No Mr Blair. Your naive war WAS a trigger for this savage violence, writes CHRISTOPHER MEYER, Ambassador to the US during Iraq War

Iraq may cease to exist as a sovereign state due to current ISIS threat

ISIS has driven through the US trained Iraqi army 'like a knife through butter'

The country is on the verge of total civil war between Sunnis and Shiites

Gunmen celebrate on a destroyed vehicle belonging to Iraqi security forces in the northern city of Mosul which has been the scene of heavy fighting

Last year, on the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces, Tony Blair sought to justify his decision to go to war by arguing that Iraq was a far better place for the removal of Saddam Hussein. ‘Think,’ he said ‘of the consequences of leaving that regime in power.’



In an echo of his former master’s voice, Alastair Campbell added for good measure: ‘Britain… should be really proud of the role we played in changing Iraq from what it was to what it is becoming.’



Today, neither Mr Blair nor Mr Campbell could utter such things without arousing the world’s bemusement and incredulity. Iraq is descending into such violence and disorder that its very existence as a sovereign country is under threat.

A savage, battle-hardened group of Sunni fundamentalists called ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) have seized great swathes of territory in northern and central Iraq and are threatening Baghdad itself. By the time you read this, they may be inside the city walls. They have driven through the Iraqi army – trained and equipped by the US at vast expense – like a knife through butter.



At Friday prayers last week, the most senior Shia cleric in Iraq issued a call to arms. The scene is therefore set for outright civil war. Meanwhile, the Kurdish people of the north have exploited the chaos to seize the oil-producing city of Kirkuk and take another step forward in their ambition to become an independent nation.

There are many reasons for this disastrous state of affairs. Perhaps the most significant is the decision taken more than ten years ago by President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to unseat Saddam Hussein without thinking through the consequences for Iraq of the dictator’s removal.



Like the entire Islamic world, Iraq is divided between two historic branches of the Muslim faith, the Sunni and the Shia. Though there have been periods of relative harmony, today the two denominations are in brutal competition with each other around the world, especially in the neighbouring Syria, where civil war has been raging for the past three years. The Syrian dictator, Bashar Al Assad, is Shia. The Syrian rebels are Sunni. In Iraq the government is Shia-dominated.



There are many reasons for this disastrous state of affairs. Perhaps the most significant is the decision taken more than ten years ago by Bush and Blair to unseat Saddam without thinking through the consequences

Underwriting the violence in both countries is the intense struggle for advantage between the two Middle Eastern superpowers, Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shia).



The situation is not unlike the violent rivalry of the 17th Century between Catholics and Protestants, which led to the ravaging of central Europe in the bloody 30 Years’ War.



ISIS have emerged from the cauldron of civil war in Syria where they control much of the east of the country. Their declared aim is to create from this territory and the neighbouring Sunni areas of northern and central Iraq a single fundamentalist state or ‘caliphate’, lying athwart the frontier between Iraq and Syria.



ISIS have proved so violent that they have been disowned even by Al Qaeda, the Sunni terrorist group from which they have sprung. But it is not through fanaticism and violence alone that they have been able to scatter the Iraqi army with such ease. ISIS have been operating in fertile territory.



For years, the Sunni provinces of Iraq have become increasingly disaffected from the Shia-controlled central government in Baghdad. The authoritarian Prime Minister al-Maliki has trampled on Sunni sensitivities and denied them the spoils of government. This has gone down very badly, given that under Saddam and the old Ottoman empire it was the Sunni who were on top.



Without the world really noticing, ISIS and its Sunni allies had already seized the town of Fallujah (scene of epic battles between the US Marines and insurgents ten years ago).



ISIS have benefited also from something that takes us back to the earliest days of the US/UK occupation – and to one of its greatest blunders. It appears that ISIS are fighting alongside, or even partly comprise, former members of Saddam Hussein’s army.



In the summer of 2003, the American Paul Bremer, who ran Iraq as President Bush’s representative and head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, issued two orders: The first sacked 50,000 members of Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath Party from their jobs as civil servants, teachers and administrators.



This made Iraq well-nigh ungovernable since it had been impossible under Saddam to hold a job of any responsibility without being a member of the Ba’ath party. Bremer’s order went further than de-Nazification in Germany after World War II.



The second order disbanded the Iraqi army, throwing 400,000 angry men on to the streets with their weapons. The order directly fuelled the eight-year insurgency against American and allied troops.



Some of the former Iraqi soldiers were recruited by the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda, have been fighting in Syria and have now returned to Iraq with ISIS.



As the ISIS army marches south towards Baghdad, young men from the city scramble aboard a military truck to enlist in the army to help defend their homes

So, we are reaping what we sowed in 2003. This is not hindsight. We knew in the run-up to war that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would seriously destabilise Iraq after 24 years of his iron rule.



For all his evil, he kept a lid on sectarian violence. Bush and Blair were repeatedly warned by their advisers and diplomats to make dispositions accordingly.



But, as we now know, very little was done until the last minute; and what was done, as in the case of Bremer’s edicts, simply made things far worse.



The White House and Downing Street were suffused with the naïve view that the introduction of parliamentary democracy would solve all Iraq’s problems. But you can’t introduce democracy like a fast-growing shrub. It takes generations to embed. Because political parties in Iraq have tended to form along ethnic and religious lines, democracy has, if anything, deepened the sectarianism.



The situation is full of ironies. The UK went along with the neocon claim after 9/11 that Saddam and Al Qaeda were collaborating, though there was not a shred of proof. Now an offshoot of Al Qaeda controls perhaps a third of the country and may yet enter Baghdad.



The unintended consequence of our invasion was to give Iran, a member of Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’, dominant influence in Baghdad. Yet, on the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, we in the West should welcome any efforts by Iran to halt the advance of ISIS.



None of this is nostalgia for Saddam Hussein (though women and religious minorities like Christians might take a different view). But, if the past 13 years have taught us anything, it is that we mess in other countries’ internal affairs at our peril.



Even with meticulous preparation, deep local knowledge and proper articulation between political goals and military means – all absent in Iraq and Afghanistan – military intervention will usually make things worse and create hatreds which are then played out in our own streets.



In 1999, in a speech in Chicago, Blair proclaimed his doctrine of intervention abroad in the name of liberal values. It became the philosophical underpinning for Britain’s invasion of Iraq.

