Political commentator Peter Oborne presents his unofficial take on The Chilcot Inquiry. Peter Oborne is a columnist for the Daily Mail and former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph . One of Britain's most distinguished and independent political writers, his books include The Triumph of the Political Class and Wounded Tiger . Not The Chilcot Report By Peter Oborne Head of Zeus Ltd Copyright © 2016 Peter Oborne All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-78497-796-2 Contents Cover, Welcome Page, About Not the Chilcot report, Foreword, Abbreviations and Acronyms, Chapter 1. Iraq: The Defining Calamity of the Post-Cold War Era, Chapter 2. Iraq and the West, 1979–2000, Chapter 3. The Shift from Afghanistan to Iraq, Chapter 4. The Road to War, Chapter 5. The Failure of Parliament, Chapter 6. Was the Invasion Lawful?, Chapter 7. From Basra to Helmand Province, Chapter 8. How MI5 was Right About al-Qaeda and Iraq, Chapter 9. The Chilcot Inquiry and Its Antecedents, Chapter 10. Is Tony Blair a War Criminal?, Conclusion, About Peter Oborne, An Invitation from the Publisher, Copyright, CHAPTER 1 IRAQ: THE DEFINING CALAMITY OF THE POST-COLD WAR ERA 'We were with you at the first, we will stay with you to the last.' Tony Blair On 1 May 2003 President George W. Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, posing in flying gear on an aircraft carrier beneath a banner stating 'Mission Accomplished'. In fairness to Bush, he was not responsible for the banner. But the image would haunt him, as it became obvious to the American people that his Iraq mission was not accomplished and never would be. The Iraq War failed in both its immediate and its strategic objectives. Its promoters had depicted Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States and to the international world order. In fact, Saddam's regime was little threat to any other country, was far from acquiring serious weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capacity, and was never remotely likely to supply such weapons to al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group. Al-Qaeda had no support from Saddam and no base in Saddam-controlled Iraq. His fall, however, allowed them to establish themselves in Iraq. They did not acquire WMD, because there were none to acquire, but they did acquire thousands of WDD – weapons of daily destruction – which cost thousands of lives, mostly Iraqi, but also American and British. The Iraq War was part of an ambitious 'forward' policy in which the United States would use its power unilaterally to achieve American goals in the Middle East and throughout the world. Saddam Hussein would be replaced by a pro-American, pro-free market democracy (in a key oil producer with a major influence on the price of oil). This new Iraq would project Western values, counter the threat of Iran and underpin a new and stable order in the Middle East. Instead, the fall of Saddam Hussein led to a long period of violent disorder. This in turn brought about the near-destruction of the Iraqi state, which escalated into a sectarian war between the country's Shia majority and a Sunni minority which felt dispossessed following the fall of Saddam. Iran, meanwhile, acquired new influence within Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Far from embracing Western values, parts of Iraq fell into the hands of terrorist groups who were even more fanatical than al-Qaeda. Only one cause united militant Sunni and Shia opponents: a common hostility to the foreign occupier. British troops, never given the means to achieve their tasks as an occupying power, became onlookers in southern Iraq. In the summer of 2009 the majority were withdrawn, along with American combat troops, but several thousand allied troops remained as trainers and support for the Iraqi army until the final withdrawal in 2011. By that time, Britain had lost 179 soldiers in Iraq, the Americans over 4,000. Thousands more suffered permanent physical or psychological damage. The number of Iraqi casualties is beyond computation. The war had some other unintended consequences. The neoconservatives – among whom the most eminent in the Bush administration were Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz – had sought to establish a doctrine of preventative self-defence whereby the United States would act against perceived threats on the basis of intelligence data. Instead the Iraq War gave the American people a strong aversion to preventative war and indeed any foreign intervention which involved the use of ground troops. Today, the United States and Britain prefer instead to intervene by means of air power, as in Libya, or unmanned drones, as against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. These are forms of warfare which inevitably kill innocent people, whose gains are always likely to be temporary and which give the Western powers no means of controlling events on the ground in the countries concerned. The Iraq