Former UK Foreign Secretary and sitting International Rescue Committee Chief Executive David Miliband speaks during a Reuters Newsmaker event at the Thomson Reuters building in New York City, May 29, 2015. (Reuters)

UK former Foreign Secretary admitted that the war on Iraq caused "real damage" to Western claims to advocate for a law-based international order, noting that supporting the war was "one of the deepest regrets” of his political career.

“I voted for the war, I supported the government’s position,” David Miliband, now chief of the International Rescue Committee IRC, said during the Hay festival in Wales. “There’s no question in my mind about quite how serious a mistake that was.”

The war on Iraq was “a strategic mistake”, partly due to “the global lesson that it allowed to be taught”.

“I don’t believe myself that it excuses what’s happened subsequently in Ukraine,” he added, but considered voices calling out the West as being hypocritical in its stance against Russia is a valid argument.

“I think it’s a very, very serious point.”

“Ukraine has united the west, but it’s divided the west and wider parts of the world,” he continued.

While only five countries supported Russia in the UN vote, “40 or 50 countries have refused to join any condemnation, not because they support the invasion of Ukraine, but they feel that the west has been guilty of hypocrisy and weakness in dealing with global problems over the last 30 years," the former top diplomat said.

The head of the IRC urged the crowd present at the festival to read speeches made by Kenyan President William Ruto, who “talks about how the effort in Ukraine should be contrasted with the effort to tackle those other wars in other parts of the world."

Miliband stressed that the Kenyan leader, among others, argues, “Yes, Ukraine has enormous poverty and crimes against its own population, but what about Ethiopia, what about Afghanistan, what about Palestine?"

“And I think that’s what we have to take very, very seriously if we want to understand what’s the role of the west, never mind the UK, in global politics.”

Shock and death

In March 2003, former US President George Bush fabricated a lie claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and launched a UK-backed “shock and awe” bombing campaign on Iraq.

Weeks later, on May 1, Bush declared that the "mission" was accomplished. However, the US-led war was in fact far from over. Weapons of mass destruction never existed, and destruction was all that the US inflicted on Iraq, with its repercussions still evident up to this very day in 2023.

According to figures from Iraq Body Count (IBC), 209,982 Iraqi civilians were killed between 2003 and 2022. 29,526 civilians were killed in 2006 alone, making it the bloodiest year for the Iraqi civilian death toll.

The war resulted in 3.9 million Iraqi refugees that were displaced between 2003 and 2016; 2 million of them fled the country, while 1.9 million were left displaced within Iraq.

The medical journal The Lancet estimated civilian deaths at 600,000. As for Iraqi national military forces and national and local police forces, 48,719 were killed in the period between March 2003 and August 2021.

The numbers, however, do not account for the ones who were killed due to the destruction of healthcare systems, which caused as many deaths from malnutrition and diseases.