Like you, dear reader, I haven't read Chilcot; just the words of those who haven't read it either, or only part of it. But I think we get the gist.
Blair probably committed himself too early; the intelligence on WMD was not wholly watertight; our troops didn't always have the right gear; there was no adequate plan for afterwards; military action should have been a last resort; hundreds of thousands of people died; ISIL rose out of the ashes.
And yet there are counterarguments.
Even if Blair did make a personal decision months in advance, Parliament was free to overrule him. It did not.
The intelligence on WMD may have been flawed (although Chilcot clears Blair of the sexing up allegation), but even so we all believed Saddam had such weapons because we knew he'd gassed the Kurds and because he had obstructed the UN weapons inspectors at every turn. The circumstantial evidence for WMD was overwhelming.
As for the absence of an adequate plan, we were going into coalition with a much larger ally, the United States. Diplomats and soldiers suggest we tried to influence the US approach (itself riven by factionalism) but were often rebuffed. And what plan could conceivably cover every eventuality on the ground?
At the time he was trying to prevent war, Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, said that completing his work would take "not weeks, but months". Given that Saddam's cooperation had only been secured by massing forces on Iraq's borders, how long did Chilcot suggest we should have paid for our armies to remain there?
It's true that many of ISIL's early leaders served time in post-invasion prison camps, but, aside from the generality that removing Saddam was likely to take the lid off the sectarian pot, no-one predicted the rise of ISIL, a phenomenon which owes its emergence as much as anything to the Arab spring revolution in Syria.
In the 13 years since the invasion Iraqbodycount.org has counted about 160,000 violent civilian deaths. That's a little over 10,000 a year. Iraq is still a violent place, but not remotely comparable to the scale of the Saddam Hussein years.
It's worth briefly examining the scale of those casualties. Saddam engaged in repeated assaults on his own people and took Iraq into a disastrous war with Iran. He is thought to have killed about 180,000 people in the 1988 Al Anfal campaign alone. In the 1991 uprising estimates of Kurdish and Shia deaths range between 100,00 and in excess of 200,000. The Iran-Iraq war killed half a million soldiers and, according to one source I found, an equivalent number of civilians. And then we have the constant attrition rate the maintenance of a tyrannical state involves - the torture chambers, the summary executions, the disappearances, the use of chemical weapons at Hallabja. Mass graves are still being found.
Fewer people are dying post invasion, perhaps by as much as a factor of ten.
Chilcot is guilty of the counsel of perfection. His inquiry took seven years to mull over decisions which the Blair government had weeks, days and sometimes hours to consider. Chilcot found that sometimes things didn't go according to plan. Well blow me down! Who could have predicted that?
Moreover Chilcot was given the job of making sense of what happened, not with considering what would have happened otherwise. If the invasion hadn't taken place Saddam Hussein would still have been in power today. Or one of his sons, or some other Ba'ath party hard-man. This prospect reminds me of Orwell's famous image: "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever"
Without the invasion Iraqis would have been denied an opportunity to remake their country. They may have messed it up, but that isn't all our fault.
If the anti-war faction had not taken such a stranglehold on Western political life we might have intervened in Syria. As it was, stymied by Ed Miliband's Labour party, David Cameron lost a Commons vote, Barack Obama forgot his "red lines" and President Assad stayed in power. In Syria the militants stepped into the vacuum and thus ISIL was born.
Chilcot is a luxuriant wallow in hindsight. Shame it didn't look forward and consider the counterfactual a bit more. Its effect is to indulge the fantasy that it's possible to make the world a better place without mistakes, expense or anyone dying.
The reality about liberal intervention is that it's messy, expensive, difficult and time-consuming. It's impossible to plan for every eventuality, and if you think a bomb-proof plan is conceivable you're going to be disappointed. Every time. And yet intervention sometimes works. It worked in Kosovo and in Sierra Leone. If you think it didn't work in Iraq, Google "Iraqi media after Saddam".
In contrast, non-intervention always fails. Why? Because it merely gives bad people like Saddam Hussein or President Assad (or ISIL) space to do whatever they like. The disappointing thing about Chilcot for me is not that he was critical of Blair, but that his criticism will merely reinforce the tendency, already becoming ingrained in Western political life, to isolationism. Unless you want to be vilified like Tony Blair, don't send your troops overseas. Ever.
PS Those of us who think that Blair probably did the best he could under difficult circumstances have been dogged for years by the foolish assertion that Iraq was an "illegal" war. I'm pleased to see that Chilcot knocks this on the head. Not by confirming the war was legal (how would he know?); but by pointing out that no-one knows whether it was or not. The only way to establish this would be to go to Court. It's amazing how many lavishly backed Blair-haters have baulked at this, considering how confident they are in their view. When even international lawyers don't agree on the issue, I think we should be sceptical of pronouncements by those whose closest brush with the law will be contesting a parking ticket.
