On the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, JFK’s former Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara published a memoir: In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. In his mea culpa, the man widely regarded as the chief architect of that disastrous conflict finally admitted that “we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why”. The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. summed it up with this question: “Can anyone remember a public official with the courage to confess error and explain where he and his country went wrong?”
On this twentieth anniversary of the start of the equally calamitous Iraq War, it’s not possible to answer Schlesinger’s question. Although too little too late, McNamara was at least a man on nodding terms with the concept of shame, a concept that seems singularly absent among our ruling class. Admittedly, two former New Labour figures have subsequently condemned the UK’s invasion of Iraq as illegal: Lord Falconer in 2015, then former Deputy PM John Prescott in 2016. But they were not the architects of the war, and their words are cold comfort for the countless Iraqi dead, or the millions who opposed the war in the streets around the world.
At two million, the protest on 15 February 2003 was the largest ever witnessed in the UK. It was also the world’s largest collective demonstration, with estimates ranging from 15-30 million protestors taking to the streets across nearly 800 cities in 72 countries. Whilst it did not stop the war, contrary to received wisdom it had far-reaching and profound consequences.
The protest put paid to the idea that the war had popular support. Some commentators rush to point to pre-war polls showing a slight majority in favour, conveniently forgetting the role the mass media played in shaping public opinion by their parroting of government propaganda. When the lies were eventually exposed, the polls turned against the war. In any event, physical protests are more telling than unreliable polls. For every one present at that march, several with similar views would have been unable to attend. The presence of vast numbers of first-timers effectively made the anti-war position mainstream, and created activists out of young protestors who went on to found new movements.
The western protests were a profound catalyst for the liberation movement that erupted in Egypt in 2011 and rippled through the Middle East and beyond, as I discovered when making a film about the protests of 15 February 2003. It also led to parliament voting against an attack on Syria in 2013, with MPs citing the public outrage in 2003, and stayed the hand of the government in taking military action against Iran.
Perhaps its greatest impact was the way it contributed to the rupture in trust between the public and politicians. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former UK Ambassador to the UN and Special Envoy for Iraq at the time of the war, even drew a line between the protest and Brexit in his book, Iraq – The Cost of War.
“The effects of this particular divorce between the leadership and the common citizen in Britain have been far-reaching,” he wrote. “The linkages can be traced from the protests over Iraq in 2003 to the vote in the June 2016 referendum to leave the EU: ‘The people up there in charge just do not seem to be taking our views into account’”.
The social and constitutional rot runs deeper still. Our legal, political and media institutions have made a mockery of the idea of accountability since not a single person responsible for the war has been brought to justice. In my view, the Chilcot Inquiry was a whitewash. We eagerly call for war crimes prosecutions of Russia in Ukraine whilst ignoring and covering up our own in Iraq. If hypocrisy were a currency, we’d be the wealthiest country in the world.
This anniversary reminds us that little has been learned from Iraq by our political masters. Indeed, many of the architects and handmaidens of the war have failed upwards, in time-honoured British fashion. Intelligence chiefs have since been given promotions and plum posts – John Scarlett elevated to run MI6 and Richard Dearlove made master of a Cambridge College, to pull just two from a long list. As for the MPs who voted for the war, one might think a newspaper would have a good story in tracking them down to ask if they still stand by their vote. But my guess is that hacks and MPs alike will be too busy thumping their chests over Ukraine to revisit their stance on Iraq.
Even Alastair Campbell and his former boss Tony Blair rarely seem to be off the radio or television. With a new podcast, and a star turn as a judge on Make Me Prime Minister, Campbell’s public rehabilitation is complete. As for Blair, the British state rubbed salt in the wounds when it awarded him its ultimate accolade, the Order of the Garter in June 2022.
The senior partner in the war also did its part when the American Navy announced in December last year plans to build the USS Fallujah, a warship named after two massacres carried out by allied forces in the eponymous Iraqi city. It should come as no surprise that few will have heard about USS Fallujah, given the apologetic role many of our leading journalists played at the time. Those of them still at large today will no doubt serve up reheated columns for the anniversary, declaring that Iraq was just a terrible “mistake” that “went badly”.
But for Benjamin B. Ferencz , a former American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Iraq was no simple mistake. In his foreword for Michael Haas’ book, George W. Bush, War Criminal?: The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes, Ferencz stated that “a prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.” Ferencz also noted that the night before the invasion in 2003, the deputy legal adviser to the British Foreign Ministry, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned, stating: “an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression.” In other words, the UK also stands accused.
Last year, in a beautiful coda to Robert McNamara’s memoir, his son Craig published his own: Because Our Fathers Lied. A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today. In that title alone, there is more honesty than two decades of our public discourse. I doubt that any such book will ever be written about the Iraq war by any British McNamara. And there can be few more fitting and damning commentaries than that on the state of our nation.
Amir Amirani is a writer and filmmaker
