The Guardian: Here is Britain’s new place in the world – on the sidelines

To say this is not to fall for the notion that Brexit suddenly makes Britain insignificant, relegated to the second division, a quaint offshore island of little consequence. That’s not true. Britain remains in the top 10 of most global rankings, and the top half dozen of those that confer most weight – economic, military, education, stability, soft power. Beware the easy myth of terminal decline. [...]

Britain has nevertheless lost influence and will continue to do so because of Brexit. Boris Johnson went on the Today programme earlier today, partly to talk up Britain’s relationship with Trump, but also to claim that Britain’s long embrace of the US makes us the ally that can shift Trump’s America “into a better place” on issues such as Nato, climate change and the Iran nuclear accord.

To put it at its mildest, it was ironic that Johnson could make that tendentious claim on the day when Sir John Chilcot raised fresh criticisms of Tony Blair’s Iraq policy and Trump delivered a highly nationalistic speech in Warsaw. Blair too thought that Britain could shift the US into a better place – or at least that was what he said he thought. But as Chilcot said, the amount of effective influence exerted by Britain on America in 2003 was “very slight and short-lived”. Things do not change.

And it was doubly ironic that Johnson should make the influence claim on a day when one of his most recent predecessors as Conservative foreign secretary was knocking it down. Shortly after Johnson’s BBC interview, William Hague told a House of Lords committee that Britain’s influence over America and in world affairs more generally was being significantly weakened by leaving the EU. Hague made three strong points. Britain’s global clout has been amplified by EU membership. Britain’s self-image as a bridge with America mattered because it was a bridge that reached to Europe. And Britain’s role in Europe helped to prevent fragmentation within the Nato alliance. That influence will now inescapably diminish.

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Al Jazeera: Corbyn was right in 2003, and he is right again today

The import of Corbyn's statement must be considered in its historical context. Despite the legion of people who stood figuratively and philosophically with the then backbench Labour MP, Corbyn faced a deep and vitriolic thicket of establishment opposition, particularly from Britain's rancid reactionary press that universally supported then-Prime Minister Tony Blair's disastrous military misadventure and instinctively libelled the war's opponents as quislings. [...]

But Corbyn's speech arrived at its moral crescendo when he warned the mesmerised throng, and, by, extension, the rest of us, of the calamitous human and geopolitical consequences the obdurate trans-Atlantic architects of the pestilential Iraq invasion would ultimately cause.

His voice rising in plaintive anger, Corbyn said the war would "set off a spiral of conflict, of hate, of misery, of desperation that will fuel the wars, the conflict, the terrorism, the depression, and the misery of future generations ... the way to free us from the scourge of war is to free ourselves from the scourge of injustice, of poverty, and of misery". [...]

In this regard, Corbyn made what many other politicians consider a politically fatal admission: Britain, France and the United States (or their regional proxies) invading and dropping bombs on Afghanistan and other, predominately Arab countries - from Iraq, Syria, Yemen to Libya - year after dreadful year have fuelled, rather than stemmed, the terror visited upon so many, in so many places.

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VICE: Why It Took So Long for Labour to Address Gay Rights

Depending on your views towards illegal wars, the introduction of tuition fees and the expansion of PFI, things largely didn't get that much better. However, in the 13 years that Blair and Brown held office, one thing certainly did: LGBT rights. By the time the Conservatives took back the keys to Downing Street in 2010, the age of consent had been equalised, civil partnerships had been introduced and out gay men were no longer barred from serving in the British Armed Forces.

But is it too easy to look back on those years with glittery, rose-tinted glasses? Labour won in an electoral landslide and yet took years to implement legislation that protected and legally validated LGBT lives. They made no Parliamentary effort to scrap Section 28 – the legislation that banned local authorities from "teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality" – until February of 2000. It remained in place until 2003. What's more, when voters gave Brown's government the boot, equal marriage – and the scrapping of the lifetime ban on men who have sex with men (MSM) from donating blood – was yet to pass through the Commons. [...]

