Chilcot report

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Tony Blair and George W. Bush on July 28, 2006

The Chilcot Report is named after Sir John Chilcot , Chairman of the Commission of Inquiry . The report, which is usually referred to as the “Chilcot Inquiry” or “Iraq Inquiry”, presents the results of a public British investigation into the country's role in the Iraq war . The public justification for entering the war is also analyzed. The commission was convened in 2009 by Prime Minister Gordon Brown (Labor). The report was published on July 6, 2016 with an official executive summary and prior public statement by Chilcot on the committee's website, "Iraq Inquiry".

presentation

The report was made public on July 6, 2016, thirteen years after the war began and a good seven years after the investigation was initiated. The main results of the investigation, which are justified in the report, are,

  • that Saddam Hussein did not pose an imminent threat to Britain at the time of the invasion.
  • that information from the intelligence services regarding weapons of mass destruction was presented without due certainty.
  • that the tried and tested containment had not been exhausted as an alternative to war.
  • that Britain, along with the US, had undermined the authority of the UN Security Council.
  • that the procedures to secure the legal justification for the deployment were "far from being satisfactory".
  • that the war in 2003 would not have achieved its goals.
  • The committee declared that it was unable to make a legal assessment; only a court could do this.

The report was made available under an “Open Government License”.

Beginnings

Gordon Brown had initially announced the investigation as a parliamentary investigation ( in-camera procedure ) with exclusion of the media and the public. However, the decision was later assigned to Sir John Chilcot as investigator. He said that "it is essential to hold as many trials as possible in public". In July 2009, when the investigation began, it was announced that the committee would have the power to request any document and to question any British citizen as a witness. A week before the hearing of the witnesses began, a number of the documents, including military reports, were leaked to a newspaper indicating that there had been flaws in post-war planning.

history

The investigation was carried out by a committee of Privy Counselors . With the consideration of British involvement in Iraq from 2001 to 2009, the scope was broad: The origins of the conflict were examined, as well as the military actions and the events that followed the military victory.

The aim was to determine how decisions were made, what actually happened and what lessons could be learned so that the government could act in the most effective manner and in the best interests of the country in similar situations in the future.

The public meetings of the Commission of Inquiry began on November 24, 2009 and completed their work on February 2, 2011.

In 2012, the government vetoed the submission of documents containing details of the minutes of cabinet meetings from the days shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the committee. In parallel with this measure, the Foreign Office successfully sued a judicial decision and blocked the publication of a conversation between George W. Bush and Tony Blair that they had had a few days before the invasion. The government justified the secrecy on the grounds that the publication posed a "considerable threat" to relations between the United States and Great Britain . The detailed report was originally due to be released to the public by 2014, but delays occurred due to the difficult negotiations with the US over the publication of the documents.

The Lord-in-Waiting Lord Wallace of Saltaire said in favor of the government attitude that it was "inappropriate" to publish the report in the run-up to the 2015 elections. In August 2015, another postponement of the publication was announced, this could possibly only take place in 2016. The reason for the renewed postponement was the so-called "maxwellization", which allowed anyone attacked in a public report to comment on the draft text before it was completed and published. Chilcot wrote a letter to David Cameron in October 2015 announcing that the report could be completed by April 2016. He also promised the release for June or July 2016.

Committee members

The members of the committee of inquiry were selected by Gordon Brown. These included:

Margaret Aldred took on secretarial services.

Adviser to the committee

negotiations

According to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's appointment on June 15, 2009 , the deliberations were to take place in camera. This decision was overturned after criticism from the media and the House of Commons .

The investigation began in July 2009, the public hearings on November 24, 2009, with Peter Ricketts, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee at the time of the invasion, as the first witness. At the opening of the sessions, Sir John Chilcot announced that the investigation was not looking for culprits but "wanted to get to the bottom of the matter that had happened". But one would also not “shrink” from criticizing if this was justified. The committee resumed its hearings in January 2011. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was the first to witness.

