Tony Blair gives evidence to a US inquiry into the Iraq situation, but refuses one at home.
It is troubling, if not entirely out of character, that the Prime Minister is prepared to give evidence to the Iraq Study Group, set up in the US to cast "fresh eyes" over the conduct of the war, but feels unable to sanction anything approaching a similar exercise in this country. He and his Foreign Secretary claim repeatedly that a fresh inquiry would demoralise British troops. Apparently this does not apply to our transatlantic allies.
Tony Blair's evidence was disappointing, with all its tired platitudes about Israel-Palestine. Intervention in Iraq was supposed to have led to a democratic domino-effect across the Middle East. Now he admits the regimes he naively hoped would topple in the wake of Iraq may now be needed to sort out the mess he helped create. We face the strange prospect of a Bush administration admitting mistakes the British government has so far denied.
The problem for Blair is that any further inquiry would be obliged to look again at the process that led to war, as well as the present strategic priorities for UK troops. The PM will not countenance this before he leaves office.
The truth is that it would be demoralising not for the military - which has long been aware of the machinations that took us to war - but for Blair and his circle.
Any credible inquiry would have to re-examine the use of intelligence in Downing Street's propaganda war because crucial information has come to light since the Hutton and Butler reports. Among the stream of disclosures is the so-called Downing Street memo, a leaked document published by the Sunday Times in May 2005, which showed that Blair gave his backing to regime change in Iraq as early as July 2002.
It would also have to look at the missing first full draft of the government's dossier on weapons of mass destruction, as revealed in the New Statesman last week. The draft was written by John Williams, director of news at the Foreign Office, on 9 September 2002. It was never disclosed to Lord Hutton's inquiry into the death of weapons expert David Kelly, nor, even more outrageously, was it shown to Lord Butler's inquiry into the use of intelligence. Now the Foreign Office is refusing to release it to Christopher Ames, a member of the public who has campaigned to get at the truth.
Contradictory versions
Williams has now confirmed that he wrote the draft after a meeting on the morning of 9 September with John Scarlett, chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and Alastair Campbell, Downing Street director of communications. But Williams said it contained no new intelligence, such as the now discredited claim that the Iraqis could deploy chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes.
Be that as it may (and the Foreign Office has so far refused to back Williams's account of the contents of the draft), Williams seems inadvertently to have contradicted the official version of events.
Both Scarlett and Williams told the Hutton inquiry that it had been decided that the JIC must retain "ownership" of the dossier at least by 9 September; Campbell denied knowledge of a 9 September draft. However, a close reading of the Hutton evidence (and again we have Ames to thank for this) shows that Williams was also present at a meeting held at the Cabinet Office that very afternoon, when the 45-minute claim was first made available beyond the intelligence community. The first official mention of the 45-minute claim in a draft of the dossier was presented by Scarlett to Downing Street the following day.
Serious questions remain: for instance, why did Williams go ahead and produce a draft on 9 September when it had been supposedly agreed that the "ownership" of the dossier should remain with the JIC if it was to have any credibility?
What was the object of this exercise if Williams just did it "on his own initiative" as he has claimed? And what was Williams's involvement in further drafting of the dossier? When the Foreign Office finally produces the Williams dossier, as surely they must, we will see how closely it resembles the drafts that followed. Williams has claimed it is not the smoking gun, but his own version of events places him, a spin-doctor, at the crucial meetings when the 45-minute claim found its way into the dossier.
There is much the British government could learn from the American experience. If it wants to avoid another inquiry at all costs, one option would be to set up the British equivalent of the Iraq Study Group, which is backed by a bipartisan group of Congress but run by independent institutes. In the UK, the Royal United Services Institute or the International Institute for Strategic Studies would, for example, be well-placed to carry out such a task.
Those clamouring for an inquiry should embrace the US model. Ministers should welcome it, too, as a way of finally drawing a line under this terrible chapter in British political history.
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