Blair oversaw government lawyers fighting to defend British statutes that banned gay men from serving in the military at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They tried a similar trick with equalising the age of consent. Labour wasn't in power when these cases started, but, says Tatchell, they failed to retreat. He adds that the prohibition on sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace – eventually passed in 2003 – only materialised after the European Union ordered Britain to end its lack of protection for LGBT employees. When it came to decriminalising gay sex at 16 Blair gave his MPs a free vote. The last Labour government failed to introduce LGBT-inclusive HIV and sex-and-relationship education. Blair presided over a system where queer refugees could be locked away in asylum detention centres for months on end.

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Politico: Labour’s last Scottish bastion crumbles

In Glasgow, and across Scotland, Labour is in steep decline. In the 2015 U.K. general election, the party lost all but one of its 41 Scottish seats to the Scottish National Party (SNP), including all seven in Glasgow. In 2016, the SNP won elections to the Scottish parliament for the third successive time, also claiming all the directly elected seats in Glasgow. And now Labour faces a double-drubbing — in local council elections this coming Thursday and again in Britain’s snap general election on June 8. [...]

The immediate — and most obvious — cause of Labour’s precipitous demise is the rise of Scottish nationalism. Three years ago, Glasgow voted Yes to independence despite Labour campaigning to maintain the three-centuries-old union with England and the rest of the United Kingdom. [...]

The independence campaign accelerated a shift from Labour to the SNP that began with Scottish devolution in the late 1990s but gathered pace after Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. “Iraq was a big moment for me because I realized that what our government was telling us was a load of rubbish,” says Feargal Dalton, an Irish-born Royal Navy veteran elected as Glasgow SNP councillor in 2012. [...]

Recent polls have put support for the Scottish Tories as high as a third, raising the possibility of the Conservatives taking a number of the record 56 Scottish seats won by the SNP. Even in Glasgow, where the Tories hold only a single council seat, there are hopes of a breakthrough in a city identified as “the least Conservative place in Britain” based on previous election results.

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The Guardian: The Tories have set course for a ‘hard Brexit’. How long can unity hold?

Last week’s Tory conference required everyone to clear their memory banks and delete all such inconvenient details of recent history. Never mind what Rudd had believed so passionately in June. Here was the new-look home secretary embracing a hard Brexit as a fantastic opportunity to slash immigration, keep young foreigners out if they were judged second-rate, and shame British companies who signed up too many overseas workers and not enough Brits. “Work with us, not against us, and we’ll better control immigration and protect our economy,” was her message now. When Theresa May spoke the following day, Rudd and Johnson, the prime minister’s surprise choice for the post of foreign secretary, were new best friends, sitting side by side, glancing approvingly at one another time after time as ovation followed ovation. [...]

The frustration of those who want to fight against hard Brexit and who are tearing their hair out at Labour’s divisions on issues as central to the Brexit debate as immigration was perhaps best exemplified by news that an exasperated Tony Blair was considering returning to some role in front-line politics. “Frankly, it’s a tragedy for British politics if the choice before the country is a Conservative government going for a hard Brexit and an ultra-left Labour party that believes in a set of policies that takes us back to the 60s,” Blair told Esquire magazine. “Do I feel strongly about it? Yes, I do. Am I very motivated by that? Yes. Where do I go from here? What exactly do I do? That’s an open question.” [...]

The second aim was to showcase the personal vision of prime minister May, allowing her to explain how she intended to create “a country that works for everyone, not just the privileged few”. May’s first conference speech as prime minister shunned the individualism of Margaret Thatcher and the shrinking-state Conservatism of her successors, including David Cameron, replacing all that with a commitment to an active state that would intervene wherever and whenever it could to help people “across the line”. “We succeed or fail together,” said May, recalling one Brownlee brother dragging the other across the finishing line in their recent triathlon success. “We achieve or fall short together. When one of us falters, our human instinct is to reach out our hand and help them over the line. There is more to life than individualism and self-interest,” she declared, in what was intended to be a defining section of her speech.

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Jacobin Magazine: Why They Invaded

I became ambassador to Uzbekistan shortly after the invasion of neighboring Afghanistan. The British government had a policy of collaboration with the Uzbek dictatorship, which provided an airbase for the Americans to operate into Afghanistan.

