An hour reading social media on Ukraine will show you that we are still walking in the shadow of the war in Iraq.
One of that war’s consequences is that, for a large constituency both within and beyond the West, Western media and policy establishments simply can’t be trusted. They remember the dodgy dossier, the biological weapons ready in 45 minutes, and Colin Powell’s speech to the UN. When these untruths came out, they created fertile ground for the cynical, trust-nothing attitude that the Kremlin’s media strategy promotes.
Another consequence is that Europe and the US are now divided. Europeans, including Brits, just don’t trust America as the leader of the free world. Over the past decade, Americans have repaid that mistrust with their own disengagement. Iraq sowed the seeds of that division, too.
Tony Blair was a highly moralistic politician, but his morality was one of mission. He had to bring the nation with him, come what may, and his weapons included an unscrupulous and highly professional media operation, which seemed to work wonders in the very different information environment of the 2000s. Ironically, Blair’s deepest motivation, when he fell in with George W. Bush’s invasion, was to keep the Atlantic alliance together:
I believed then, as I do now, that the US could not afford to lose this battle, that our job as an ally who faced a common threat should be to be with them in their hour of need.… in the new world taking shape around us, Britain and Europe were going to face a much more uncertain future without America. As the defeat of Communism showed… our alliance with the US mattered…. So when they had need of us, were we really going to refuse… I reflected and felt the weight of an alliance and its history, not oppressively but insistently… a call to be at their side, not distant from it, when they felt imperilled.
But the result of this unpopular war was to drive us apart. The first fruit came when Assad used chemical weapons on his people. We now all remember that Obama backed off his red line, but we forget that in 2013, David Cameron lost a House of Commons vote on military action against Syria, after a debate in which Iraq naturally loomed large. Putin surely drew lessons from that. If the West had stood united against Syria then, we might not be watching refugees flow into Poland now.
These failures share a common root: clever people acting dishonestly in pursuit of what they think is a vital cause.
The spinners of the US and UK governments might have read Churchill’s remark that in war, truth is so precious that it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. But in Iraq there was no truth to protect. The mission was salesmanship to the core. The PR exercise in Iraq burned the West’s reputational capital. It has still not recovered. Perhaps the openness of the US intelligence strategy in Ukraine shows the start of a change.
Tony Blair took Britain into a wrong war in the pursuit of grand strategy. This backfired. The results remain to be thrown in our teeth by the world’s thugs and their lackeys. “Invading Ukraine is bad? What about Iraq?”
One surprise, if you read Churchill’s history of the World War, is his idealism. His attacks on appeasement were based in a deep appreciation of the blessings of peace. He was also clear about the long-run value of uprightness:
In life the only wise course is to follow the course of duty and not of interest. Every man knows what his duty is. But it is not given to many to know their true interest.
Honesty is the best policy. It’s trite, but in Iraq, our political class forgot it, and since then we have been paying for their short-sightedness.
While I agree when it comes to the relevance of the Iraq war and how it relates to today, I strongly disagree to your insinuation that in its dishonesty and lies it historically somewhat stood out. It may have been unique in that already at the time the reasons for war were based on obvious lies. Hans Blix and his team’s investigations convincingly exposed the lies at what they were, and millions of people saw that and went to the streets against the war. I also think we need to be careful not to prejudge everyone who is pointing to the Iraq disaster now, to be a Putin apologist. I find it unbearable to see people condemning the “invasion of a sovereign country” now, who did not have the slightest of issue with it in 2003.