the invasion of Iraq was responsible for launching a new epoch of horror, instability and violence across the globe. It asks how and why did Britain get involved in such a mistaken enterprise.

Crucially, this was a war of choice: there was no threat to Britain worthy of the name from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

At the prime minister's private meeting on Iraq on 23 July 2002, Jack Straw was minuted as saying: 'It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.'

Despite such reservations Britain chose to support the US. We could have stood aside, as did France and...