The 6-year-in-the-making Chilcot Report into the Iraq War has been published
The inquiry commissioned by the British government into the Iraq War, covering the decision by the UK government to support the US, the preparation for the war, how the war was conducted, and how the aftermath was handled up until 2007, has been published.
The report contains 2.6 million words and is organized into 12 volumes.
In his speech at the publication ceremony, Sir John Chilcot stated that "We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort."
Opponents of the war hope that this report will allow legal action to be taken against Tony Blair, however legal experts have expressed that this will not happen.
Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader of the UK Labour Party, is expected to apologise on behalf of his party's involvement (although he personally voted against the war), while Alex Samond, former leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, may propose that Blair be impeached, which amounts to a gesture that would prevent Blair from ever taking office again.
Chilcot Report: Tony Blair Rushed Britain Into the Iraq War
The results of an inquiry about the British rush to enter the Iraq War have been released:
NPR's Lauren Frayer says that the 6,000 page report that came out of the John Chilcot led investigation, found that the Britain rushed to war before all peaceful means were exhausted. She filed this report for our Newscast unit:
Protesters yelled 'Tony Blair war criminal!' outside Britain's parliament. An investigation has concluded there was 'no imminent threat' by Saddam Hussein when Prime Minister Blair decided to invade, alongside the U.S.
It also reveals secret communications nine months before the war in which Blair told President George W. Bush, 'I will be with you whatever.' "Blair decided to invade before all the evidence was in, the report says. Families of the 179 British troops who died in Iraq are weighing lawsuits. "Blair issued a statement in his defense, saying he made the decision to go to war 'in good faith.'
Mr. Blair knew by January 2003 that Washington had decided to go to war to overthrow Mr. Hussein and accepted the American timetable for the military action by mid-March, pushing only for a second Security Council resolution that never came, 'undermining the Security Council's authority,' the report concludes.
The report is likely to underline in Britain the sense that Mr. Blair was 'Washington's poodle,' the phrase widely used by Mr. Blair's critics at the time. The report says the lessons from the British government's conduct are that 'all aspects' of military intervention 'need to be calculated, debated and challenged with the utmost rigor,' and decisions, once made, 'need to be implemented fully.'
The BBC quotes Kadhim al-Jabbouri, a man who became a symbol of Iraqi anger after swinging a sledgehammer at a bronze statue of Saddam Hussein, as saying "Saddam has gone, and we have one thousand Saddams now. It wasn't like this under Saddam. There was a system. There were ways. We didn't like him, but he was better than those people. Saddam never executed people without a reason. He was as solid as a wall. There was no corruption or looting, it was safe. You could be safe."
Also at Marketplace.
(Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Wednesday July 06 2016, @11:58PM
We had to go in and save all that precious oil; if we didn't do that, then what kind of monsters would we be, letting all that innocent oil go on being used by those evil dictators!!!
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Thursday July 07 2016, @12:06AM
It wasn't the oil, it was Dick Cheney letting no crisis go to waste by taking out a mostly-secular Sunni leader for a variety of reasons not connected to 9/11. Bob Woodward's book summarizes how Cheney almost instantly and obsessively wanted Saddam gone no matter his connections to Bin Laden or anything else. The fact is the mess of Iraq and Syria are the direct aftermath of our botched adventurism, and Trump was right that the peoples of the Middle East would have been better off with Saddam in his weakened state than the chaos American actions have sown. At least Saddam was consistent, you didn't fuck with him and he didn't kill your family. Now your entire village can be flattened for not paying homage to the right puppet government.
Blair's idiotic idealism led to the deaths of his countrymen in a place they had long left. Iraq was never a threat to the UK nor could it be, by nature of being so damn far away. Making "the world safe for democracy" always has blowback.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @02:10AM
At the time, the per-eminent neo-con think-tank/lobby-group The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) had a whitepaper on their website that literally said a "new pearl harbor" [wikipedia.org] would be necessary to catalyze the west into remaking the middle-east into a part of the american empire. 9/11 was their New Pearl Harbor and they did remake the middle-east indeed. Be careful what you wish for...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @03:03PM
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/defeat-isis-let-iraq-split [worldaffairsjournal.org]
http://www.infowars.com/isis-and-the-plan-to-balkanize-the-middle-east/ [infowars.com] (knock infowars if you want but move on to the next two links)
http://www.vox.com/a/maps-explain-crisis-iraq [vox.com] (tons of graphs)
http://muslimvillage.com/2014/08/13/56742/the-yinon-plan-greater-israel-syria-iraq-and-isis/ [muslimvillage.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @03:56PM
Clearly it took you a fair amount of time to round up those links.
