Iraq Inquiry: Thorough? Rigorous? Or another whitewash?

By Robin Beste, Stop the War Coalition

Cartoon by Martin Rowson

One look at the composition of the Chilcot panel starts the alarm bells ringing.

Chilcot himself – a former civil servant -- was a member of the Butler inquiry that cleared Tony Blair of dishonestly using intelligence in the run-up to the war.

The Butler exoneration of Blair was quite a feat, given the overwhelming evidence that he concocted intelligence to inflate the threat posed by Iraq and lied repeatedly to his cabinet, his party and the British public.

Panel member historian Sir Lawrence Freedman helped Blair to develop his doctrine of liberal interventionism, outlined in a speech in Chicago in 1999 and subsequently used to justify the Iraq war.

Panel member historian Sir Martin Gilbert said in 2004 that Blair and George Bush could one day be compared to Churchill and Roosevelt, in other words as figures that history would revere.

When Chilcot was asked whether any of the five members had opposed the war, he said it wasn’t 'helpful' to discuss their personal opinions. We can take that as a 'No' then.

Open inquiry?

Chilcot promises the inquiry will be 'as open as possible'. Which means the panel will decide what and who the British people get to hear in public. So will all the testimony of key witnesses like Blair, Jack Straw and others culpable in war crimes be heard in public? The suspicion must be that the function of this inquiry -- like the Butler and Hutton reports before it -- is once again to exonerate the war criminals.

And will the central questions be asked and answered in public:

• Did Tony Blair give secret undertakings to George Bush in March 2002?
• What advice did the Attorney General give on the legality of the war?
• Why was the British government so disastrously wrong on weapons of mass destruction?
• Why did Tony Blair and Jack Straw stress taking the Iraq issue to the United Nations but then ignore the UN’s decision not to support a war?

Even if these issues are addressed, those who took the decision to take Britain into an illegal and unjustified war, in which over one million people died, will not be held to account for their action. Chilcot says the panel will not apportion blame in its report: "The inquiry is not a court of law and nobody is on trial."

The decision to go to war with Iraq is a scar on British democracy. What hope that the Chilcot inquiry will go some way towards healing that scar by putting the issue of accountability at its heart? It could begin by allowing the Stop the War Coalition to submit evidence and call expert witnesses to highlight the undemocratic nature of the government’s decision in 2003 to take Britain into a war which was opposed by the vast majority of British people.