The minutes of October 29th

On October 29, 2009, in agreement with the committee, the government published a protocol on the handling of sensitive written and electronic data. No evidence that is likely to violate any of the following principles should be disclosed to the public:

  • a) Protection of the public interest according to the rules of court hearings in England and Wales, including but not limited to the following cases:
    • i) Protection of national security and everything in the interests of national defense or international relations
    • ii) Protecting the economic interests of the UK or part of the UK
  • b) Defense against endangering the life of an individual or serious harm;
  • c) Protection of sensitive commercial data
  • d) protection of the principles of confidentiality ;
  • e) Protection of the position of the government from prejudicial information in ongoing proceedings
  • f) Compliance with the legal provisions governing proceedings in England and Wales under Section 17 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 .
  • g) Compliance with the legal provisions on the disclosure of information of the secret service of the SIS or GCHQ and the tripartite rule, which regulates the non-publication of secret service material, or other obligations and agreements for the protection of sensitive information;
  • h) Compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998
  • i) Protection from influencing the course or outcome of an ongoing legal or criminal investigation related to the materials to be published.

Witnesses

The committee took testimony from politicians, including cabinet members, senior administrators, judges and heads of intelligence, diplomats, mostly British ambassadors to the United States and Iraq, as well as high-ranking officers, including former heads of the Joint Chiefs of Staff such as the Defense Staff, and military chiefs of operations.

Key witnesses were Key Sir Christopher Meyer, former Ambassador to the United States; Admiral Lord Boyce , former Chief of the Defense Staff ; Sir John Scarlett , Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service ; Major-General Tim Cross , the highest ranking British officer in the area after the invasion. Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, the chief of command of the British Forces during the invasion.

Tony Blair was interviewed publicly for the first time on January 29, 2010, and then again on January 21, 2011. Each time there were protests outside the conference center. Because of the great public interest, access to the hearings had to be decided by lottery. Special permission was granted to the relatives of the war victims, some of whom Blair shouted furiously when he appeared before the committee for the second time.

After January 2010, it was mainly politicians and government officials that were heard, including Alastair Campbell , Tony Blair's communications director. On February 2, 2010, former Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short , appeared on the witness stand. She repeatedly criticized Blair, Public Prosecutor Peter Goldsmith and other government officials for the government's attempt to gain parliamentary approval for the invasion of Iraq, which they perceived as a deception of parliamentarians.

Gordon Brown had to withdraw his statement that military spending increased every year during the Iraq war, as this assessment was found to be inaccurate.

After the break due to the British general election , the committee resumed its work on June 29, 2010. The first to witness was Douglas Brand, principal police advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior from 2003 to 2005.

The last public witness was former Secretary of State Jack Straw (2001-2006) on February 2, 2011 .

publication

The final report was published on July 6, 2016. With 2.6 million words in 12 volumes, plus an official executive summary , a printed copy cost £ 767. Family members affected by deaths in the war received a free copy. The report was published online and can be viewed free of charge.

The report was published under Open Government License 3.0, although that license excludes the publication of material from third party sources.

Results

The report - described by BBC News as a "damning", by The Guardian as a "crushing verdict" and by The Telegraph as "scathing" - contains a generally critical judgment of the actions of the government and the military in all areas of the investigation, i.e. with regard to political decisions in the period before the war, the military implementation and the lack of planning for the period after the war in the there were uprisings shortly after the military victory . The Guardian's Richard Norton-Taylor wrote that the report, which could hardly contain a stronger condemnation verdict on Blair, was an unprecedented scathing indictment of the way a prime minister was allowed to make decisions that made him even appear to have been Avoided cabinet-led policies that undermined intelligence work and made exaggerated claims about the threat to Britain's national security. (“… Was an unprecedented, devastating indictment of how a prime minister was allowed to make decisions by discarding all pretence at cabinet government, subverting the intelligence agencies, and making exaggerated claims about threats to Britain's national security”).

