Tony Blair & the Iraq War

Warfare

History Hit

History

4.5 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the 2022 New Year Honours list, alongside the names of Joanna Lumley, Moira Stuart and Emma Raducanu, was that of Tony Blair. Over a million people have since signed a petition opposing his appointment as Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, because of his involvement in the Iraq war. In this episode, we go back to take a look at the decisions that led to Iraq and at the context it occured in. Brigadier (retd) Ben Barry OBE is a former director of the British Army Staff in the UK Ministry of Defence and author of the Army’s lessons learned analysis of post-conflict stabilisation of Iraq. He is now Senior Fellow for Land Warfare, International Institute for Strategic Studies, and joins us to share his opinion on the Iraq war. His book is ‘Blood, Metal and Dust: How Victory Turned into Defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq’.

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Transcript

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0:15.8	Hello everyone I'm your host James Rogers and welcome to warfare a podcast that is on the front line of military history each week twice a week I bring you brand new cutting edge military history's new historical findings and we place current world events into their proper historical context. This week is no different.
0:17.9	As the petition to remove a knighthood from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair
0:22.1	passes more than a million signatures.
0:24.8	We ask is the XPM the least deserving person, as the petition says, to get an honour
0:31.2	due to his role in the Iraq war.
0:34.0	To take us through this history we have Brigadier Ben Barry, who was director of the British
0:38.4	Army staff and led the team that wrote the British Army's final analysis of its campaign in Iraq.
0:44.0	Ben is now a senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies,
0:49.4	I-S, and the author of a new book, Blood, Metal and Dust, how victory turned to defeat in
0:55.7	Afghanistan in Iraq, and so he is the perfect person to take us through these
1:00.3	controversies, successes and failures of the Iraq War. Enjoy. Hi Ben, thanks for taking the time to chat. How are you doing today? How's the start of your new year going?
1:24.7	It's going well. We managed to avoid getting COVID over Christmas within my family.
1:29.3	And I've actually taken a couple of weeks off to start work on my next book called the rise and
1:34.5	fall of the British Army in 1970 to 2020 which looks at the British Army from an unusual
1:40.0	perspective namely it's rise and fall it's great improvement in capability up to the 1990s,
1:46.3	and then it's marrying in unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and steadily getting
1:51.4	smaller since 1990 as well.
1:53.7	And so this runs parallel to your own career.
1:56.1	Give us a little insight into your background.
1:58.1	Well, I joined the Army in 1975.
2:00.6	I spent a brief period actually as a private soldier doing recruit training with the light infantry.
2:05.3	The regiment I subsequently joined after graduating from Santos at the end of 1976.
	...

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