“The Iraq war was a disaster” is a familiar refrain. Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us very much. Do we mean the concept, the planning, the implementation, the strategy, the tactics, what? Or do we want an official stick with which to beat the government?
Were the problems with the Iraq war just the basis on which we went to war, or inappropriate equipment necessitating lots of UORs ?
Do we just want to know that the whole enterprise was a bad idea, or do we want to see where and why things were done badly or well?
The loudest opposition to the nature of the inquiry has largely come from the grouping around the Stop the War Coalition (a trading name of the Socialist Workers’ Party 1 ). It is worth remembering that this grouping was not only opposed to the war 2 , not only opposed to the Labour government, but opposed to the entire system of government and nature of the state. That suggests that they would be opposed to the inquiry on some basis no matter what as, in their view, the government is necessarily corrupt and serving of capitalist interests.
The more reasoned problems come under three heads; timing, secrecy and outputs.
Timing
The ‘why now’ question is easily answered; British troops there have largely withdrawn. Conducting an honest inquiry would have been impossible if witnesses thought they were kicking the stool from underneath troops in the field.
The ‘how long’ question can only be answered in reference to other inquiries.
The Fingerprint Inquiry; announced 14 March 2008. Yet to report.
The Fraser Inquiry into the Holyrood building; announced July 8th 2003. Report published 15 September 2004.
The Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly; opened 1 August 2003. Report published 28 January 2004
The Cullen Inquiry into the Dunblane massacre; announced 21 March 1996. Report published 30 September 1996
The Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié; announced 20 April 2001. Report published 28 January 2003.
The Cullen Inquiry into the Ladbroke Grove rail disaster; announced 8 October 1999. Report published 17 April 2001
The Davies Inquiry into the Aberfan disaster; announced 26 October 1966. Report published 3 August 1967
The Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday; announced 29 January 1998. Yet to report.
The Butler Review into WMD in Iraq; announced 3 February 2004. Report published 14 July 2004.
The Redfern Report into the Alder Hey organs scandal; announced 3 December 1999. Report published 7 November 2000
The Scott Report into the Matrix Churchill affair; announced November 1992. Published 27 April 2004.
This will of necessity be a painstaking process. Setting an artificial limit of twelve months will not help anyone. I would reply to anyone who says it is being put back till after the election for political reasons that desiring it to report early, half-cock, so that it can be used to hit the Labour party is also a political reason.
Secrecy
Much of the criticism has been on the issue of secrecy.
For one thing, I understand and agree with the logic of certain things being secret. Beyond the obvious issues of national security, I would make two points.
Firstly, we did not cover ourselves in glory. I’m guessing that there are plenty of people who will want to tell their part of the story but will not, for various reasons, want to do it in public. Their own conduct or that of ‘brother officers’ might have been wanting, or they might be concerned about leaving interpreters and other locally employed civilians in the lurch again.
Equally, an honest investigation will have to take information from people who we cannot compel to appear – from the USA, for instance – and who are unlikely to appear if they feel they would compromise confidences. Similarly, would (say) a representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government be likely to appear to discuss oil if their words were ferried direct to Washington and Baghdad?
Outputs
The inquiry has many issues to consider. Off the top of my head, they could include the lead up to the war, WMD, intelligence qua intelligence, use of intelligence, lack of embassy, use of intelligence from allies, the march on Baghdad, de-baathification, troop numbers, mission objectives in Basra, relations with civilians, the Awakening, civil-military co-operation, troop equipment and so on and so forth.
Quite beyond the simple questions of ‘were there WMD’ and ‘was the dodgy dossier sexed up’, there are questions about everything that happened in Iraq. There is a general understanding that we didn’t cover ourselves with glory, but after any operation of the size of Iraq, there is a need for a ‘lessons learned’ exercise. There are going to be two outputs, one public, one secret. As with the Dunblane inquiry, parts of the secret version may be declassified before the time limit to aid that process.
The ouput is not ‘Tony Blair was wrong’ but a whole range of comments, recommendations and criticisms. Those looking for an answer along the lines of ‘Tony Blair was wrong’ are missing the point and, ultimately, will make it harder for us to see where we went wrong, what lessons we can learn and how that affects and constrains future military conduct.
Ultimately, going to war in Iraq was a political decision. While an inquiry may do much, it cannot decide whether a policy was right or wrong. That is reserved for the electorate.
For the record, I opposed the Iraq war.
xD.
This post also appeared at Common Endeavour and in a shortened version at Liberal Conspiracy.
1 – they’re not socialists, they’re not workers and they don’t know how to party
2 – even though it had no problems with declaring “we are all Hezbollah now”