The Chilcot report and foreign policy analysis

It’s not every day that a professional interest in analytical thinking gives you a perspective on a major British news story. But last week’s publication of the Chilcot report highlighted the reliance of pro-war arguments — most eloquently and effectively made (then as now) by Tony Blair — on a device known as a ‘counter factual’, namely the justification of one course of action by claims that an alternative choice would have led to worse consequences.

Blair’s defence of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 focused less on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 and more on the threat Hussein might have posed had he remained in place in a possible world in which the US and UK chose not to invade and oust his regime.

Ignore, for a moment, the difference between this argument and the justification for war in 2003, on the basis that Iraq was in breach of UN resolutions and posed an imminent threat to its region and to UK interests. Post-war searches for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction demonstrated unequivocally that the threat posed by Hussein was considerably less ‘imminent’ than had been assumed by Blair and persuasively articulated by him to the public.

It is only fair to acknowledge, however, that the future-orientated argument was always part of the case for intervention. Blair’s televised address at the start of the Iraq war in March 2003 invoked the same spectre of an unacceptable risk from future threats.

In this 2003 address, Blair eloquently advocated a preemptive approach to possible future threats from Iraq:

Britain has never been a nation to hide at the back, but even if we were, it wouldn’t avail us. Should terrorists obtain these weapons, now being manufactured and traded around the world, the carnage they could inflict to our economies, our security, to world peace, would be beyond our most vivid imagination. My judgement as prime minister, is that this threat is real, growing and of an entirely different nature to any conventional threat to our security that Britain has faced before. For twelve years, the world tried to disarm Saddam, after his wars in which hundreds of thousands died. UN weapons inspectors say vast amounts of poisons remain unaccounted for in Iraq. So, our choice is clear: back down, and leave Saddam hugely strengthened, or proceed to disarm him by force. Retreat might give us a moment of respite, but years of repentance at our weakness would, I believe, follow.

Across the Atlantic, the Bush administration had honed a coherent foreign policy doctrine of preemptive action, the use of US power to neutralise threats before they became too dangerous or difficult to address. The then Vice President Dick Cheney made a very clear statement of this argument in an August 2002 speech.

In this speech, Cheney explained that Hussein would — if left unchecked — grow more powerful and dangerous than the US could allow:

Should all his ambitions be realized, the implications would be enormous for the Middle East, for the United States, and for the peace of the world. The whole range of weapons of mass destruction then would rest in the hands of a dictator who has already shown his willingness to use such weapons, and has done so, both in his war with Iran and against his own people. Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop ten percent of the world’s oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies, directly threaten America’s friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.

Reasoning from past experience of Iraq’s bad faith and lack of cooperation with UN inspections in the 1990s, Cheney concluded in this speech that it would be unwise to trust any new inspection regime to constrain Hussein’s long-term plans to develop his WMD programmes and enhance the threat Iraq could pose. This was also an important premise in the counter factual argument deployed by Blair.

THE MECHANICS OF THE ARGUMENT

In his 6 July response to Chilcot, Blair conceded that the ‘aftermath [of war] turned out to be more hostile, protracted and bloody than ever we imagined.’ He continued to insist, however, that the alternative to replacing Saddam would have been even worse:

It is claimed that by removing Saddam we unleashed terrorism in the Middle East today. I profoundly disagree. Saddam was himself a wellspring of terror, a continuing threat to peace and to his own people. Had he been left in power in 2003, then I believe, for the detailed reasons I shall give, he would once again have threatened world peace, and when the Arab revolutions of 2011 began, he would have clung to power with the same deadly consequences as we see in the carnage of Syria; whereas at least in Iraq, for all its challenges, we have today a Government, recognised as legitimate, fighting terrorism with the international community in support of it. The world was and is better off without Saddam.

Blair relies on the post-war report of the Iraq Survey Group, which found that Iraq had a strategic plan to eventually re-commence its WMD programmes. On this basis, Blair concluded that Saddam Hussein ‘would have resumed his earlier development of nuclear and chemical weapons. If that is conceivable as it surely is, then his removal avoided what would otherwise have been an unacceptable risk.’

