Andrew Marr: We cannot ignore the ghost of Iraq - it reshaped the world order and not in the way the West intended

20 March 2023, 15:22 | Updated: 21 March 2023, 06:36

'I am ashamed' Andrew Marr reflects on 20 years since the Iraq qar

By Andrew Marr

@AndrewMarr9

There's a ghost hanging over Westminster, one we mostly ignore but which today, the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, we really can't.

That war changed so much, mostly in Iraq, of course which descended into a kind of Hell afterwards - you may have heard a prominent Iraqi journalist describing it on my show a little while ago.

If you want numbers, there are plenty of numbers. The Public Library of Science Medicine survey, a middle road between other assessments, gives us 460,000 excess deaths as a result of the war and its aftermath.

Nearly half a million dead who might otherwise be alive today. The Middle East was supposed to have become more peaceful and more democratic. the opposite has happened.

This was supposed to be when the West imposed its moral authority. But by invading a country, albeit one in the hands of a brutal and dangerous dictatorship, without the explicit say-so of the United Nations, Britain and America lost moral authority.

Our real enemies were watching and drawing their own conclusions about military force.

As a journalist I remember vividly flying into Moscow before the war with Tony Blair, to try to get Putin's backing for the invasion.

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I remember the prime minister's spokesman telling us what a great statesman Putin was, and how this was going to lead to a wonderful new era in British-Russian relations.

But Putin was drawing, shall we say, other lessons. I'm not saying there was any moral or other equivalence between his invasion of Ukraine – that of a country with a democratically elected president which has never threatened any of its neighbours, as Blair has recently pointed out - and the Iraq War.

But 2003 was a year in which we lost a lot of our moral standing in the world. Without the Iraq War, Tony Blair would be remembered very differently by history.

There would probably have been no rise of the anti-war Jeremy Corbyn. I reckon the Tories would have found it much harder to dominate the past dozen years.

So perhaps without the Iraq War, less austerity, no Brexit, no Boris Johnson premiership?

Of course - that's how history works. You go down one corridor, not the other… and everything is changed and you can't know how, as you make the decision.

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I remember giving a terribly badly misjudged piece to camera after the fall of Saddam's statue, hailing Blair as a great Prime Minister as a result.

It came after months when I'd been pretty hostile to the war, as I was - I had expected a bloody battle outside Baghdad involving British troops; and I'd never thought that invading Iraq would somehow produce a calm desert democracy – Minnesota with palm trees.

And I think people today forget the intense emotion after 9/11 - the absolute determination to stand alongside the Americans following that day of horror.

All that said, I frankly feel ashamed of what I said on that particular day. Twenty years on, there is plenty of shame and embarrassment still to go round.

I want to finish by reminding you of words from a famous speech Tony Blair made at Labour’s 2001 conference - that is, before the war, but after the Twin Towers attack: "The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.

"This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us."

I quote those words not to mock but to point out that we did reorder the world, just absolutely not in the way intended. The true message, 20 years on, is: be modest.

Let us be cautious. Remember not just wars but what happens after wars. We have ideals and hopes. but we also have, all of us, feet of clay.