Americans Did Liberate Iraq. They Just Failed to Protect It.

Luay al-Khatteeb

Global Governance, Middle East

The only weapon of mass destruction was Saddam.

The world shares much blame for Iraq’s darkest decades. A new report that condemns former Prime Minister Tony Blair is only the start. Launched on June 15, 2009, the Chilcot Inquiry is Britain’s second and almost certainly most comprehensive review of the UK’s conduct in the run-up to, invasion and occupation of Iraq. To many observers, including a British politician who claimed to have reviewed the 2.6 million word document in a single morning, Sir John Chilcot has already condemned one man to eternal damnation.

Summaries of the report so far have particular focus on intelligence failures, the exaggerated case for war and poor preparedness for the aftermath. For Americans, this will be all too familiar after the Duelfer report and the Senate Report on Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq. To others in the West, it is far more simple: Bush and Blair lied, people died.

As an Iraqi, I welcomed the liberation of my country, but was against the occupation, mismanagement and corruption that followed. It is painful to think, for example, of how the United States thought that a rapidly assembled new Iraqi force of thirty thousand men could have secured Iraq’s vast borders from the jihadists that have caused interminable chaos.