Blair’s argument relies on four key points:

1. Saddam Hussein had used WMD in the past (against Iraqi civilians and Iranian soldiers in the 1980s), therefore demonstrating a possible intent to use them in future;
2. As a sponsor of terrorism, there was always a possible risk that Hussein’s WMD materials might be proliferated to terrorist groups, to be used against western targets;
3. International sanctions and inspections were underpinned by a fragile and fraying consensus, with many nations favouring the relaxation of sanctions — over time this could have enabled Iraq to rebuild its WMD programmes and again pose a threat to the region and the world; and
4. The assertion that the possible consequences of Saddam Hussein’s continued rule, including his likely violent response to an Arab Spring style revolt, would cumulatively have been a greater risk than was the decision to invade Iraq and oust him, even though that decision has led to massive loss of life, increased instability in the region, and an elevated terrorist threat to the UK.

HOW TO EVALUATE A COUNTER FACTUAL

The problem with counter factual analysis is that statements such as these are impossible to verify or falsify: they deal in what might have been, rather than in what was or is, so we cannot easily test the strength or weakness of these conclusions. By definition, Blair’s claims are about things that did not happen, so no-one can apply the evidence of experience to test them.

At this point, you might be tempted to paraphrase Wittgenstein and say: ‘when you can’t speak meaningfully about something, you should just shut up.’ But we cannot do this, not because it is somehow necessary to respond to Tony Blair’s self-defence, but because scenarios like this are (or should be) at the heart of any signficant foreign policy decision.

Whatever your deeply-felt beliefs about the Iraq war, it’s clear that there was a big decision to be made about how to deal with Saddam Hussein: whether to make the best possible effort to contain his regime and to deter him from aggression or proliferation, or to eliminate the risk he posed by removing his regime. Faced with a choice between a range of possible options, governments need to have mechanisms for exploring (and vigorously debating at a high level) the relative merits of these scenarios, they need structured analytical techniques and tools to help presidents and prime ministers to arrive at balanced decisions about the most prudent course of action. Counter factual analysis can play a part in this, whether it is pursued rigorously and analytically, or, as appears to have been the case in 2003, in a less systematic manner.

The crucial lesson is that governments need to help political leaders to think clearly about the possible consequences of each option, to weigh the risks comparatively, and ultimately to form a judgement about the most prudent course of action.

THE PROS AND CONS OF INTERVENTION

In a 2000 article for Foreign Affairs, Condoleeza Rice advocated regime change in Iraq but also emphasised the continuing relevance of deterrence as a strategic response to the threat of WMD-armed rogue states:

These regimes are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence — if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.

It took time for the Bush administration to agree on invasion as the only course of action likely to succeed in removing Hussein’s regime. Support for opposition groups, covert action, and the persistent degradation of Iraq’s capabilities through sanctions, were all components of US strategy prior to the invasion. But by mid-2oo2 — around the time of Cheney’s speech above — invasion had become a fixed point in US policy (‘seen as inevitable’ in the words of one contemporaneous UK government document released to the Iraq Inquiry).

A decision like this, between a strategy of containment (perhaps amplified by targeted bombings of credible WMD targets as and when they appeared) and one of full-scale armed intervention, entails the weighing of several different factors. Flawed intelligence about the current WMD threat posed by Iraq undoubtedly played a role in this decision, but so did ingrained beliefs — not inherently unreasonable — that Saddam Hussein could not be trusted to comply with inspections without trying to cheat and beat the process.

As Blair conceded in his response to Chilcot, pre-war assessments of the likely post-war security environment were egregiously inaccurate, and this will also have contributed significantly to a decision-making calculus that made intervention look like a more attractive choice than the continuation of a flawed and fraying process of sanctions and inspections.

And yet, if a more accurate and severe estimation of post-war chaos and violence had weighed into the equation, what exactly would it have been weighed against? There is a lack of clarity and specificity in Blair’s post-Chilcot statement about the possible future threat posed by Saddam Hussein if he had been left in place.

How many lives does Blair think would have been at risk in the possible world in which Saddam Hussein was not removed from power? How many more lives were at stake than have been lost cumulatively since 2003? To arrive at such unswerving certainty, what was the process he used to quantify the size, scope and probability of this risk? There appears to be an inferential gap between the intensity of his conviction and the rigour of the analysis.

In any case, we may be criticising the wrong counter factual argument. It is likely that the US-led intervention would have gone ahead without UK support, in which case the key question is: would it have been better for the UK not to have joined the intervention? Blair was faced with choosing between assisting the US intervention or standing aside. As Steve Richards wrote on the eve of the Chilcot report’s publication:

Blair never had to answer the question: should the UK invade Iraq? He had to answer a different one: should I support President Bush who has decided he wants to remove Saddam Hussein?

