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Iraq Inquiry

No, I must conclude. The extraordinary thing about Iraq was that it was the one country in the middle east where al-Qaeda could not go. Their respective leaders were bitter enemies. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein detested each other; they represented opposite ends of the theological spectrum in the Muslim world. The American Administration led by President Bush wanted an opportunity to show the American people that they were hitting back in what they called the war on terror. They enlisted Mr. Blair's support for that, and he dressed it up in the bogus phrase, liberal interventionism, which is in fact just an excuse for overthrowing sovereign Governments wherever we do not like them. If we were to attack every despotic ruler on that basis, the world would be in total chaos. I have no doubt that if Zimbabwe had had oil, we would have long ago thought it morally necessary to overthrow its leader. The fact is that we did not have to attack Iraq at that time, because under the no-flight zone arrangements Kurdistan was doing better than ever before, and there was no possibility of danger from Iraq. Israel is much less secure now than it was before the attack, as the war in Lebanon against Hezbollah has proved. We are responsible, jointly with America, for the death and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children. We have driven the whole of the middle class out of Iraq. Some 4 million Iraqis have lost their homes. The water supply has gone and the drainage has gone, and the health service, which was the best in the entire middle east, has been destroyed. There will be instability in the middle east for years to come. In my judgment, the attack on Iraq was the greatest strategic mistake that the west has made since our failure to crush the German militarisation of the Rhineland in 1936. The consequences of that went on for many years, and the consequences of our attack on Iraq will be felt for decades to come.