The American diplomat tasked with leading the occupation of Iraq in 2003 has backed several key criticisms made by Britain’s Chilcot inquiry despite a defiant response to its report from former president George W Bush and other Republicans.
Writing in the Guardian, Paul Bremer – who administered the coalition provisional authority (CPA) in the months after the war – agreed that prewar planning by both US and UK governments was “inadequate” and accused political leaders of ignoring internal warnings.
“The [Chilcot] commission noted that that ‘bad tidings’ tended not to be heard in London,” he said. “The same was true in Washington. Before the war, a few American military officers suggested the need for a substantial post-conflict military presence. They were not heard.”
Bremer also sharply criticised the failure of western forces to prevent looting in Iraq after the invasion and unrealistic troop commitments made by political leaders in Washington and London.
“As David Richmond, one of the able British CPA colleagues, told the commission, the coalition ‘never got on top of security’,” he added. “So the coalition gave the impression to Iraqis that we were not serious in this most important goal of any government. No doubt this failure encouraged some members of what became the resistance.”
The comments contrast with a defiant response from George W Bush, who was celebrating his 70th birthday by cycling with wounded veterans at his ranch in Texas when the long-awaited UK report by Sir John Chilcot was published on Wednesday.
“Despite the intelligence failures and other mistakes he has acknowledged previously, President Bush continues to believe the whole world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power,” said a spokesman for the former president. “He is deeply grateful for the service and sacrifice of American and coalition forces in the war on terror. And there was no stronger ally than the United Kingdom under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair.”
Prominent neoconservative commentators in Washington also pushed back at the report’s findings, agreeing with Blair that events in Iraq could have been worse without the invasion.
“US-UK intervention offered Iraq a better future,” wrote the former Bush speechwriter David Frum after the report came out. “Whatever [the] West’s mistakes: sectarian war was a choice Iraqis made for themselves.”
“[There was] no US-UK intervention in Syria: and it collapsed into sectarian war even more horrible than Iraq’s,” he added.
Bremer also says he disagrees with Chilcot on the wider merits of invading Iraq, as well as criticism of the decision to remove senior Ba’ath party officials from government posts after the war.
“I believe history will agree that it was the correct, if difficult, decision to remove Saddam,” he writes. “Had we not done so, today we would likely confront a nuclear armed Iraq facing off against a nuclear armed Iran. Bad as the unrest in the region is today, that would be worse.”
Dave Wurmser, a former Middle East adviser to US vice-president Dick Cheney, told the Guardian via email that blame for current terrorism in Iraq lay with Iran and Syria. “Today’s Isis is a descendent of the Ansar al-Islam movement/Fatah al-Islam movement, which emerged from the refugee camps of Nahr al-Barid in Lebanon. They came originally from al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida, but retreated through Syria to Lebanon after his death. All intelligence at the time suggested that Ansar al Islam/Fatah al-Islam had substantial support from the Syrian and Iranian regimes, both of which were trying to stoke sectarian conflict in Iraq to undermine our position. The current plague of Isis is a direct result of those Iranian-Syrian policies.”
He added of the report: “The estimates of hundreds of thousands of killed Iraqis by US or British troops is simply contemptible gibberish. As bad as it might have been, and much of the bad was a result of Iranian and Syrian actions, Iraq remains the only relatively free Arab state in the region with a government representative of the people.”
The White House said it had not been able to fully read the report yet, but stressed its support for Barack Obama’s view of the Iraq war.
“I don’t know that anyone in the US government has had an opportunity to evaluate the entirety of the report,” said spokesman Josh Earnest. “The president’s longstanding opposition to the war in Iraq is well known ... [He] has been dealing with the consequences of that fateful decision for the entirety of his presidency and future presidents will likely do the same.”
But officials insisted the experience would not hurt future cooperation between Washington and London.
“It is important that the US learn the lessons from those past mistakes,” added Earnest. “But what is also true is that the UK and US have a special relationship and the ability of our leaders to work together ... has made our countries more prosperous and more safe and I expect that relationship will endure regardless of who is in power.”
The report coincided with a separate announcement by Obama of higher-than-anticipated troop deployment in Afghanistan.
