The right inquiry

27 June 2009

The Spectator on the Iraq inquiry the country needs

The painful truth is that the British mission in southern Iraq failed. Basra had to be liberated from the Shiite militias which had been allowed to take over the city by Iraqi and American forces in an operation that the British were not even informed about until it was under way.

This failure has undermined this country’s most important strategic relationship: its partnership with the United States. We need a thorough examination of what went wrong. In an under-reported speech on Tuesday, the outgoing chief of the general staff Sir Richard Dannatt conceded that ‘we failed to maintain the force levels required.’ Chilcot should look into why this was the case, whether requests for more troops were made, and if not, why not. It is imperative that we discover how and why the decision to reduce the British force was taken. It also needs to be established where on the chain of command the plan to reduce the British presence originated.

Iraq should have taught us one thing: there is a danger in a collective rush to judgment. Before the war, too few in the political class were prepared to question the intelligence. Once the mission ran into trouble, politicians were too keen to accept that the war was lost and that the question was how to manage the retreat. Both the government and the opposition endorsed with indecent haste the American Baker–Hamilton report’s recommendations in 2006 for how to withdraw, while ignoring the arguments for a surge of forces. Now, everyone is ignoring the risks of a public discussion of intelligence sources and methods. An inquiry that compromises national security by weakening the capabilities and morale of the intelligence services is not in the public interest.