Do you care if anyone actually reads them?
If you don't care, why did you post them? Was it just public dick stroking?
If you do care, why don't you bother to explain why the fuck anyone should read them?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday July 07 2016, @05:44PM
Trump was right that the peoples of the Middle East would have been better off with Saddam in his weakened state than the chaos American actions have sown.
Yeah, maybe he should've said something about it before it happened.
“Are you for invading Iraq?” Howard Stern asked him, and Trump answered, “Yeah, I guess so.” (2002) [buzzfeed.com]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday July 08 2016, @01:10AM
Saddam, idealism, Cheney... Please stop! The Chilcot Report was written 19 years ago [imdb.com]... Let's not waste our energy on bullshit.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @12:07AM
Correct. The US wanted the oil and they wanted to not stand out and thus get UK to join them, not to cooperate. The first objects that were secured were oil fields. So the objective is clear. The question is what the people of the UK gets out of this? cheap oil? reliable oil deliveries?
Iraq and other Muslim countries perhaps need a dictator to make the society work? Something for Turkey, Syria, Egypt and Libya?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Thursday July 07 2016, @12:27AM
Nooo. Not supporting the war at all, but there were good damn reasons to secure the wellheads first. Look up Red Adair, and fighting oil well fires.
Securing the oil fields first is a result of the Gulf War where Iraqi troops deliberately set fire to the fields. Once started they can be extremely difficult and dangerous to stop. You think it took 6 months to put out that single oil well fire because of general incompetence?
So they secured the oil fields first due to precedence set by that same army to destroy them when retreating/losing. Considering the massive cost of putting out the fires (in terms of lives and money), I don't exactly blame them.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 07 2016, @02:50AM
The US wanted the oil
Think about it. Iraq supposedly has proven reserves of around 140 billion barrels of "proven reserve" right now. If that oil magically teleported itself onto the oil markets and was sold at the price it would have commanded in the middle of the last decade, sure you could clear several times what the US was spending on Iraq. In the absence of such, you just don't have that much value in controlling Iraqi oil aside from stabilizing the world oil markets.
It always strikes me as bizarre that people speak of the oil, when the money the US burned on the invasion and occupation was considerably bigger. The captive revenue stream of US federal taxes is much bigger than the oil production of Iraq.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @03:00AM
You are right, during 2002 a barrel of oil averaged about $25 in 2015 dollars. [inflationdata.com]
But you are also wrong in that the cost of the invasion was born by taxpayers while the profits of any oil extraction would go to the corporations who have lobbyists to convince to do things like invade.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 07 2016, @04:40AM
while the profits of any oil extraction would go to the corporations who have lobbyists to convince to do things like invade.
And considerably higher profits were to be had from war profiteering which including considerable oil extraction but which went well beyond just that.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday July 07 2016, @10:00AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by dak664 on Thursday July 07 2016, @04:14PM
Immigrants.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday July 07 2016, @12:13AM
Yeah, sure... they'll confiscate the bullocks pulling his bicycle.
That will make Blair very unhappy, which is punishment enough for selling his country to Bush&co.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday July 07 2016, @12:13AM
I find it a bit odd that in the UK there's quite a strong movement to have Blair impeached but in the US there seems to be no appetite at all to impeach Bush (or any of the others involved).
I wonder why that is?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @12:20AM
Or treated long term memory in the US. I am not sure which.
Put simply the US, whether due to media, politicians, or puppetmasters is quickly made to forget past transgressions until it is politically, legally, or financially beneficial to shine the spotlight on them once again. For the rich and powerful of this country it is just a circlejerk of one upsmanship, downsmanship, and leveraging things for yourself and your cronies^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HGod and Country.
Quite frankly given the Panopticon attitude taking place in the UK I am not sure there is that much practical difference in governance between there and here however.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 07 2016, @12:28AM
Well, the Labour party seems to have become more liberal, there are more parties in the UK so there is less of a good vs. evil mentality shit show as we have with Dems vs Reps, and there have already been fall guys for the war over here, like Colin Powell. I've also never heard of a former leader in the U.S. being impeached. I do remember (circa 2008) that Obama/DNC quickly quashed any notion that former Bush administration officials would be prosecuted. That could be another failure of the two-party system; the two parties are so mainstream that neither can afford to rock the boat much by listening to their extreme wings, and administrations from both parties are likely to commit some of the same types of crimes anyway (war crimes, warrantless surveillance).
