Taking the country to war is one of the most serious decisions a government can make. So it is right and proper that once the troops return home, there is a full investigation. To the greatest extent possible — given intelligence relationships and the need not to reveal information that could compromise national security — that inquiry should be public. It is essential for maintaining trust that people understand and have confidence in how such decisions are made. There is, however, something deeply unedifying about the debate over the coming Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war and its aftermath.
This inquiry is being convened for all the wrong reasons. Gordon Brown announced it not because it was the right thing to do but because he is too enfeebled to resist any demand from any faction of the Labour party. Indeed, so weak is the Prime Minister that, having conceded an inquiry to appease the left of the party, he was also forced to allow Peter Mandelson — as John Kampfner reveals on page 14 — to dictate its terms in a way favourable to Tony Blair. Flip-flop concessions are now being granted on how much of the inquiry should take place in private to prevent Mr Brown losing a vote in the House of Commons. The internal politics of the Labour party, rather than the national interest, is driving this process.
The inquiry will also — judging by the signals so far from Sir John Chilcot — focus on ground that has already been tilled extensively. We have already had five inquiries into how the intelligence was used in the run-up to the war. It is hard to see what good can come from yet another one. If Chilcot wants to perform a genuine public service, he should concentrate on what happened once the decision to go to war had been taken. If he does not, then the inquiry could turn into a kangaroo court that operates on a presumption of guilt towards all those who made decisions about the intelligence and ignores the post-9/11 context in which they were operating.
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.
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