However, I discovered that this policy of collaboration not only included downplaying the terrible human rights abuses of that dictatorship, but also intelligence collaboration, by which I mean that our government was knowingly getting intelligence from the Uzbek torture chambers, very often from the torture of dissidents who had no connection with terrorism whatsoever. [...]

For example, when I was on the Foreign Office South Africa desk during apartheid, everyone knew that Thatcher was very supportive of the existing regime. The official government line at that time was that Mandela was a terrorist and he should be in prison.

There would have absolutely no point in me drafting minutes saying “he is a good man and we should be campaigning to get him out,” because they wouldn’t get anywhere.

So I drafted minutes explaining that it was in the British “business interest” to secure his release, arguing that it would be best not to annoy the black community in South Africa, because one day they might be in power and we would have to deal with them to make money. That’s the only kind of argument that would get anywhere with the government. [...]

That was part of our attempt to push back against Mi6 and the government. There was a lot of that kind of resistance. And around 120 former ambassadors also signed a letter opposing the Iraq War, which was also the view of the serving ambassadors.

But one of the fascinating things about all of this was the unwillingness of people to push things to the point of losing their job. [...]

Motivation is something we all wondered about at the time. It seemed to me to be primarily a matter of Tony Blair’s huge desire for Britain to be seen as a great power and important in the world, and the way to do that was to be indispensably connected to the United States. I don’t think it was much more detailed than that.

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Business Insider: CAROLINE LUCAS: The Iraq War was illegal, Tony Blair was lying, and David Cameron should apologise too

So, absolutely, I think it's really clear that there are big constitutional lessons to be learned, not to least of which I think will be that, in future, the Attorney General ought to be an independent appointment of Parliament, rather than an appointment from the Prime Minister and of one of his old chums. I don't think that gives me confidence in the decisions coming out of it. [...]

On the issue of whether Tony Blair was lying, you can see from some of the timings of the different statements that were made. There he was, on the eve of war, claiming in Parliament that Saddam Hussein could still avoid the invasion if he were to comply with the UN Security Council resolution. Yet, six months earlier, not only was he saying to President Bush that "I will be with you whatever," but also we have Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, saying very clearly that the US had already stated that they would be invading, the question was only about when. [...]

When it comes to Blair himself, I would like to see him held to the very strongest possible account but, in the absence of the ICC, if there are other legal avenues, it might make sense to explore them.

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Deutsche Welle: Opinion: No remorse - Tony Blair fails to understand

The report, prepared in infinite detail by a former high-ranking government official, is a quiet, yet perfectly focussed annihilation of Tony Blair. Britain's old government apparatus has once again demonstrated its qualities amid the political chaos of the day. In the 2.6 million word report, Sir John Chilcot explains how Tony Blair decided to go to war in 2002, and how he subsequently shaped intelligence to justify that decision. [...]

The former prime minister laid the foundation for the hate and opposition that politicians are so often confronted with today. He committed the original sin that feeds the distrust with which so many people regard politics. [...]

"I will be with you, whatever," wrote Tony Blair to George W. Bush in the summer of 2002. One should carve that on his gravestone as an eternal deterrent to blind allegiance and political hubris. With the report, Tony Blair's reputation has been utterly decimated.

The positive things that he achieved in office - such as the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland - will be buried under the ruins of the Iraq War. Whether Tony Blair can now be brought to trial remains to be seen. But history will ultimately judge him: Here is a man that fought the wrong war, for the wrong reasons, with the wrong plan.

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The Guardian: The US needs its own Chilcot report

The only thing close to the Chilcot report in the US was the Senate intelligence committee’s long-delayed investigation on intelligence failures in the lead-up to Iraq, released in 2008. The Democratic-led committee faulted the CIA for massive intelligence failures and the Bush administration for purposefully manipulating intelligence for public consumption. It led to a couple days of headlines, denunciations from the Bush White House (still in office at the time) and that was it.

