Man lights candles near scene of car bomb attack in the centre of Baghdad, June, 2016. Hadi Mizban / Press Association. All rights reserved.Seven years ago, then Prime
Minister Gordon Brown commissioned Sir John Chilcot to lead an investigation into
the events that led Britain to join the US in initiating the 2003 war in
Iraq.
Launching the inquiry, Gordon
Brown said: ‘The inquiry will, I stress, be fully independent of Government.
Its scope is unprecedented. It covers an eight-year period, including the
run-up to the conflict and the full period of conflict and reconstruction. The
committee of inquiry will have access to the fullest range of information,
including secret information. In other words, its investigation can range
across all papers, all documents and all material.’ All this was a
response to a disastrous war launched in March 2003 by the US administration, and
supported by the British government, under Tony Blair’s premiership.
Tony Blair presented the dodgy dossier to the British Parliament
on 24 September 2002. He claimed that Saddam Hussein had
chemical and biological weapons, the so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction
(WMD), and active military plans for the use of such weapons, which could be
activated to reach British targets within 45 minutes. We
now know that the infamous claim that Saddam could launch WMD within
45 minutes was ‘sexed up’, by Alastair Campbell, to push
Britain into the war.
In order to secure the support for an unprovoked war, Iraq
was portrayed as a ’rogue state’, a state which didn’t obey international norms
and was governed by a brutal dictator. It was put in the same category as
other ‘pariah states’ such as North Korea. But it also happens to be next
to two other ‘rogue states’, Syria and Iran, and to have the second largest oil
reserves in the world. Since 2003, it has become increasingly clear that
there was a principal link with Iraqi oil in shaping US and British decisions
that led to this war. Iraq’s proven oil reserves are considered
among the greatest in the world. The Iraq war was important in terms of
guaranteeing/ safeguarding firm control over the oil riches of the
country. Indeed, many writers, and anti-war groups have mentioned the oil
dimension as the key reason why Iraq was targeted.
On 6 November 2000, while Americans were distracted by the
controversial Florida presidential vote count, the Iraqi government announced
that it was no longer going to accept dollars for oil sold under the UN’s Oil
For-Food Programme and had decided to switch to the euro as Iraq’s oil export
currency – hence launching the so-called ‘secret weapon’ of Iraq. This was the
first time an OPEC country had dared to violate the dollar-price rule. Since
then, the value of the euro has increased and the value of the dollar has
steadily declined. Libya has been urging for some time that oil be priced in
euros rather than dollars. In 2001, Venezuela’s ambassador to Russia spoke of
Venezuela switching to the euro for all their oil sales.
Before 2003, Iran, Russia, and other countries also indicated
that they would like to denominate their petroleum in euros. Since the oil
trade is a central factor underpinning the dollar’s hegemony in global trade,
all these are potentially very significant threats to the strength of the US
economy, and eventually to US global hegemony.
In the end, as we know, the US, in alliance with Britain,
intervened in Iraq militarily in March 2003, and installed its own authority to
run the country. The invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq may well be
remembered as the first oil-currency war. There is now a wealth of evidence to
suggest that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with any threat from
Saddam’s WMD programme and certainly less to do with fighting international
terrorism, than it has to do with gaining control over Iraq’s oil reserves and
in doing so maintaining the US dollar as the dominant currency for the
international oil market.
The war against Iraq, a war started
under false pretences and conducted brutally, regardless of its devastating
human costs for Iraqi civilians, can therefore be seen as part of a larger
equation of global economic and political structures, a convergence of
political/economic interests, travelling under the rubric of ‘humanitarian
intervention’ and ‘regime change’.
Vested interests in energy, weapons
and influential segments of the media industries are always rooted in key parts
of government in the US and other western developed countries. These
interests have been involved heavily with sustaining their favoured position,
and key elements of the US and British political elite are, for most of the
time, acting in response to these powerful interests. This is not a
conspiracy, it is simply ‘business as usual’.
What is not ‘business as usual’ is the utter devastation of
the Iraqi state, all institutions and the irreversible damage done to Iraqi
society. The hostilities that began on 20 March
2003 and continue to this day have resulted in the deaths of at least 179,000
Iraqi civilians. Over 17,500 of those
civilians have been killed by coalition forces. British forces were engaged
from 2003-2011 and again from 2014, with the loss of 179 British men and women.
British forces were responsible for the security of four provinces in
southeastern Iraq after the 2003 invasion. These were Basra, Missan, Muthanna,
and Thi-Qar. From May 2003 to December 2007, 124 Iraqi civilians have been
identified as victims of British military action.
Violence is still claiming lives in Iraq
Over 1,100 Iraqi
civilians were killed in the month before the publication of the Chilcot
report, in June 2016. At least 50 of them were children. In the month of June,
163 civilian deaths were caused by coalition bombings. Between January and June
2016 over 800 civilians were killed in coalition air strikes, nameless civilians
who are barely mentioned by western media and will almost certainly be ignored
by Chilcot.
As we await
the publication of the Chilcot report, and as we celebrate the ‘liberation’ of
Fallujah from ISIS forces, violence in Iraq is still claiming innocent victims.
Over 200 people were killed by car bombs and suicide bombers on July 2, dozens
of children among them, most of them in Baghdad.
Many of
the victims in Baghdad on Sunday were children; the explosives detonated near a
three-story complex of restaurants and stores where families were celebrating
the end of the school year, residents said.
Ali Ahmed, 25, who owns a shop close to where the
bomb went off, said that in the aftermath, knowing how many children were
inside a shopping mall that was hit, he had begun yelling: “The kids upstairs!
The kids upstairs! Save them!”
“But the firefighters arrived too late,” Mr. Ahmed
said. (New York Times, July 3, 2016)
Victims of
terrorism, victims of imperialism, victims of the mechanism ‘regime change’. As
all sides are protecting their interests, who protects the interests of the
ordinary citizen, child, mother, father, farmer, policeman, housewife, teacher,
road sweeper? Who counts the lost lives alongside their own economic and
political benefits?
When Iraq is out of the news we can easily
forget that every day brings a new chapter of death and misery. Since the 2003
invasion there has been no let up. The maximum number of deaths in any one
month was 4083 in 2014, the lowest monthly total was 254 in September 2010.
Whatever is said by Chilcot about the decision to go to war, we should remember
that the civilians of Iraq continue to pay a terrible price. Any assessment of
the UK’s involvement in Iraq must address the most numerous and direct victims
of the conflict.