Iraq inquiry repeats Blair's mistake (an invasion would be welcomed; neocon arrogance)

[laststeamtrain]

Iraq inquiry repeats Blair's mistake

The Chilcot inquiry has failed to take into account the resistance of ordinary Iraqis to an invasion – exactly like Tony Blair did

Jonathan Steele
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 January 2010 09.30 GMT

One line of questioning has been conspicuously absent from the Iraq inquiry. Two words have never been mentioned. But as the parade of witnesses reaches its climax with Tony Blair's appearance on Friday, the inquiry team has its best chance to put the omissions right.

The first missing word is resistance. The inquiry has heard much about the violence which has racked Iraq since the invasion. There have been frequent references to insecurity, the breakdown of law and order, and instability. "Insurgency" has been mentioned. Yet in every case, whether it is in the questions or the witnesses' replies, these concepts crop up as part of a narrative which puts the blame for the chaos on Iraqis.

The notion that Iraq's post-war violence was provoked and initiated by the occupiers has been brushed aside. It is certainly true that Iraqis, with some help from foreign Arab volunteers, were responsible for the car bombs and suicide attacks which killed tens of thousands of civilians. The sectarian murders which took thousands of other lives and led millions to flee their homes were perpetrated by Iraqis.

But these horrors only began on a significant scale in 2005. The initial blood-letting came from the invaders, and for the first two years of the occupation they were responsible for the bulk of the killing. Those of us who covered that period will not forget it as easily as the inquiry team has done. In the days after Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled, I remember watching desperate fathers dig up recent makeshift graves in the grounds of Baghdad's main children's hospital for the bodies of loved ones killed by US troops at checkpoints. These were not casualties of the wartime bombing, but of nervous soldiers after the regime had already fallen. Three weeks later I was in Fallujah after US troops, billeted in a local school, had killed more than a dozen unarmed demonstrators.

Away from Baghdad over the next few months US troops were firing on villages suspected of sheltering men who were attacking US convoys. In April 2004 they subjected Fallujah to a ferocious three-week bombardment. Civilian casualties continued to mount, and by the second anniversary of the invasion the independent assessment group, the Iraq Body Count, calculated that the occupiers had killed 2,654 civilians, more than four times the number of victims of car bombs and suicide attacks. The US was detaining tens of thousands of Iraqi men, usually stripping them in front of their families in nighttime raids, thereby further fuelling Iraqi anger and hatred.

Even if the invasion had been legal, with unambiguous UN authorisation, Iraqis would have had the right to resist a foreign occupation. Yet the notion of resistance has not been acknowledged by the inquiry. It is as though the inquisitors (not the best word for these elaborately polite and long-winded questioners) accept the same parameters as the men they are interviewing. Saddam was hated by most of his subjects. Therefore an invasion would be welcomed.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/28/iraq-inquiry-tony-blair