The Chilcot Cover-Up

In The American Conservative, Rod Liddle writes:

There is a grave anxiety that gnaws away at Sir John Chilcot as he daily conducts his inquiry into the war in Iraq. By 11 o’clock each morning, as some former Foreign Office mandarin is dissembling about weapons of mass destruction or the legality of the invasion, you can see Sir John beginning to look troubled. A little after midday, this has developed into a rumbling and a mild panic. Soon enough, he will interrupt the evidence and inquire politely, but with some urgency, if perhaps now might be the right time to break for lunch? Or, he will add, in a spirit of democracy but with a slightly crestfallen expression, should we wait until 1 o’clock?

Lunch is an important part of the Chilcot Inquiry, Britain’s third sort-of inquest into the events that led up to the invasion of Iraq. This one has been convened because the present Labour administration, under Gordon Brown, wishes to decouple itself from the gravest failure of the previous Labour administration, under Tony Blair. Or at least I assume that’s the idea. Anyway, over the course of several interminable months all of the British people who had anything to do with the war will be paraded before the inquiry and asked stuff.

I don’t think you Americans would quite believe the Chilcot Inquiry unless you saw it. Even then you might be fooled into thinking it is a production of a hitherto unknown early Terrence Rattigan play, one of those anti-dramas where titled, well-mannered people who attended Eton behave with exquisite politeness toward titled, well-mannered people who attended Harrow. It is a snapshot of Britain that could have been taken with a pinhole camera in 1896. If nothing else, it is at least a salutary reminder that no matter how modern Britain pretends to be, it is not really so. Not at the top.

The counterargument is that at least we are prepared to investigate this farrago, to ask the salient questions. Well, indeed—although that depends upon what you mean by “investigate” and “salient.” We have already had two inquiries into the Iraq War—the Butler Inquiry and the Hutton Inquiry—both of which largely exonerated the government, at least partly as a consequence of the extremely narrow remits that were set down at the start of each process. Now we have a third that, according to Chilcot, is “not a trial,” is not designed to establish guilt or innocence or to apportion blame, but is instead an amiable ramble around the houses before a spot of lunch at the Garrick Club. Thus there has been an almost total absence of forensic inquiry and follow-up questions. Witnesses say things that clearly conflict with things they were saying during the run-up to war, but they are never asked to reconcile these contradictions.

Please forgive the skepticism, or even cynicism, but public inquiries chaired by amenable establishment judges and consisting of amenable establishment figures have been a mainstay of the British system for a century or so, and they have never poked a finger of blame at the government. This may, of course, be because over the last 100 years the British government has at all times behaved with the utmost probity, honesty, and decency. Certainly this is the line taken by government ministers over Hutton and Butler: You see, we told you so. It’s just that you people are determined to vilify the government and are not prepared to accept the official decision.
Inquiries of this kind only ever work when they are held 30 or 40 years later, and everybody who might be implicated by them is dead. If we held an inquiry into Suez right now it is entirely possible that the chairman would find that Britain may just have overstepped the mark a little with regard to Egypt, but benefit of hindsight, past is a different country, not much we can do about it now, etc.

Let’s take a look at the people doing the inquiring. There’s Sir John Chilcot in the chair, a former civil servant attached to the security services who has been accused of “spoon-feeding” easy questions to the witnesses and has told them that they need not answer questions they consider inappropriate. Then there’s the eminent historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who was four-square behind the invasion of Iraq from day one and has already served on the Butler Inquiry, which cleared the government of misleading the public and the House of Commons. Then we have Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, who wrote some of Tony Blair’s foreign-policy speeches, including the one our former prime minister made in Chicago where he outlined the criteria by which civilized countries like Britain and the U.S. might wage war against Third World Islamic hellholes. Are you beginning to get a flavor of this thing? There’s the former diplomat Sir Roderic Lyne, who, in his genteel way, has asked the most penetrating questions so far. And Baroness Usha Prashar, who is presumably on the panel because she is a nice middle-class Asian lady who has done many nice things in her life but has so far not asked a single question of pertinence or point. These are the people charged with the task of discovering the truth.

From the witnesses—mainly civil servants but with a sprinkling of charismatic guests such as Blair, his spin doctor Alastair Campbell, and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw—we have heard the same stuff we heard in the Butler Inquiry.

We know that even in the autumn of 2002, Iraq was considered less of a threat to the West than Libya and Iran. We have heard again how Blair pledged to stand beside the U.S. in its dealings with Iraq as early as spring 2002, and from that moment on we were headed to war, with or without the United Nations’ approval. It has been reiterated that the September dossier, which detailed Iraq’s threat to the West, was not merely based upon flawed intelligence, but was “sexed up” in order to provide a compelling case for the public—and the House of Commons and the cabinet—to take military action. We have heard once again that in the last month or two before the invasion, the British government received persuasive intelligence reports that Iraq had no program for weapons of mass destruction, posed no threat, had no official links with any Islamic terrorist organizations, and was beginning to comply with the UN weapons inspectors.

In short, we have had confirmed what we knew all along: Britain, via a short conversation between our prime minister and President George W. Bush, committed itself to doing pretty much whatever the U.S. wanted to do about Iraq. As this criterion for an invasion might not prove sufficiently alluring to the public or to Parliament, Blair and his close lieutenants flammed up Iraq’s military threat in a manner that deceived all of our major institutions. A nuclear program? Nope. A program of WMD that was “beyond all reasonable doubt”? Nope. An ability to strike at British targets within 45 minutes? Don’t be so bloody stupid. This much we knew already, but the cavalier approach to those nonexistent weapons of mass destruction continues to thrill the layman. We discovered, early on in the inquiry, that Iraq’s possession of chemical weapons was not predicated upon it having, uh, chemical weapons. As one sage put it, as a country with a vibrant petro-chemical industry, Iraq had the ability to create chemical weapons pretty quickly and had no need to stockpile them. As it also possessed ballistic missiles—a means of delivery of those hypothetical chemical weapons—then de facto, it had chemical weapons. Even if it didn’t.

Only Brits get a chance to take part in this production. There will be no Bush or Rumsfeld or Cheney. More pertinently, no Hans Blix.

The spin from the major players—the cabinet, Blair, Campbell—continues unabated. They say, in the most reasonable of terms: listen, we made a decision to invade Iraq. That may have been the wrong decision, and we can have a valuable and rewarding debate about that. But come on, do not suggest that we lied or acted under anything other than good faith.

The complete reverse of the argument is the truth. It may well be that invading Iraq was, in the long term, the right thing to do—although I would disagree, and so would many others over here. But it is beyond dispute that the government dissembled, it exaggerated, it distorted. It misled the British Parliament and the British people. Its reasons for invading Iraq were simply not those that it stated at the time. Instead of commissioning intelligence reports to ascertain the nature of Iraq’s threat to either the West or to neighboring Arab countries, it made up its mind and twisted the intelligence to suit that conclusion. This was pretty clear shortly after the invasion, and it is even clearer now. But don’t expect our Chilcot Inquiry to conclude such a thing. It is not there to apportion blame.