IRAQ (3)

Today is the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. Was it worth it?

Tony Blair may still be parrotting, that he has no regrets, but I think most people are coming round to the view that it was a mistake. Lord Bingham was not the only lawyer to think that it was illegal. Lots of people got killed, not least over 100,000 innocent civilians. It cost over a trillion dollars.

Those were the things that did happen. But there were also lots of things that didn't. The war didn't stop the production of weapons of mass destruction, since there weren't any to start with. It didn't lead to democracy in the Arab world, or a solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict, or cause the Iranians to stop developing a nuclear weapon. It didn't lead to more respect for the Western world or its way of life. It didn't stop terrorist recruitment or suicide bomb attacks.

Perhaps worst of all, it didn't bring Iraq together as a country. Ambassadors who had lived and worked there all cautioned against the war, on the grounds that Iraq, an artificial post-WW1 creation from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, would fragment into its constituent parts if there was no central authority. That has happened, with Shias, Sunnis and Kurds all controlling their enclaves. Iraq, as a state, exists only on paper.

Countries take a long, long time to develop; wars destroy things very quickly. Iraq was one of the many examples of the noughties that confirmed that view.

Walter Blotscher