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Britain’s Iraq inquiry would appear to be little more than a quaint post mortem of an ugly foreign war, but for its links with an even uglier one in Afghanistan, now bleeding into its 32nd year of brutality.
Evidence heard in the early days of the Chilcot Inquiry in London has confirmed that U.S. and British forces were sent hurtling into Iraq in March 2003 on the basis of a web of crude lies spun by George W. Bush and Tony Blair.
The threat posed by Saddam Hussein was artificially conflated with that of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, despite pre-war British intelligence assessments that the two were not allies.
As well, Tony Blair’s alarmist claims about Saddam’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were overcooked distortions of evidence provided to him in the weeks prior to the invasion.
Further testimony is scheduled to be heard by the inquiry over the coming year from spy chiefs, defence officials, diplomats and politicians.
The Asian elephant in the room, of course, is Afghanistan, since the Iraq debacle bled both focus and resources from the campaign to track down and defeat the real culprits of the 9/11 terror attacks, who are now safely entrenched in a third country beyond Western reach and comprehension: Pakistan.
Even the election of a promising new U.S. president has done little to distance the world from the Bush/Blair era.
The doctrinaire, born-again duo plunged our community of nations so deeply into the quicksand of purposeless warfare that governments still feel obliged to posture and deceive, rather than get down to the task of fixing the problem of pseudo-Islamic terrorism where it lives and breathes – again, in Pakistan.
Witness the week’s events in Berlin and Ottawa.
Germany’s top soldier, a cabinet minister and a deputy minister resigned over allegations of a cover-up of civilian deaths in a September air strike, ordered by a German officer, in Afghanistan’s Kunduz province.
Canada, meanwhile, was rocked by revelations of censorship by the Harper government of a senior Canadian diplomat’s reports about the abuse of prisoners transferred by Canadian troops to Afghan authorities.
Though painful and damaging to the coalition war effort, both matters could have been dealt with and consigned to history with effective follow-up and forthright statesmanship.
Instead, officials opted for secrecy and disinformation. Now two well intentioned international parties to the Afghan war find themselves cloaked in suspicion and scandal.
What is it about our current crop of illustrious suits and uniforms, those who would be leaders? They breathe the same air as the rest of us, but still haven’t learned the first lesson of George W. Bush and Tony Blair: Stop Digging.
If a war is truly just, you shouldn’t have to lie about it. Conversely, if politicians, diplomats and generals lie about the war, they can’t be surprised when the public concludes that the conflict is unjust, futile and shameful.
Finally, this week’s revelations at the Chilcot Inquiry provide us with another lesson in failed foreign policy. The bogus nature of the case for war was transparently obvious at the time, before Bush and Blair committed so many lives, and so much treasure, to the conflagration. (Please see On The Record above.)
Today, the counter-productive strategies weighing down the U.S.-led coalition's campaign in Afghanistan are just as obvious a dead-ender as was the fraud dreamed up in Texas - and, sadly, just as unlikely to be challenged and corrected.
Just ask the Afghans, who are condemned to endure in April of 2010 the same fate dealt them in April 1978: escalating warfare.
