Britain’s Iraq inquiry is destined to disappoint. Its chairman Sir John Chilcott declares no-one is on trial at his committee’s investigation of Britain’s role in the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Sad to say, the admonition misses the point. Tony Blair has already been tried, convicted and sentenced in the court of media opinion.
Anything but official affirmation from the inquiry that a mendacious prime minister tricked the nation into an illegal invasion at the bidding of his war-crazed chum George W. Bush will be judged, alongside earlier independent reports into the war, as an Establishment “whitewash”.
The mood has been summed up by the reaction to the inquiry’s opening sessions. Anything that seemed to make the case against Mr Blair grabbed a headline. Everything else was ignored. The tone was captured by the commentator who observed scornfully that Sir John seemed set on writing a report that was “detailed, nuanced and balanced”.
Mr Blair’s reputation must be shredded sufficiently to ensure the eternal condemnation of history. His portrait must be hung in the gallery of shame alongside Anthony Eden, author of that earlier debacle in the desert. Eden really lied about Suez.
Unfortunately, this verdict has already encountered obstacles. The senior officials who have so far given evidence have often been less than fulsome in their support of Mr Blair’s handling of the war. Many of them had misgivings at the time, though none sufficient to resign. Hindsight seems to have hardened a view that the prime minister fell prey to both his unshakeable self-righteousness and his eagerness to stay on side with the Americans.
Yet the same officials insist that Mr Blair did not wilfully lie about the imagined weapons of mass destruction. Sure, the intelligence was patchy and sporadic. No, they would not have employed the same language. Yet they were as shocked as the then prime minister when the invading forces did not turn up chemical and biological weapons.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, at the time Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations and anything but a hawk, has testified that the international community shared this surprise. In all the heated debate in the Security Council before the war none of Sir Jeremy’s counterparts – including the French and Russian ambassadors – argued Saddam had no WMD.
The hitherto accepted narrative that Mr Blair signed up unconditionally to war a year before the invasion has also taken some knocks. He does seem to have told Mr Bush at the president’s Crawford ranch that he was willing to back regime change. But, according to the testimony of Sir David Manning,Mr Blair’s top foreign policy adviser, this was always a contingent pledge. Throughout 2002 and into 2003, the policy objective was rather to disarm Saddam. As one senior military figure told the inquiry, there was no “stitched up deal” to go to war. The UN process to which Mr Blair sought to bind Mr Bush was not a feint.
I offer such observations not to change anyone’s mind. It is too late for that. It seems pretty evident that Mr Blair exaggerated the threat. He was impatient of advice from lawyers and military advisers. I would be surprised if the inquiry does not criticise him for bending the evidence to his conviction – a charge, in case of war, graver than it sounds. Whatever the argument for war – and there was one – Mr Blair was too careless of the consequences.
That said, the inquiry has also heard how Jacques Chirac’s French government had previously colluded to wreck the alternative strategy of containing Iraq. Mr Chirac claimed the moral high ground only after he had safeguarded France’s commercial interests. This was a story that was always going to have an unhappy ending.
The pity is that some of the broader lessons are likely to be lost to the rancour. How was it, for example, that a military timetable itself held hostage to the weather (it is too hot to fight during the Iraqi summer) could be allowed to shape the diplomacy at the UN? Have we learnt nothing since 1914?
How was it that politicians and officials in London could ignore the absence of a credible postwar plan? Should Britain have committed forces once it was clear that Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon intended to occupy Iraq on a hunch that the Americans would be welcome?
Behind such tactical questions lie Britain’s strategic choices. I count myself among those who think that Britain still has more to gain than to lose from its security relationship with Washington. But if Iraq tells us anything it is that Britain’s willingness to fight alongside the US can never be unconditional. Nor must the relationship be exclusive. The US happily admits that its foreign policy is the pursuit of its national interest. Britain’s national interest cannot always be defined as a willingness to follow on behind.