Lack of reasons for war

The report found that in the pre-war era, not all peaceful diplomatic means had been used to prevent instability and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction . The war was therefore not a “last resort”. Intervention might have been necessary later, but in 2003 Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat. The majority of the United Nations Security Council had supported the continuation of weapons inspection and surveillance.

The report does not question Blair's personal belief in the cause of war, only the manner in which he presented the evidence. The report acquits the government administration of the allegation of tampering with the Iraq dossier (the "Dodgy Dossier"), which alleged Iraq had the ability to use weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. Instead, the committee saw responsibility for the weak evidence with the Joint Intelligence Committee.

In particular, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI6), Sir Richard Dearlove , was portrayed as responsible. He had presented Blair directly with the so-called “hot” intelligence about the alleged weapons of mass destruction, which allegedly came from an Iraqi with “phenomenal access” to high ranks of the Iraqi government. This Iraqi would later become known under the code name " Curveball " in the 2016 International Emmy Awards-winning documentary "War of Lies - Curveball and the Iraq War". The truthfulness of the documents was not initially confirmed by the secret service. The members of the committee concluded that references to these intelligence communications in government reports were presented with an inappropriately high degree of certainty that uncertainties and subtleties had not been adequately emphasized. The Iraqi government informant later turned out to be a liar. The report states that Dearlove's “personal intervention” and his presentation of the urgency added weight to the as yet unconfirmed safety report. In this way, the security report had influenced the perception of the situation by ministers and senior government officials. On July 7, 2016, Tony Blair admitted that he should have questioned the intelligence reports before relying on their accounts to justify military intervention.

Some of the MI6 staff had voiced their own concerns about the quality of the source - in particular, it had been discovered that an incorrect detail about the storage of chemical weapons in glass containers appeared to have been taken from Michael Bay's film The Rock of the Decision . Doubts about the credibility of the source had also been conveyed. Unimpressed, however, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw asked MI6 to use this source to provide a powerful intelligence material (“silver bullet intelligence”).

Insufficient legal basis

The committee did not deal with the legality question of military actions in general and in particular, since this was the task of a court, but only criticized the government's procedure for establishing certainty about the legal basis. She assessed this approach as far from satisfactory (“far from satisfactory”). Lord Goldsmith , the attorney general, should have given a written report to the cabinet, instead he was asked to explain his reasons orally without extensive questioning. He had not explained what the basis for the decision was whether Iraq had violated United Nations resolution 1441 . Goldsmith's advice had changed over time. In January 2003 he considered a second resolution necessary, in March 2003 he declared resolution 1441 to be sufficient. The Chilcot Report describes the pressure Blair's government office put on Goldsmith to change his mind. By eventually entering the war without a UN resolution , the UK "undermined the authority of the Security Council".

The UK overestimated its influence on US decisions

The committee notes that Blair tried to convince Bush of the need for support from the UN, European allies, and the Arab states. He had "overestimated his ability to influence the decisions of the USA regarding Iraq". Blair is personally accused in the report of being too conciliatory with the US: "Despite concerns about the state of the US's planning, he did not make an agreement for satisfactory post-war planning a condition for British participation in military action." The report draws attention to Blair's sentence in a private communication to Bush: “I will be with you whatever happens”. Contrary to Blair's assertion, Chilcot found that the “Special Relationship” does not mean an unquestionable correspondence between the United States and the United Kingdom. The report presents several previous occasions in which one country entered a war without the other, without causing long-term damage to diplomatic relations. These included the Vietnam War and the Falklands War .

War preparation and planning were "completely inadequate"

The report assessed the planning for the post-war period as "completely inadequate". In addition, the Ministry of Defense (MoD) did not provide the troops with adequate equipment or deployment plans.

The ministers were not aware of any post-war strategy.

