Chilcot Report: Executive Summary

by John Chilcot

'A further and devastating indictment not only of Tony Blair personally but of a whole apparatus of state and government, Cabinet, Parliament, armed forces, and, far from least, intelligence agencies.

-- GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

'It offers a long and painful account of an episode that may come to be seen as marking the moment when the UK fell off its global perch, trust in government collapsed and the country turned inward and began to disintegrate.'

-- PHILIPPE SANDS, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

Description

All the key findings of the public inquiry into the handling of the 2003 Iraq war by Tony Blair's government in a 60,000-word book.

Chaired by Sir John Chilcot, the Iraq Inquiry (known as the 'Chilcot Report') tackled:

- Saddam Hussein's threat to Britain

- the legal advice for the invasion

- intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and

- planning for a post-conflict Iraq.

The behaviour of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun and the controversy over whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was the subject of the film Official Secrets.

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Privy Council's Iraq Inquiry, seven years in the making, provides a lucid recounting of the events of the Iraq War from the British perspective along with lessons learned for the future. The Report clearly delineates the friendship of British PM Tony Blair with President Bush and how that personal relationship was viewed as so successful that many traditional Cabinet decision-making and planning processes were bypassed. The UK joined the war without any clear post-war planning and an assumption that the USA's planning would be sufficient. When that turned out to not be the case, the UK became responsible for the reconstruction of the four southernmost provinces of Iraq--a task it never intended to assume and was unequipped to accomplish.

[Leopold Benedict · Rating 4 out of 5]

The report is a thorough and well-researched investigation of the UK's role in the Iraq War of 2003. This document is the 140 page summary. The complete report is with over 2,6 million words a truly elephant-sized document. The report shows how the UK government overestimated their influence on the US decision making process, lacked a proper plan for post-conflict reconstruction and mislead the public with regard to the weapons of mass destruction. In the end it is worrying to see how easy western democracies choose to go to war in the 21st century.

[Joseph McHale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Composed entirely from the Chilcot report, this book features nothing but excerpts from the huge report. Concise and well ordered, it is not confusing to read and easy to find points of interest, however, can be dry at times and difficult to keep the attention to.