“The human consequences – and lessons of – the murderous Iraq War must never be forgotten.”
By Matt Willgress
The content of Tony Blair’s recent interventions into the direction of the Labour Party have been brilliantly dissected and countered by Jon Trickett MP on this site.
The purpose of this column is to additionally remind readers of the humanitarian catastrophe and consequences caused by undoubtedly his most unpopular act as Prime Minister, being at the forefront of the war on Iraq that commenced in 2003. The war was famously justified by Blair himself to the British public on lies and fabrications, especially around weapons of mass destruction.
As Nelson Mandela famously said of Blair at the time, he was acting like “the foreign minister of the United States… no longer the prime minister of Britain.”
The state-commissioned Chilcot Inquiry would later argue that the war was “not a last resort” as claimed and based on “flawed intelligence”, with the bombastic claims regarding Iraq’s WMD threat presented with unwarranted certainty. The report also slammed post-war planning as “wholly inadequate”.
Why then was the war such a disaster for Iraq, its people and the wider world?
The invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths – with between 150,000 and over 1 million people estimated to have been killed, depending on the methodology used.
The widely-cited Iraq Body Count project documented between 183,000 and 205,000 violent civilian deaths based on reported media and NGO records.
The figure increases when estimates also take into account excess mortality. Academic studies doing so suggest total deaths from the war could have reached over one million, including indirect deaths from the destruction of infrastructure and healthcare systems, disease, and economic collapse. (One example is this academic study from 2013, which showed how half a million people died in Iraq as a result of war-related causes between 2003 and mid-2011.)
Millions more Iraqi people were displaced, fuelling the global refugee crisis; with human rights abuses (including torture) becoming widespread – with images and reports from Abu Ghraib prison circulating and horrifying people across the globe.
4,800 US and nearly 180 British military members died, the latter leading to the emergence of the Military Families Against War campaign here.
Additionally, the war cost trillions of dollars – draining from the US, UK and other economies’ resources which could have been used for social progress at home and international development abroad.
The UK’s military operations alone in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 cost some £9.6 billion that we know of, not counting longer-term and hidden additional costs. This colossal figure—confirmed by the MoD—represents the additional costs of the Iraq war on top of regular and existing military spending.
As part of this, massive amounts were spent on private military contractors, which were highly wasteful and corrupt. As a Guardian report noted in 2021, “The Inspectors Generals for Afghanistan and Iraq, the Wartime Contracting Commission, and the Pentagon’s own inspector general all documented waste, profiteering, corruption and ‘ghost spending’ (money spent on activities that turned out not to exist at all).”
All in all, summing up Iraq after the war, another academic report from the US in 2014 outlined that whilst “in the early 1980s, Iraq was a middle-income and rapidly developing country with a well-developed health system… A few decades later – after wars, sanctions and a violent sectarian upsurge – child and maternal health indicators have deteriorated; its poverty headcount index is at 22.9% and diseases such as cholera have reemerged.”
These human consequences – and lessons of – the murderous Iraq War must never be forgotten. Tony Blair’s role in it should also never be forgiven – let alone should he have any role in politics or the Labour Party today.
- Get involved in Stop the War’s International Anti-War Conference in London on Saturday, June 20th. Register and find out more here.
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