Initial planning assumed an attack in the north, but Turkey refused to cross its border. The plans therefore had to be completely changed, which resulted in too little time to assess the dangers or to prepare the brigades.

Soldiers were left without the necessary equipment, there is also a lack of supplies for helicopters, armored vehicles and equipment such as reconnaissance equipment. In addition, the MoD has been very slow in responding to the threat posed by unconventional explosive devices (IEDs).

Despite the concerns expressed by the military personnel, these were not taken into account in the planning. Risks such as the emergence of internal conflicts in Iraq, the Iranian influence, regional destabilization, and the interference of Al Quaeda had already been explicitly identified before the invasion. A feasibility mania (“can-do” attitude) among the military leaders had led them to downplay possible dangers and setbacks in their official communications.

The report also particularly describes the incidents in Basra . It was "humiliating" that British forces had to make a deal with the insurgents there in order to put an end to attacks on British troops.

The military actions did not lead to the goal

According to the report, the objectives of the military actions were not achieved, and the resulting Iraqi resistance destabilized Baghdad and southeastern Iraq in a short time after the invasion.

At the same time, the UK has been involved in the war in Afghanistan since 2001 . According to the report, military commanders had the impression that there was greater potential for success. As a result, the forces and equipment as well as the attention of commanders were later increasingly directed to Afghanistan and away from Iraq, which increased the troops' difficulties in Iraq.

Statements by those concerned and political comments

In a statement to Parliament the evening after the report was released, then Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron declined to answer the question of whether the war was a mistake. He dismissed calls for the Conservative Party to apologize for its role in the road to war. He saw no particular point in repeating all the arguments of the day; instead, one should concentrate on learning the lesson from what happened and avoiding future mistakes.

On the same day, US Home Office spokesman John Kirby said in the daily White House press release that the US would not comment on the report. Journalists should address their questions directly to the UK, as the US is now more focused on the current challenges in Iraq and Syria than on a decision 13 years earlier.

Jeremy Corbyn , opposition leader and leader of the Labor Party, who voted against the military operation, said in a speech in Westminster that he apologized on behalf of his party for the devastating decision he called an act of military aggression. This act was undertaken under a false pretext, which has long been considered illegal by the overwhelming weight of international opinion. In particular, Corbyn apologized to the victims of the war, the Iraqi people, the relatives of British soldiers who died or were wounded in Iraq, and the millions of British citizens who feel that “our democracy is through the way the decision to go to war is made was accepted, defamed and undermined ”.

Alex Salmond said on behalf of the Scottish National Party that after such a "carnage" people would inevitably ask the inevitable questions of whether the war was necessary and worth it. Chilcot's answer to this question is an unequivocal no. The person in charge is Tony Blair. It must be considered which political or legal steps are appropriate for those responsible.

Tony Blair acknowledged that the report contained real and substantial criticism of the preparation, planning, implementation and relationship of the UK with the US. However, he cited sections of the report that he believed would invalidate the allegations of dishonesty, lies or deception. “Whether people agree or disagree with my decision to take military action against Saddam Hussein, I met them in good faith and, in my opinion, the best interest of the country…. I am fully responsible for all errors with no exception or excuse. At the same time, I would like to say that I still believe that it was better to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and why I do not believe that this is the cause of the terrorism that we find today, neither in the Middle East nor anywhere else in the world ".

Following the release of the report , former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said the war was illegal.

