The war with Iraq: where did it all go wrong?
Before the Iraq war, the initials WMD meant little outside defence and diplomatic circles.
But in the years since, those three letters have become emblematic of the distrust and disillusionment felt by many in Britain and the United States at the way their governments took them to war.
Comparisons with the US involvement in Vietnam were quickly batted away by Downing Street and the White House for some time into the Iraq incursion.
Five years on, it is more difficult to dismiss the parallels as the engagement in the Gulf state has become bogged down beyond most early expectations.
The bill for military operations in Iraq has cost the British taxpayer more than £6 billion – more than £100 for every man, woman and child in the UK.
But the fallout from the 2003 invasion has reached much further than the public purse.
It has tarnished Tony Blair’s reputation and left Britain and the rest of the world more reluctant to intervene in far-flung countries.
The weapons that weren’t
Iraq’s supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction may have been at the heart of the case built by Tony Blair and George Bush against Saddam Hussein, but they proved to have no more substance than a desert mirage.
Following the 1991 Gulf War, United Nations inspectors were highly successful in rooting out and destroying Iraq’s chemical, nuclear and biological weapons programmes.
But as the decade wore on, Saddam became increasingly restive and, after a series of tense stand-offs culminating in British and US airstrikes in 1998, the inspectors were finally expelled.
In the years that followed, intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic became concerned that, away from prying eyes, the Iraqis were secretly reconstituting their banned WMD programmes.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on America, Bush and Blair determined that Saddam would have to be dealt with once and for all.
In September 2002, Blair set out the case against Saddam in the government’s now infamous dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which stated that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons – some capable of being deployed within 45 minutes.
A very public denial
With the drum beats of war sounding ever louder, Saddam reluctantly re-admitted the UN inspectors, led by the Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, in an attempt to convince the world the claims were groundless.
But by March 2003, inspections ground on without anything being found. Blair and Bush finally ran out of patience and launched the invasion.
Barely a week after Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled in Baghdad, Bush announced the formation of a 1,200-strong team, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), to track down the missing weapons.
The pressure on them intensified with the suicide of weapons expert Dr David Kelly after he was identified as the source of a BBC report claiming that the government’s dossier had been “sexed up”.
Initially, the ISG’s hopes of finding the weapons were high, but, as the summer wore on, they soon faded.
In the ISG’s final report in October 2004, it likened the difficulties in trying to find the weapons to the “search for extra-terrestrial intelligence,” conceding that all WMDs had been destroyed after 1991 and there was no evidence he had anything left when Britain and the US invaded.
Questionable intelligence
Meanwhile, inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic exposed a series of embarrassing intelligence failings.
In the US, it emerged that the CIA’s main source of evidence, a supposed Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, was a faker who made up information.
In Britain it emerged that much of the intelligence relied upon by MI6 was flawed, while the dossier was criticised for failing to include the reservations the agencies attached to their assessments.
In a final indignity, on October 13 – a week after the ISG report and 25 months after the dossier was published – MI6 formally withdrew its claim that Saddam could deploy his WMD within 45 minutes.
Few decisions divided public opinion as sharply as the decision to topple Saddam Hussein – and that was before rows with the BBC, the suicide of weapons scientist David Kelly and fierce criticism of the government’s use of intelligence.
Nevertheless, the decision to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the US in the aftermath of 9/11 over both Iraq and Afghanistan led to a high-point in transatlantic relations.
International relations have moved on since then, not least with the transfer of power from Blair to Gordon Brown.
But with a series of international crises coming to the fore over the last year – like Darfur, Kenya and Zimbabwe – the public’s appetite for Western involvement is now much diminished.