A lot of the same reasons apply for potential war crimes prosecutions, as well as the fact that the U.S. hasn't signed on to the same treaties like the Rome Statute [wikipedia.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @02:01AM
The logic is basically that once that door is opened, it will be regularly used as a political weapon. Hard to say how true that is. Clinton was impeached for lying about a blow-job instead of something substantial which was a real low point in american politics and nobody has been impeached since (maybe because it was such an invalid use of impeachment). So impeachment of a sitting president might not be a valid analogy for a war-crimes prosecution of a former president.
Plus the bar would be pretty high. The results of his actions are a clusterfuck obvious to all but the most partisan. But his intentions are a lot more grey. The more I learn of the bush presidency the more I believe it was a perfect storm of lack of wisdom and failure of imagination and not anything close to a conspiracy. Even if we made an example out of him, it is unlikely the lesson would be learned by the next fool in office because fools don't know when they are being foolish.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 07 2016, @01:45PM
There is really no bar higher than starting an unnecessary war, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and destabilizing an entire region. If that's not an impeachable, prosecutable offense, then nothing is.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @02:49PM
Name one president, prime-minister, or equivalent that was impeached for starting a war.
Even banana republic cases where the reason was just a pretext for political machination.
I bet you can't.
In the US's case he did not go to war alone. While the president pushed for it, he had the authorization of congress. If you impeach him you gotta take out everybody who voted for it too.
Ultimately your argument is intellectually empty, you are just righteous and reaching for any handy stone to throw. That's great and all, but don't think its anything more well informed than a drunk argument at a bar.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @09:46PM
Name one president, prime-minister, or equivalent that was impeached for starting a war.
Rudolf Hess? Franz von Papen? Albert Speer? Hermann Göring? Some others avoided impeachment by taking the coward's way out.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 07 2016, @10:36PM
"Intellectually empty?" No, it is your argument that is morally bankrupt. If you can excuse gratuitous mass murder, then nothing else you might say, no word that passes your lips, has any meaning at all.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Thursday July 07 2016, @12:34AM
For nearly a century or more former US Presidents are functionally "retired" here even if they give speeches, they're no longer as involved as the self-important man Envoy Blair has become. Thus any censuring would be a waste of political capital.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @09:42AM
I don't think Blair is important. Wasn't Ginger Spice a UN envoy?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @01:17AM
Initially there was (from the left and disenfranchised), but with the election of Obama, it's harder to justify when the policies never changed. You essentially have both major parties guilty and not enough political clout from outside the establishment for it to gain any traction.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday July 07 2016, @02:25AM
In June 2008, Dennis Kucinich and Robert Wexler introduced 35 articles of impeachment against Bush in the Congress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_impeach_George_W._Bush [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday July 07 2016, @03:06AM
It didn't take that long for Kucinich to be forced out of politics by a little redistricting. Wexler doesn't seem to have been forced out; he resigned voluntarily to take another job.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @03:44AM
John Ashe didn't fare so well.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @12:27AM
In this case, it should have been the first action. Completely obliterate the entire region.
if we had done that, we wouldn't be dealing with these damned terrorists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @01:16AM
Irony is knocking, can you hear it?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday July 07 2016, @10:05AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @12:28AM
If you want to send people like Blair, Bush, Obama, and Clinton to jail then you'll just have to wait for them to do something really, really bad. Like leave a ten year old kid in the car while they run inside for five minutes to pick up their dry cleaning.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 07 2016, @01:49PM
When I was a kid we had a joke, "These things are make-believe: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and a smart North Dakotan (we made fun of North Dakota)." As an adult I'd have to amend that to read, "...and the Rule of Law."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 07 2016, @12:40AM
The scare tactics used to convince the US population that war was "necessary" included the idea that Hussein had nuclear weapons, and that he could deploy them in about 40 minutes.
A simple who's who search prior to the war showed that Hussein no longer had a nuclear weapons program. All his scientists were scattered around half the world. Many were in academia, others working in "innocent" research, while yet others were entirely outside of the nuclear weapons world.
Without any security clearances at all, one could locate almost every member of Iraq's nuclear weapons program. Unless one supposes that some uneducated military personnel took over everything, no one could believe that Hussein had an ongoing nuclear weapons program.
The rest of his WMD? Well, Hussein lacked the dehydration techniques necessary to give his weapons an extended shelf life. Again, prior to the invasion, knowledgable people were saying that any bio or chem weapons found would be deteriorated to the point of uselessness. Idiots in government responded with the idea of mobile chemical weapon laboratories.
The war was never justified by the reasons offered. The invasion of Iraq was an adventure, plain and simple. There was no necessity.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 07 2016, @04:46AM
The scare tactics used to convince the US population that war was "necessary" included the idea that Hussein had nuclear weapons, and that he could deploy them in about 40 minutes.
