Truly Astonishing

David Davis writes:

Tony Blair is truly astonishing. He is summoned to the Chilcot inquiry to answer questions, and instead he poses his own: "What if I had not invaded Iraq? Where would we be then?"

Put to one side the astonishing insensitivity of saying such a thing in a room in which at least 20 people could have replied: "My son would still be alive today." Let us answer his question.

And let us not be too prissy about it. He will not have been the first war leader to use secrecy and subterfuge to attain his ends. But he will be the first that I know of who bullied his attorney general, ignored his legal advisers, deluded his cabinet and dissembled to the House of Commons and the public to get his way.

Even if we accept that he felt he was acting in the public interest, these acts alone did enormous harm to that interest. He believes that weapons of mass destruction and state-sponsored terrorism are threats to modern society. So they are. Now consider how likely parliament or public are to believe any future prime minister if he says: "I have compelling intelligence of an imminent threat to this country."

So, by his excessive reaction to a non-existent threat, he has crippled the capability of future democratic governments to respond robustly to a real threat. He told the Chilcot inquiry that his perception and assessment of the risks posed by Iraq changed after 9/11. But that assessment was naive, ignorant, careless and inconsistent.

It was naive because there was no prior indication of links between Saddam and al-Qaida. Indeed there was evidence of hostility between them. It was ignorant because it ignored the known fact that there were a number of alternative bolt holes for al-Qaida in the many failed and dysfunctional states in the region, so shutting down one would not handicap them at all. It was careless because it took no account of the cause célèbre that invasion handed to Islamist fundamentalists the world over, and the recruiting sergeant for terrorism that it created in this country. It was inconsistent because he did few of the other things that this new threat demanded. In particular, he did not materially increase the size of our security services until 2004, nearly three years later, and too late to stop the 7/7 bombings. Unfortunately, the naivety did not stop there.

I suspect that, when they presented the "dodgy dossier", he and his advisers believed it. They appeared to have no grasp of the will-o'-the-wisp nature of much intelligence data. When I was the non-proliferation minister in the previous government, I saw weekly intelligence assessments of Iraq's capabilities and intentions. It was always clear that this intelligence was patchy and incomplete, like most intelligence on hostile nations.

Indeed, when Blair assured the House of Commons of the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), I assumed that we had acquired access to live data from a human source in place. Nothing else explained his confidence. It now transpires that his access was no greater than ours four years earlier. Possibly less.

Similarly naive was Blair's approach to warfare as an arm of state policy. When Margaret Thatcher was considering military action to retake the Falklands, the people who were most cautions were the Whitelaws, Carringtons and Pyms, who had seen warfare first hand. They had witnessed young men being burned and shattered by the weapons of modern warfare. They had no illusions about the hideous human cost.

Blair's concept of war seems pure Hollywood. He seems to forget the vast numbers of innocent casualties; the collateral damage and destruction; the pain, hunger and disease that are the fellow travellers of military action.

How else do we explain the cavalier carelessness with which he treated the follow-through to military action? He was told by the Ministry of Defence that there was no "phase four", the reconstruction and rebuilding of the nation that should have followed the invasion if there was to be any moral justification for "regime change".

Of all the people in the world, Blair was the one best placed to insist to George W Bush that the Americans take this seriously. At the very least, it should have been the price of our co-operation. Yet there is no evidence that he lifted a finger.

The result? One hundred thousand civilian casualties in Iraq. Even if we accept Blair's aims – and I did – there is no excuse for a British government to behave in this simplistic, careless, almost blinkered way.

Sometimes it is necessary for governments to spend lives, but when they do they should take very special care over both their aims and their methods. They should never spend any lives unnecessarily, and never spend one life more than necessary.

The final price of this war is not yet settled. It has not destroyed the morale of al-Qaida; if anything, it has given it a new moral cause. It distracted us from Afghanistan – the necessary war – and has rendered it a thousand times more difficult to resolve. And it has taken the west from a position of moral superiority to moral failure.

Where would we be without your war, Tony Blair? Even by your own criteria, in a rather better position than we are now, I fear.

Why is this great man not Leader of the Opposition? He lost when far more people than could possibly have been eligible (where had they been for the previous 10 or 12 years?) voted for a complete unknown who had been heavily promoted by the BBC.