Ultimately, Blair decided that to maintain the closest possible alliance between the US and UK, he needed to offer full support for the intervention, and in so doing he might be able to situate the UK as a moderating influence in that partnership. This goes a long way to explain the increasingly tortuous process of seeking explicit UN Security Council authorisation for the invasion.

It also explains Blair’s response to Chilcot’s claim that, in 2003, the war was not yet necessary, as it could have been delayed to allow more time for the inspections process. Blair’s view was that, in light of the US decision to invade: ‘I didn’t have the option of that delay: I had to decide.’ As Richard Haass recently noted, it is arguable that Blair made the wrong decision in pushing through with full support despite the shortcomings in US planning for the intervention and its aftermath.

More rigorous and sophisticated analysis of the competing scenarios, culminating in a vigorous debate at Cabinet-level, could have helped to inform and improve the decision-making process — irrespective of whether the issue was ‘intervention versus containment’ or of choosing between different ways of satisfying Britain’s role in the ‘special relationship.’

In the case of deciding between intervention and containment, analysis would have tried to assess whether Blair’s perceived possible future risks — renewed belligerence from an emboldened Hussein, proliferation of WMD to terrorists — could feasibly be mitigated by the strategy of deterrence and containment (the threat of ‘national obliteration’) that Condoleeza Rice alluded to in her 2000 article for Foreign Affairs. Certainly, on the one occasion Iraq had previously been attacked by nuclear-armed states — the first Gulf War — he had refrained, prudently, from using his WMD.

Whilst in the case of choosing between different ways of supporting the US policy of intervention — e.g. from being as full a partner in the invasion as we became, to a menu of more limited options including logistical support, use of bases, and intelligence cooperation — the analytical task would have been to frame the longer term impact of each choice on the vitality of the strategically crucial relationship with the US. As I have argued elsewhere, in connection with Syria policy, there is a broad spectrum of ways in which the UK can fulfil its obligations to its allies.

I recognise that, as Blair stressed in his response to Chilcot, these were ultimately questions for his government to answer. As Blair put it, in singularly personal terms, rather than those of collective Cabinet responsibility: ‘At a moment of crisis such as this, it is the profound obligation of the person leading the Government of our country to take responsibility and to decide.’

From evidence to the Iraq Inquiry, it appears that structured analytical techniques, analysis of competing scenarios, and red-teaming, were less a feature of Blair’s pre-war policy planning than they might have been, and that the merits of continued containment and deterrence, or of a less extensive contribution to the intervention, were less strenuously pressed, tested and challenged during Cabinet-level or sub-Committee discussions than we might reasonably have hoped from collective decision-making processes at the highest level of government.

FACING THE FUTURE

Because of the Iraq war’s formative impact on everyone who came of age, politically speaking, in the late 1990s an early 2000s, memories of the war will shape the way the next generation of Britain’s leaders approaches foreign policy. They will use it, consciously or not, reliably or not, as a guide to the decisions they face in office. For that reason alone, a thorough-going exercise like the Iraq Inquiry would be worthwhile, provoking the kind of reflection and lesson-learning that should be at the heart of any policy-making process.

Despite the proliferation of early commentary, it’s much too early to judge the success of the Chilcot Report. The extent to which his inquiry fulfils its stated aim — to learn lessons from the war — will be determined to a large extent by the use to which its report is put by current and future generations of thinkers and practitioners, and by the more diffuse way in which it is absorbed into the public mind, shaping the domestic constraints on British foreign policy.

The experience of the Iraq war and its aftermath should certainly make future prime ministers more cautious in their plans for military intervention: things can and do go badly wrong. But it is also true that inaction has its own costs: the world saw this, for example, in Rwanda. As Haass recently noted, we must strive to avoid drawing the ‘wrong’ lessons from the Iraq war.

The Iraq Inquiry gives us many insights into the causes of foreign policy failure. I think that Tony Blair’s self-defence also tells us something about shortcomings in foreign policy analysis. A more rigorous, structured and reflective approach could help his successors face more confidently the threats and challenges of the future.

Just as prime ministers can rely on a process of intelligence assessment to give them a better understanding of current threats, they should be able to draw on, and should recognise the need to draw on, a more structured analytical process, incorporating red-teams and other techniques of test and challenge, to foster the most reflective and insightful system of foreign policy decision-making. One of the major lessons of the Chilcot report is that the capacity to analyse, test and challenge policy needs to be more robust, distributed and prominent than it was in 2003.