No, it was that Hussein had chemical weapons and that he had drones and missiles for deploying those chemical weapons. If he had nuclear weapons (or even a credible threat that the US was willing to acknowledge in public), that probably would have prevented the invasion or at least given it a relatively high likelihood that nuclear weapons would be used during the course of the invasion.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 07 2016, @02:24PM
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/here-are-50-despicable-things-george-w-bush-did-before-and-after-911/ [rawstory.com]
“We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” he said.
I'm looking for the actual speech - haven't found it yet . . . .
http://edition.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/07/bush.transcript/ [cnn.com]
Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
I listened to Bush give one speech in which he turned up the scare tactics. His thing was, Hussein could launch a nuclear missile in 40 minutes. That speech marked the height of Bush's paranoid fear mongering, and it went hand-in-hand with those forged yellow-cake documents. The Brits were stroking American fears, and we were stroking theirs. The two "intelligence" communities knew better, but Bush and Blair had that mutual masturbation thing going on, and cameras were on them - NOT on the intelligence people.
It seems that virtually everybody in the world has forgotten about Bush's claims of nuclear capabiility.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 07 2016, @08:48PM
It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.
So no claim that Iraq had nuclear weapons at the time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday July 07 2016, @10:07AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 07 2016, @02:26PM
It seems that I heard something about that, at some point, but I don't remember very clearly exactly what I heard. And, of course, I certainly didn't document anything - it's all there on the internet somewhere, if you know how to search for it.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday July 08 2016, @01:21AM
There was no necessity.
All these pet theories are nice and all, but I'm sure Mr. Murdoch would disagree. The only person that can settle the mystery of why the war happened is Maury Povich. We are talking about sociopaths here, and they are that crazy.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Thursday July 07 2016, @02:39AM
video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BIlQzvx3SY [youtube.com]
transcript:
http://www.thenational.scot/news/tony-blair-responds-to-the-chilcot-report.19669 [thenational.scot]
(these don't include the questions afterward)
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @02:58AM
Saddam was a very bad guy, but Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were much worse. Bin Laden had just pulled off 9/11. It was obvious, even to a layperson and before the war, that Saddam and Al Qaeda were sworn enemies.
Cheney saw Iraq and its oil reserves as a bank account for himself, his company (Halliburton), and his country (USA). If I had to guess I'd say it was his idea.
Bush, who dodged the draft in his youth and never accomplished much as an adult that didn't involve his father's connections, wanted to prove himself as "the Wartime President" (his words).
Fox News, led by clowns like Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and the late Tony Snow, were relentless cheerleaders for the Iraq War and for evidence of Saddam's WMD. Their message was that America absolutely had to do this, and anyone who didn't think so was either a coward or a collaborator with the enemy. Day after day, night after night, month after month. Did they ever apologize? Are you kidding?
Practically all the Republicans in Washington were fully on board.
Hillary Clinton saw the chance to buff up her credentials as being tough on defense and America's enemies, and she took it.
Joe Biden was... I don't know what happened to Joe. It wasn't a good moment for him. He's great at some things, mediocre or worse at other things.
Donald Trump told Howard Stern was for it, but later decided that nobody had recorded that interview so he bragged during a GOP debate that he was the only one up on state with the foresight to oppose it. A very typical Donald Trump moment, that completely describes everything he's about. A lying, no-class shithead.
I have no idea what Tony Blair saw or was thinking.
Barack Obama saw what most of us living in America's big cities saw, that it was a train wreck in the making and had to be stopped. I personally remember people who didn't know each other spontaneously discussing the upcoming war, and there was something approaching panic at Bush's arrogance and stupidity. Saddam had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, in fact he was one of their significant enemies. To his credit, Obama didn't hedge his bets by being lukewarm instead of gung ho; instead he warned that the entire undertaking would be a disaster. The primary voters remembered that five years later.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 07 2016, @03:30AM
Time for a DNA test on Murdoch's kids
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @06:24AM
At the end of WWII, the Brits wanted to take all the Nazis out back and just shoot 'em. The Americans insisted on the Nurenberg Tribunals, to establish international precedent that aggressive use of force against other nations was not just the crime of war, but a crime against humanity. Blair is a war criminal under that definition. So are all the top military (just following orders, like good Germans!) and political (Sen. Clinton?) figures who abetted a discretionary war of aggression against another member of the United Nations. This is under the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, and individual acts under the International Criminal Court. No wonder the UK chose to pull out of the EU just before the release of this report? And no wonder Dick Cheney is still alive, taunting the international community and Wyominites to actually come after him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @08:57PM
It's a pity the yanks didn't insist on joining the war in 1939.