After four decades in the Civil Service, Sir John Chilcot is not given to strong emotions. But his Iraq report lapses into exasperation when he considers Tony Blair's failure to prepare for the invasion's aftermath. "The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate," says Sir John. He is particularly struck by the fact that Britain ended up running four provinces without so much as a "ministerial decision". Even before Sir John delivered his verdict, almost everyone who joined the Iraq debate thought they knew one thing: the failure of America and Britain to plan for life after Saddam was a central reason for the country's descent into turmoil. The first seeds of today's catastrophe were sown by the absence of a masterplan.
As someone who witnessed the looting that engulfed Baghdad after Saddam's downfall, I am not so sure. The truth may be worse: even if America and Britain had drawn up the most elaborate, skilful and lavishly funded plan in history, Iraq today would probably look much the same as it does now.
Sir John's mistake is to assume that there was a solution to the problem of how to occupy and rebuild Iraq after Saddam. He thinks that Mr Blair's government failed to find the answer because it did not look carefully enough at the problem. I think the reality is even more sobering. The whole business of two Western powers occupying and governing Iraq was doomed to fail from the outset. True enough, the situation would have been less terrible if America and Britain had possessed a proper plan. Yet the fundamental problem was not the absence of preparation, but the nature of the enterprise.
I happened to arrive in Baghdad on April 11, 2003, less than 48 hours after Saddam's statue had been pulled down. All around, thousands of Iraqis were busily engaged in pillaging their capital. The streets were thronged with looters, laden with whatever they had managed to steal. Saddam's old palaces were stripped bare – and that was understandable – but so were schools, ministries, hotels, police stations, army bases and government offices. Just about everything that Iraq needed to rebuild itself was pulled to pieces with terrifying speed.
One Iraqi friend compared the situation to the rampages of Hulagu, the Mongol warlord who destroyed Baghdad in 1258. In fairness, the thieves of Baghdad in 2003 were bent on plunder, not murder, but the city never fully recovered from that terrible period. Law and order, once lost, is almost impossible to regain. The situation was much the same elsewhere, including in Basra in the south. How could the mass looting have been stopped? Should British and American soldiers have begun their occupation by shooting unarmed thieves in the streets? If they had, the insurgency which took several months to get off the ground would probably have started immediately.
Another point that has entered conventional wisdom is the notion that the occupying powers made a grave error by dissolving Saddam's old army and purging the civil service of members of his Ba'ath party. And this is perfectly true: those decisions were indeed calamitous. But they were disastrous for a different reason from the one usually provided. The standard version holds that abolishing Saddam's army and "de-Baathifying" every ministry caused the collapse of the Iraqi state. In truth, by the time those decisions were taken the Iraqi state had collapsed anyway. Most of the soldiers in Saddam's old army melted away during the invasion in March and April. By the time the dictator was toppled his forces had largely dissolved themselves. Iraq's civil servants had also disappeared, for the simple reason that their ministries were being torn apart by looters.
The decisions to abolish the army and purge the bureaucracy made it harder to rebuild the state, but they did not cause its disintegration. Sir John betrays the mindset of a true mandarin when he laments the absence of a British "ministerial decision" to take responsibility for four provinces. Suppose there had been such a decision, preceded by an earnest Whitehall discussion and perhaps even a plan? All of a sudden, would those provinces have become governable? In reality Britain never had the power to guide events in Iraq; nor in many respects did America. Our officials and soldiers could have done everything right – and they would still have failed.
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