This is a project to monitor and comment on the Iraq Inquiry.
Read more about the projectHow Blair led us into war in Iraq
by Brian Jones
This is the lecture that I gave at the Royal United Services Institute yesterday to launch my book Failing Intelligence: How Blair led us into war in Iraq.
In the year or so following my retirement in early 2003, I gave evidence on intelligence and WMD to two of the four inquiries on Iraq – namely Hutton and Butler.
I was less than completely satisfied with what emerged from these, and indeed the other two inquiries, by the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee, so through 2004 I wrote a number of articles and gave a number of interviews trying to clarify what I believed had happened and what had been missed.
Blair: I didn’t tell Chilcot the whole truth
by Chris Ames
The papers have of course been through Tony Blair’s memoirs. On Chilcot and Iraq, I find the Telegraph’s brief account most revealing:
Mr Blair says he was angry at being asked when giving evidence to the Iraq Inquiry led by Lord Chilcot earlier this year if he regretted anything. He writes that he took a conscious decision to give an answer that was incomplete so he would avoid a headline, ‘Blair apologises for war’.
Blair justifies giving a public inquiry an incomplete answer because he was concerned about the headlines. Very Blair. But if you justify acting in that way for that reason, why would anyone believe anything else that you said?
The Guardian has a bit more of an explanation for Blair’s “anger” and perhaps he has a point:
Blair recounts how he told the inquiry that he took responsibility, an answer that he admits was incomplete. “The anger was at being put in a position in an inquiry that was supposed to be about lessons learned, but had inevitably turned into a trial of judgment, and even good faith; and in front of some of the families of the fallen, to whom I wanted to reach out, but I knew if I did so, the embrace would be immediately misused and misconstrued. But the anger was selfish, trivial – comparatively at any rate – and transient.”
But the Telegraph also has what is perhaps the most revealing explanation of all, relating to what Blair did in 2003 when it became apparent that UN weapons inspectors were not going to find Weapons of Mass Destruction:
But on the issue of weapons of mass destruction, Mr Blair maintains that if Saddam had survived and the UN had backed off or the inspectors had concluded that the Iraqi president had given up his WMD ambitions, it would have stored up trouble.
He says that it would have been impossibly hard to reapply pressure to a regime that would have been “cleared”. Saddam would then have had the intent; know-how; and with a rising oil price, enormous purchasing power, he writes.
Failing Intelligence
By Brian Jones
Digesters may be interested to know that Dialogue have just published my book, FAILING INTELLIGENCE: The true story of how we were fooled into going to war in Iraq.
It is available online and should be in the book shops this week. It got a mention in this week’s Sunday Express and was reviewed in the Sunday Times.
The work that has been required to produce it explains why my contributions to the Digest have been so sparse in recent months.
Although readers of the Digest are amongst the most knowledgeable on this subject, I hope those of you who find the time to read it will be informed by it, at least on a few things. My main objective has been to try to join all the dots I have in my archive to form a comprehensive, coherent and comprehensible picture of the road to war and the subsequent attempts to cover-up what happened, and to explain some of the lessons I believe we should draw from the episode. One of the main problems has been that the some of the most important dots have not appeared in the right chronological sequence, which has made it necessary to revisit evidence that appeared earlier and to adjust the picture retrospectively to take account of the “new” information. I am sure there are still things I have missed.
I would be most interested to see any comments readers of the Digest can find the time to make.
Coincidentally, as Tony Blair’s book is being launched on 1 September, I will be giving a short talk and answering questions at a members event chaired by Michael Mates at the Royal United Services Institute.
Iraq Body Count slams Chilcot
by Chris Ames
NGO Iraq Body Count (IBC) has slammed the Inquiry for paying insufficient attention to Iraqi casualties and focusing on the British side of the story:
“Earlier official Inquiries into the war have been criticised for having too narrow a remit. In contrast, the Chilcot Inquiry has evidently been given one so broad and indeterminate that it has been able to obsess minutely over the ‘war at home’ to the detriment of everything else. Indeed one would almost think that the Iraq war largely took place in Britain.”
IBC has published correspondence with the Inquiry going back to the Inquiry’s launch last summer:
“Almost a year after it was announced, and as it nears its completion, we ask how carefully the UK’s official Iraq Inquiry has considered the deadly effects of the war on those affected most pervasively and in the greatest number – ordinary Iraqis.
As if they were of little importance, is the short answer.”
Inquiry invites veterans to a meeting
The Iraq Inquiry invites veterans to a meeting with the Committee
11 August 2010
Sir John Chilcot has written to UK military personnel who served in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 inviting them to attend an event at Tidworth Garrison on 14 September. The open letter has been circulated to military personnel via Service Organisations, Ex-service Organisations and Regimental Associations. A full copy of the invitation can be found here.
