THE case for going to war in Iraq was "frankly delusional" and ultimately gave rise to the Islamic State, a senior US military professor has said during a visit to Scotland.
Professor Martin Cook, a US Defence Department employee who teaches senior officers at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island, also cautioned against any armed intervention against Isis in the Middle East, saying it was "something we have to leave Muslims to sort out themselves".
Prof Cook, Admiral James Bond Stockdale professor of professional military ethics, was at Glasgow University for a two-day seminar exploring what victory means in the context of modern warfare.
It was organised to coincide with the launch of a four-year research project led by Glasgow University which will bring together scholars and military professionals to consider how armed conflicts are concluded in light of protracted and messy "endgame" struggles in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, as well as the so-called War on Terror.
It comes amid controversy over fresh delays in publishing the long-awaited Chilcot report on why Britain entered the Iraq war in 2003.
Speaking in a personal capacity, Prof Cook said: "The people who led us into Iraq had frankly delusional ideas of what was going to happen there. Vice President Cheney was saying 'we're going to be walking in there as liberators', Wolfowitz was saying it won't cost us any money because the oil will pay for the whole thing. It was just crazy - and it turned out to be crazy.
"In some sense we created them [the Islamic State], there's no question about that. I understand the desire to try and contain them as much as possible but we're not going to go in there and defeat them militarily, and even if we did it wouldn't put an end to the thought process that created Isis in the first place - another group with a different name but a similar ideology would just emerge in its place. This is something we have to leave Muslims to sort out themselves."
He added that Libya's descent into chaos after the west intervened to help remove Gaddafi would ultimately backfire on the international community by undermining future Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) actions, which permit a state's sovereignty to be overridden when it fails to protect its population from genocide, war crimes and other human rights atrocities.
"The way it actually played out, this will probably be the last RtoP that we are going to see in my lifetime because the Chinese and the Russians take the view that we so exceeded the mandate that the Security Council gave us, that they will never authorise one again - they'll veto it," said Prof Cook. "So if you care about the underlying case for RtoP then you've got to be thinking in retrospect that it was a mistake, because it undermined the whole legal process."
Dr Cian O'Driscoll, a political scientist at Glasgow University who is leading the project, said the traditional "mission accomplished" declarations of victory associated with World War Two or the Battle of Waterloo 200 years ago, were outdated.
"It's theatre," he said. "It reflects that we still hold onto these outdated conceptions of what winning a war looks like and what war is.
"There's this idea that at the end of a conflict the leader stands up and says 'we won', everybody goes home, and the issue is resolved. The last 10 years have shown us the fact that that way of thinking doesn't quite cut it anymore."
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