Twenty years have passed since George W. Bush announced the start of the US attack on Iraq under the pretext that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” and “defend the world from great danger.” “We will not accept any other result than victory,” he stated in the speech that was broadcast on American television on March 19, 2003.
A few days before, the coalition in support of the war sealed in the Azores –formed by George W. Bush, Tony Blair and José María Aznar, and hosted by the Portuguese Durão Barroso– issued an ultimatum to Hussein and threatened to invade the country of the Middle East to “disarm” it and “liberate its population”. After the war ended, the photo of the meeting became a symbol of the shame of a conflict that, in addition to costing thousands of human lives, displaced persons, orphans and lives cut short, failed in the attempt to “export democracy” to Iraq and unleashed the proliferation of extremist ideologies in the country.
Since this great political mistake that sought to display US hegemony through armored tanks, both the then leader of the White House, George W. Bush, and the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, have been forced to present excuses and answer for their mistakes in front of their fellow citizens. Meanwhile, on his side, the then Spanish president, José María Aznar, is proud of the decisions made, and the former Portuguese prime minister evades responsibility for him.
The US president was the first to admit that the pretext for invading Iraq, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was false. He acknowledged this at a press conference at the White House in August 2006, low times for Washington, when the casualties of US soldiers began to intensify and on the Iraqi side there were hundreds of daily casualties in Baghdad. “The main reason we went to Iraq was because we thought [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction. It turned out that he did not have them, but he had the ability to make them. And he added: “Imagine a world with Saddam Hussein creating even more problems, in a part of the world with so much resentment and so much hatred that they came to kill 3,000 of our citizens” on 9/11.
Two years later, in 2008, Bush declared in an interview on ABC that his biggest regret from the presidency had been “the intelligence mistake in Iraq.” An expression that he kept in the memoir that he published in 2013, when he came to recognize that the evidence had been fabricated and he took responsibility, despite the fact that he continued to excuse himself in the intelligence reports from which he had:
“In the run up to war, my Administration made claims that turned out not to be based on fact. Personally, I sincerely believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But when we couldn’t find the evidence, we fabricated it,” he acknowledged. Bush even admitted that “it was a mistake to exaggerate the nature of the threat (…), but ultimately (…) I accept full responsibility.” He likewise apologized to the American people and to our soldiers and veterans.
More recently, in 2022, the unconscious played a trick on him and ended up saying “Iraq” instead of “Ukraine” when he wanted to condemn “a brutal and totally unjustified invasion.” The former president jokingly attributed his slip to his 75th birthday, but these statements would convince any psychoanalyst that the fiasco of Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction still haunts him.
In October 2015, the former British Labor prime minister apologized during an interview with CNN for “using misintelligence,” acknowledging that he had not anticipated the chaos and violence that caused Saddam Hussein’s ouster.
But it was the publication of the Chilcot report, the result of an independent commission of inquiry into the United Kingdom’s participation in the war, published in 2016, that really put the British president on the ropes and forced him to apologize and accept “full responsibility without exception or excuse” for the consequences of the conflict. “I express more pain, regret and apology than you will ever know or believe,” Blair said in a cracking voice before the international press after the report was released.
The exhaustive work, which had unprecedented access to confidential government documents, came to the conclusion that Saddam Hussein’s regime posed no real threat to British interests and that the war began without exhausting other alternatives. Furthermore, it determined that the way in which the war had been authorized was not supported by a legal basis.
Despite the fact that 85% of the Spanish population rejected military intervention, José María Aznar’s pulse did not tremble in supporting the strategy of “preventive war” in Iraq promoted by the US. Nor has he changed his position now, 20 years later, he remains the only president of the Azores quartet who has not apologized or had to submit to a parliamentary inquiry commission for the consequences of the Iraq war.
It took Aznar until February 2007, months after Bush’s confession, to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and he admitted it at a conference in Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid) before some 500 people, answering a question from a student. “Everyone thought that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – said Aznar – and there weren’t. I know it too… now. I have the problem of not having been so smart to have known it before, “and he justified himself:” When I didn’t know, nobody knew.
In 2021, in an interview with Jordi Évole, Aznar shut down when the journalist asked him if he denied the statements of the then director of the CNI, Jorge Dezcallar, who claims to have warned him a week before the start of the war that there were no indications of the existence of such weapons.
At the beginning of February 2023, the former Spanish president spoke again about the Iraq war, assuring that he was not going to apologize and proclaiming himself “completely proud” to have supported the United States in the invasion. Speaking to the One Decision podcast, he maintained that the war was necessary and that “if he had the same information today [about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq] he would make the same decision again.”
It also manifested itself in relation to the victims caused by the conflict. “I think a lot about them, but I think that the responsibility of the leaders does not change with these circumstances.” In his opinion, supporting the war was a diplomatic strategy to strengthen the Atlantic Alliance. As he had declared years before, for Aznar the photo of him in the Azores together with Bush and Blair was “the most important historical moment that Spain has had in 200 years.”
The most discreet member of the Azores meeting is undoubtedly José Manuel Durão Barroso, Prime Minister of Portugal when the conflict began and host of the meeting. Once president of the European Commission, in November 2007, Barroso claimed that he had been tricked into supporting the war in Iraq in 2003, when he was presented with documents according to which Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. “Information was given to me and to others that did not correspond to the truth,” he said.
In an interview with Diário de Notícias de Portugal, Barroso alleged that he received false information at the Azores conference and justified himself by claiming that he had agreed to hold the meeting “because our allies and friends asked us to” and, among them, the former president Spanish, José María Aznar, was especially enthusiastic about celebrating it.
