​One reason Britain and its allies failed in Iraq is that their leaders never respected Iraq, its history and its people - treating them all with contempt.
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Coursing through the entire Iraq crisis, one major theme stands out from Britain’s (and America’s) handling of Iraq which, if not addressed, will undermine every intervention in the future, including the present ones. Though it is never stated explicitly, the whole Iraq Inquiry (aka Chilcot) report exposes it at every stage.

It is the patronising, arrogant and contemptuous attitude towards Arabs, Iraqis and indeed Arabists. There was a systematic failure in treating Iraq and Iraqis with respect, an attitudinal malaise that goes to the heart of this, the most disastrous episode in British foreign policy in modern times, and one shared by the American neocons of President George W Bush.  

​Historically the evidence for this British contempt for Iraq is voluminous. Britain arbitrarily drew up Iraq’s borders to ensure that the oil fields around Mosul lay under British control, regardless of the implications for whether this new state would be viable or whether the locals minded.

From 13th century law to civil claims, MEE's Mary Atkinson runs through several ways Blair might face justice over Iraq invasion.

The long-awaited Chilcot report into the lead-up and execution of the Iraq war – published on Wednesday after a seven-year wait – savaged the politicians responsible for leading the UK’s participation in the invasion, particularly then-prime minister Tony Blair.
The report condemned the rush to war and exposed Blair for committing to support US forces long before British politicians and military leaders were informed, but it didn’t go as far as accusing the former leader of war crimes.

Many anti-war campaigners and relatives of the 179 British troops killed in the campaign still want concrete action against Blair. Many want to see him tried for war crimes – but what does that actually mean, and what national or international legislation could be used to prosecute him for alleged wrongdoings?

The International Criminal Court (ICC), based in The Hague, is the only permanent international body with the authority to prosecute war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. However, the court is unable to pursue Blair. Lawyers prosecuting him for war crimes would have to prove that he personally knew about and signed off on atrocities committed on the ground by British troops.

The Chilcot Report delivered a damning verdict on the UK Government's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. For people in Britain this might act as some comfort, those responsible may soon be held to account, but for young people in Iraq does it mean anything?The exact number of civilian deaths in Iraq since the 2003 invasion will never be known, but estimates place the figure somewhere between 200,000 and one million.

After tremendous pressure was places on the UK Government, 6 years after the Iraq invasion, Gordon Brown commissioned the Chilcot Inquiry, charges with producing a report that would look into the circumstances under which the war took place.

The process, which costed over £10 million and took over 7 years to provide results comes in at over 2 million words, but in reality there’s very little inside it that you couldn’t find out from spending five minutes with your average Iraqi, and fails to rule on whether Tony Blair, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, should be tried for war crimes.

The report, and the subsequent coverage in the UK media, has been focussed entirely on what this means for the UK, and any future interventions. But what do young Iraqis, who grew up in the midst of the destruction, make of it all?

​Whilst there was a slew of articles being released on an almost daily basis in the wake of the Chilcot Report into the illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, it is highly unlikely that most of those authors managed to even read the Executive Summary, let alone the entire report. Nevertheless, many of those who have close to no knowledge of Iraq, speak any of the languages of the people of Iraq, and have no idea about what is going on in Iraq today decided to grace us with their “expertise” and “analysis” in the newspapers and on TV.
 
The sluice gates of Western hypocrisy, self-pity and immoral moralising were opened, unleashing a deluge of the so-called experts who charge out in defence of the West whenever their political leadership have been exposed as the deceitful warmongers that they are. As such, a lot of the analyses now clogging up the internet are dubious at best, and this is perhaps best reflected by those Western-policy apologists appearing in the media in the immediate aftermath of the report’s release crying, “But we didn’t know this would happen!”. That is, quite simply, a bare-faced lie.
 
Iraq has been destroyed, subjected to horrors few others on this planet have ever experienced or can even imagine, and the entire country has been made into an almost contiguous warzone from north to south, east to west. Even the “New Dubai”, Erbil, that is under the authority of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) is now looking less and less viable as an investment as it cannot be separated from the rest of the war-ravaged country.
 
Indeed, the Chilcot Report makes it abundantly clear that the British government was warned repeatedly by subject matter experts, academics and many others prior to Tony Blair’s fateful decision to join in on the destruction of an entire nation, people and civilisation. In his 2010 autobiography, A Journey, Blair claims that Iraq’s dissent into sectarian chaos was due to al-Qaeda and Iran choosing to intervene in post-invasion Iraq. Few can argue with the logic of that argument, and even fewer would deny it (apart from Iran apologists, of course).