Inquiry stuck in a quagmire
by Chris Ames
I’ve just posted this piece on the Index on Censorship website:
“The Iraq inquiry’s public hearings ended last week, possibly for good. It is clear that Sir John Chilcot and co know the truth but, stuck in a quagmire of their own making, are unable to tell it. ”
“Chilcot should give legal view on war”
Today’s Guardian carries a letter from Louis Blom-Cooper QC arguing that the Inquiry needs to look very closely at both the process by which the attorney general came to state that the war would be legal and the validity of that decision. I’m reproducing it here in full:
Jonathan Steele tells us (Iraq’s missing witnesses, 2 August) that the Chilcot inquiry in its report will not be providing any definitive judgment on the legality of the Iraq war in 2003 because “it [the inquiry] is not a court of law”. While it is indisputably true that any civil or criminal liability for going to war would be a matter exclusively for courts with the jurisdiction and power to determine any legal responsibility, the public inquiry is not debarred from stating authoritatively the status of the invasion of Iraq under international law. More specifically, the inquiry in its primary function of finding all the relevant facts must not be inhibited from doing so, even if, in its findings, it would be inferring blameworthiness on the part of any person, corporate or personal. That would be a legitimate secondary function for the inquiry.
If, for example, John Chilcot and his fellow panel members conclude that, in the weeks before the invasion, the attorney general (Peter Goldsmith QC) had unequivocally told the Blair cabinet that to go to war with Iraq would be illegal under international law without further coverage from a UN resolution, they should say so, without qualification. It would be just as important that, should they find also that between 7 and 17 March 2003 Goldsmith appeared to change his opinion and advice to cabinet, and, if so, why he did, the inquiry should say so. And they should indicate whether he was right or wrong on either occasion. Nothing along these lines would in any way constitute a usurpation of the function of any court which may or may not in the future be entrusted with the task of determining civil or criminal liability for the war. But the public interest in a thorough examination and unbiased report demands no less than a determination of legality at any stage in the process leading up to and involving the invasion.
The alternative view is that the Inquiry is not qualified to make a judgement on the war’s legality and that an establishment inquiry appointed by the then prime minister is only ever going to reach the view that a war in which the British state took part was legal.
Ken Coates on the clusters document
by Chris Ames
Readers may know that Digest contributor Ken Coates, who was Chairman of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, died suddenly at the end of June. Tony Simpson has send me a pdf version of Ken’s last editorial for the Spokesman journal, which, inter alia, mentions my earlier coverage of David Miliband and the UNMOVIC clusters document.
Chilcot’s missing witnesses
On Comment is Free, Jonathan Steele says that “by taking evidence only from insiders, the Chilcot report will produce not the needed insight but fudge.”
Prescott out of the loop
by Chris Ames
It is very much worth looking at the transcript of John Prescott’s appearance on Friday, as well as the headlines. This section is revealing but also shows what is wrong with the Inquiry:
BARONESS PRASHAR: Apart from the videolink conversation did you actually see any of the Prime Minister’s letters to the President?
RT. HON. THE LORD PRESCOTT: No.
BARONESS PRASHAR: You didn’t see any of the correspondence?
RT. HON. THE LORD PRESCOTT: No.
BARONESS PRASHAR: Did you, in the course of these discussions with the Prime Minister, become aware of the extent to which he had committed himself to support the President over Iraq in the first seven months of 2002?
RT. HON. THE LORD PRESCOTT: I was certainly aware that the Americans wanted him on board, and –
BARONESS PRASHAR: That’s what they wanted, but what was the level of his commitment? Were you aware of what kind of commitment he had given?
RT. HON. THE LORD PRESCOTT: I don’t think he was — I think the evidence you have received here was that he was not giving any commitment and he certainly never told me that he had, that he was clearly being pressed on the matter. His, obviously, policy was to go for the UN.
BARONESS PRASHAR: But Alastair Campbell, when he gave evidence to us, said, and I quote, what he said: “If that cannot be done and the only way left is through regime change, through military action, then the British Government will support the American government. That is the message he will have been putting over.”
Was that your understanding?
RT. HON. THE LORD PRESCOTT: No, I wasn’t at that meeting.
BARONESS PRASHAR: No, you were not at that meeting, but you said you saw him regularly. He must have given you some indication of the kind of commitment he had given to President Bush?
RT. HON. THE LORD PRESCOTT: No, he didn’t say he had given any commitment and I don’t think it has necessarily been proved. There are people — Sir Anthony Meyer, he said something else and he was not even at the meeting. So, I mean, there are disputes about these issues. He didn’t tell me, since that’s the direct question, that he had promised that eventually he would stay with them.
As usual, the questioner is limited to hinting at what is in documents that the Inquiry has not been allowed to publish. Prescott tries an evasive tactic by referring to the US wish to have Tony Blair on board but is, for once, brought back to the question. But Prescott can rely on what the Inquiry has been told – “I think the evidence you have received here was that he was not giving any commitment” – rather than what the real evidence shows and Prashar is now forced to discuss the issue in these terms.
But Prescott’s admission that Blair had not told him “that he had promised that eventually he would stay with them” is significant, even if that is all that Blair had promised. Prescott was the deputy prime minister but did not know what Blair had done. He later described how Blair had put the issue before the Cabinet and Parliament but it does not seem to have occurred to him that Blair’s actions in March 2003 look very different if you understand that they were predicated on an earlier, secret promise rather than the facts at the time.
But it appears that Prescott, like the rest of us, still does not know the exact nature of that promise. Through many hours of hearings, the Inquiry has still not managed to tell us that.