EVEN though he has confessed to his Iraqi transgressions more than once and apologised for them, it is for the first time that Tony Blair has admitted that there is an “element of truth” to the allegations that the rise of the self-styled Islamic State is linked to the 2003 Anglo-American invasion.

One can understand his claim that he is not sorry for Saddam Hussein’s fate — maybe, many people agree with him — but what is astonishing this time is his candid admission that “we” made a series of strategic mistakes that went into planning the invasion of a country that is located in the heart of the Middle East.

Know more: Iraq war contributed to rise of IS, says Tony Blair

Basically, he spoke of three mistakes — wrong intelligence, flaws in planning and mistakes in “understanding what would happen” after Saddam Hussein was eliminated.

For more than a decade, the world has been aware of the faulty intelligence on which the Anglo-American invasion was based after the Western media exposed the truth about the doctored dossier and the “uranium trail”.

As a rule, any invasion based on wrong intelligence should fail — which wasn’t the case this time, for the Anglo-American invasion was a tactical success which destroyed the remnants of the Iraqi armed forces and ended the Baathist regime.

However, what turned out to be tragic for Iraq and for the region were the mistakes that “we” made not only in planning but in “our” understanding of what would happen after Hussein was ousted.

Throughout the confession, the former prime minister spoke of “we” and “our”, which obviously refer not only to his team but also to Britain’s allies across the Atlantic.

What Mr Blair failed to emphasise were two important points: one, the Baathist regime had welcomed the UN’s decision to send an inspection team to Iraq to find out whether it possessed weapons of mass destruction; and two, inspection team chief Hans Blix reported to the UN he had found “no smoking gun”.

The Bush-Blair duo still decided to go for the military option. What followed the success of the invasion is before us in the form of the IS.

Its meteoric success in warfare in 2014 was preceded by a great tragedy for Iraqi civilians, who were subjected to ‘sanctions’ that resulted in deaths still not fully counted.

The general view is that the invasion of the cradle of civilisation was launched either to destroy a country which Israel thought posed a security threat to it, or to control Iraq’s oil, or both.

Published in Dawn, October 27th, 2015

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