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Report offers new chance to learn lessons of Iraq War
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SEVEN years, 12 volumes of evidence, findings, and conclusions, and one executive summary later, the Report of the Iraq Inquiry, more commonly referred to as the Chilcot Report (after its chairman, Sir John Chilcot), is available for one and all to read.
Few people will get through all of it; the executive summary alone (well over 100 pages) is so long that it calls for its own executive summary.
But it would be a shame if the Report were not widely read and, more important, studied, because it contains some useful insights into how diplomacy operates, how policy is made, and how decisions are taken. It also reminds us of the centrality of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, and of the aftermath, for understanding today’s Middle East.
A central theme of the Report is that the Iraq War did not have to happen, and certainly not when it did.
The decision to go to war was partly based on faulty intelligence. Iraq constituted at most a gathering threat, not an imminent one. Alternatives to using military force were barely explored. Diplomacy was rushed.
Making matters worse was that the war was undertaken without sufficient planning and preparation for what would come after.
As the Report rightly points out, many in both the US and British governments predicted that chaos could emerge if Saddam’s iron grip were removed. Iraq was not just a war of choice; it was an ill-advised and poorly executed policy.
Many lessons should be taken from the Iraq War. One is that, because assumptions fundamentally affect what analysts tend to see when they look at intelligence, flawed assumptions can lead to dangerously flawed policies.
Nearly everyone assumed that Saddam’s non-compliance with United Nations inspectors stemmed from the fact that he was hiding weapons of mass destruction. In fact, he was hiding the fact he did not have such weapons.
Likewise, before they started the war, many policymakers believed that democracy would emerge quickly once Saddam was gone. Ensuring that such fundamental and consequential assumptions are tested by “red teams” — those not supporting the associated policy — should be standard operating procedure.
There is also the reality that removing governments, as difficult as that can be, is not nearly as difficult as creating the security that a new government needs to consolidate its authority and earn legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Creating anything like a democracy in a society lacking many of its most basic prerequisites is a task of decades, not months.
The Iraq War was costly enough without people learning the wrong lessons from it. That would be the ultimate irony — and only add to the tragedy.
Richard N. Haass is President of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2016. www.project-syndicate.org. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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