English language press

Commentators in the English-language press were divided on the extent to which the report showed that Blair had actually lied and that Parliament had deliberately misled. NBC News said the report just avoided saying Blair lied. Chief Financial Times commentator Philip Stephens said Blair's "sin was one of certitude rather than deception". Eli Lake, who works there, wrote at Bloomberg View that the report proves that Blair "did not lie his way into the Iraq war". Corbyn said in parliament that MPs who voted for the war had been misled by "a small number of government leaders" who "did not act scrupulously to advance their interest in the war". Caroline Lucas , MP for the UK Green Party, claimed that the contradictions between Bush’s public statements and his private notes demonstrated that Blair “lied” about whether the war could have been avoided. Philippe Sands said that the report was deliberately withheld, but that the factual evidence was compiled in such a way that it could be inferred from lies, deception or manipulation.

criticism

The timing and nature of the investigation - and in particular the fact that the committee did not want to publish its report before the end of the 2010 British general election - sparked political controversy. The chairman of the Conservative Party , David Cameron , disqualified the report as an attempt to bring the government into trouble ( "on establishment stitch-up"), the Liberal Democrats threatened to boycott the committee on the disability of his work. In a parliamentary debate on the establishment of the committee, MPs from all major parties criticized the government's selection of members. MPs pointed out that not a single member had first-hand military expertise, members with proven knowledge of questioning techniques were absent, as was elected representatives. Gilbert's appointment has been criticized for his earlier comparison by Blair with Churchill and Roosevelt. Several MPs saw in the regulation that Chilcot could not require affidavits, a defect in the procedure.

The Liberal Democrats continued their criticism after the public hearings began. Nick Clegg accused the government of suffocating the investigation. In doing so, he was referring to the power of ministries and government departments to veto parts of the final report. In the meantime, a group of opponents of the war held a demonstration outside the conference site. Concerns also arose over the committee's expertise, particularly on the issue of legality. On November 22, 2009, former British Ambassador Oliver Miles published an article in the Independent on Sunday weekly newspaper in which he questioned the impartiality of two historians who had previously supported Israel. A diplomatic telegram from the US Embassy in London, made known as part of Cablegate , quoted Jon Day, Director General of the Defense Department's Security Forces. The source said that he had assured the US that he had "taken measures to protect your interests" regarding the investigation ("Day ... is cited having promised the US to have 'put measures in place to protect your interests' regarding the inquiry ”). This was interpreted as an indication that the investigation was being restricted in order to “minimize embarrassment for the United States”.

In 2012, prosecutor Dominic Grieve was criticized for the veto he had vetoed against the release of the minutes of cabinet meetings. This veto was accompanied by State Department actions against the publication of a conversation between Bush and Blair. The government saw this as "a serious threat" to US-UK relations. When he submitted to the committee, Philippe Sands observed that in 2011 the Independent published an article with 15 allegations that still need to be answered. At a public meeting in 2013, David Owen said the committee would be "prevented from publishing extracts from correspondence between Blair and Bush that it deems important." He accused Blair and Cameron, who he believed had negotiated in a mutual self-interest to prevent the publication of important documents.

It emerged that the cabinet office refused to release more than 130 reports of Bush-Blair talks, 25 communications from Blair to Bush and about 200 cabinet-level talks.

The time to publication, which is considered excessive, has been widely criticized. It was also criticized that the report was ultimately only published as a PDF in electronic form, including scanned photocopies of hard copies of electronic documents, instead of being made available in an open format .

Web links

literature

Individual evidence

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  2. ^ Investigate UK abuses in Iraq In: The Guardian. August 14, 2009.
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  5. ↑ Iraq Inquiry: Chilcot report to be published on July 6.
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  39. ^ Open Government License. nationalarchives.gov.uk, accessed October 3, 2016 .
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  50. ^ A b Joshua Rozenberg: The Iraq war inquiry has left the door open for Tony Blair to be prosecuted . In: The Guardian . July 6, 2016 ( theguardian.com ).
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  54. ↑ a b c d Nick Hopkins, Sandra Laville: MoD left UK forces in Iraq lacking equipment and a plan, Chilcot says . In: The Guardian . July 6, 2016 ( theguardian.com ).
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  58. ^ Tony Blair says world is better as a result of Iraq War.
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  82. ↑ Retired High Court judge questions 'inordinate' Chilcot delay as Defense Secretary intervenes. In: The Telegraph. August 18, 2015.
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