After that, the Senate intelligence committee continued to lavish the CIA with praise, increase its budgets and provide only a modicum of oversight, despite the many scandals that preceded and succeeded the report. When the same intelligence committee later investigated illegal CIA torture – also directed by the highest levels of the Bush administration – they didn’t even bother mentioning the top officials who designed and sanctioned the program, only the anonymous (read: redacted) underlings who carried it out. [...]

Coincidentally, a scathing new biography of Bush was published Tuesday by renowned historian Jean Edward Smith, and it sounds like it’s closer to an indictment than anything an official governing body has come close to producing. Smith, who devotes a substantial portion of his book to the lead-up and aftermath of the Iraq war, concludes: “Whether George W Bush was the worst president in American history will be long debated, but his decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.” [...]

It’s unlikely that anything will ever actually happen to Tony Blair or any of the other war architects in the UK despite the report’s damning conclusions. And he’ll continue to spend much of his time doing PR work for some of the world’s worst dictators, helping them avoid the same fate that he will almost certainly miss himself.

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Independent: As a Foreign Office Minister, I voted for the invasion of Iraq. I am still trying to understand my failure

The whole world agrees that Iraq, in Talleyrand’s words, was worse than a crime – it was a mistake. The oddest consequence was that, having seen the failure of Iraq, the British state went and made exactly the same blunder in Libya. Nicolas Sarkozy is not George W Bush (more a Napoleon III than the original), but twice in less than a decade a British prime minister tucked in behind a dubious ally and joined in the destruction of a Middle East state with disastrous consequences. [...]

There was no UN authorisation but the military pressure worked and Milosevic withdrew from Kosovo and the people there no longer faced the fear of a new Srebrenica. Soon after Blair’s triumphant re-election in May 2001 came 9/11 and the desire from Washington to hit out and punish someone, anyone for the biggest attack on US territory with more Americans killed than at Pearl Harbour. [...]

We all know that assessment and what followed was disastrously wrong. But all I can report from being in the heart of government at the time was that no official or adviser or “expert” challenged the right of Britain to intervene and protect Kurds and others in Iraq who faced oppression and worse from Saddam.

The fault in the end was Blair’s, as the fault to destroy Libya or send 500 British soldiers to unnecessary deaths in Afghanistan 2010-2015 is Cameron’s. Prime Ministers have the ultimate Yes or No decision and must live with the consequences.

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The Guardian: Chilcot delivers crushing verdict on Blair and the Iraq war

The report suggests that Blair’s self-belief was a major factor in the decision to go to war. In a section headed Lessons, Chilcot writes: “When the potential for military action arises, the government should not commit to a firm political objective before it is clear it can be achieved. Regular reassessment is essential.”

The report also bitterly criticises the way in which Blair made the case for Britain to go to war. It says the notorious dossier presented in September 2002 by Blair to the House of Commons did not support his claim that Iraq had a growing programme of chemical and biological weapons. [...]

According to Chilcot, Blair shaped his diplomatic strategy around the need to get rid of Saddam which – he told Bush – was the “right thing to do”. Blair suggested that the simplest way to come up with a casus belli was to give an ultimatum to Iraq to disarm, preferably backed by UN authority.

Chilcot rejects Blair’s view that spurning the US-led military alliance against Iraq would have done major damage to London’s relations with Washington. “It’s questionable it would have broken the partnership,” he writes, noting that the two sides had taken different views on other major issues including the Suez crisis, the Vietnam war and the Falklands.

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BBC4: How Iraq Changed the World

Writer and broadcaster John Kampfner talks to Tony Blair, the former French foreign Minister Dominque de Villepin and others about the global consequences of war in Iraq.

How has the world changed since the fall of Saddam Hussein ten years ago? What effect did the war have on the balance of power, the respect for international institutions and the global standing of the United States and Britain?

George W. Bush described the war as 'a central commitment in the war on terror' but some say that, if anything, it has promoted terrorists and their cause. And then there's liberal interventionism. Have we created a tyrant's charter?

Leading thinkers from Britain, the United States, China and Russia discuss the impact of the war that has dominated our headlines and reshaped our history.

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