Waiting for Chilcot

The inquiry set up in 2009 under Sir John Chilcot to examine Britain's involvement in the Iraq war is still a work in progress. Jeremy Seabrook explains the role and fate of such inquiries under the British political system.

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THE Chilcot report into the Iraq war has been delayed, its publication adjourned sine die. The inquiry was set up by then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2009, its remit, according to chairman Sir John Chilcot, to 'examine the UK involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish as accurately and reliably as possible what happened and to identify lessons that can be learned'.

The three knights and the baroness who made up the panel, it was asserted, had 'long and distinguished careers', which means they will disturb no slumber of conscienceless elites. The inquiry has earned the chairman £790 a day and the members £565, so there is small danger they will be pauperised by this solemn public duty. The cost of the inquiry has risen from £2.3 million in 2010 to £7 million in 2013 and more than £9 million now. It was originally due to take one year to complete.

The committee finished hearing witnesses in 2011. In January 2015 it was announced no publication would be possible before the general election in May. This was, in part, because witnesses had to be given time to respond to the way the report deals with their evidence and to criticisms made of their conduct; although this scarcely explains why many of the actors received an account of their contribution only at the end of 2014. Just what place the responses of those luminaries will have in the final report we cannot, of course, know. Will they be permitted to excise passages they do not like, revise their testimony, 'set the record straight'?

In the wakeful world of 24-hour media the ponderous deliberations of this august body are proceeding at a pace suitable for the long summer afternoon of an imperial heyday, but scarcely appropriate for an investigation into the carnage that killed half a million Iraqis and led to the ferocious sectarian violence which now disfigures the region. In any case, the actions of the UK government before, during and after the invasion of Iraq are a matter of public record. The principals have frequently reiterated their self-justification in the media and on their lucrative lecture-tours, while many politicians whose fateful decisions led to the war have deserted 'high office', in most cases, for an even higher one, at least in terms of rewards.

The war in Iraq, the defining foreign policy error of our time, will not be described as such, even though both Bush and Blair have coyly admitted that 'mistakes were made'. Nothing ever happens in the conduct of affairs, no matter how tragic, damaging or disastrous, which cannot be exploited subsequently by governments as an object lesson, a source of chastening instruction and future wisdom. Whenever they can no longer avoid confrontation with the consequences of their own folly or dishonesty, they vow, as Chilcot has, 'to learn lessons'; although if History (an ambiguous and unreliable instructor) teaches anything, it is that those in power make extraordinarily incompetent pupils and demonstrate a perverse tendency to repeat their misjudgments.

Perhaps the most frequent refrain echoing down the years is the slogan 'Never Again'. It has shadowed our lives since the Holocaust, attempts to suppress the freedom of former imperial possessions from Cyprus to Kenya to Malaya, the fiasco of Suez, the debacle of Vietnam, and since each economic disaster that has punctuated the long history of capitalism. There is no official blunder that cannot subsequently be exploited to reinforce our sense of perpetual progress. Disaster is sometimes even welcomed, for the opportunity it provides for the displays of penitence that follow.

Tony Blair - who responded with alacrity to an invitation to war from George Bush - has denied that he has anything to do with the delayed appearance of the Chilcot report. The confidential exchanges between President and Prime Minister are, in any case, 'redacted' (a recent euphemism for censored), and only 'the gist' of them is to be published. It is suggested that the chairman wanted to publish more of the classified documents than the government allowed, including 'conversations' between Blair and Bush, a thwarted bid for 'transparency' by the powerful practitioners of opacity. The body of the report already exists. Simon Jenkins observed in the Guardian that it is reputed to consist of over a million words, more than twice the length of War and Peace, and has been longer in the writing than that majestic work of literature.

While in power all ruling elites claim infallibility; only after a lapse of time, long enough to erase memory of their ineptitude, does a laborious process of recantation occur. In Britain there will be an inquiry, a commission or a judicial review into this decision or that course of action. This can speedily produce a conclusion, if its purpose is to show there was no need for such an inquiry in the first place. Two earlier investigations connected with the Iraq war, the Butler and the Hutton Inquiries, were generally emollient and disinclined to contest the account power gave of itself.

The Hutton report was into the death of the government weapons adviser David Kelly, who committed suicide in the summer of 2003. There was speculation that he had been the source for a report on the BBC that the government had inserted unreliable intelligence in the  false 'dossier' that 'revealed' Iraq was capable of mounting a lethal attack with chemical or biological weapons on Britain 'within forty five minutes'. The BBC was blamed for not checking its story more thoroughly. The Chairman and the Director-General of the BBC both resigned. Allegations against the government were 'unfounded'. Tony Blair demanded an apology from the BBC, since the claims 'undermined his integrity' - an already threadbare garment at the time, perhaps as a result of its constant need of re-washing.

The Butler report was into the intelligence used as a basis to justify the war in Iraq. Butler found 'weaknesses' in certain intelligence sources. There was an 'over-reliance' on the assertions of dissident Iraqis. Stern words are deployed about 'flawed' sources. Intelligence played only a 'limited role' in determining the legality of war, and the conclusion was that there was 'no evidence of deliberate distortion or culpable negligence'.

Both these reports were widely perceived as the products of an establishment naturally predisposed to regard the power which appoints and rewards it as beyond reproach, and all accusations against it as malicious and unfounded. The culture of this establishment - an informal network of those who govern the country and occupy the majority of 'senior positions' in all walks of life - remains unshaken through all disclosures of its amateurishness and self-interest. It depends upon 'assurances', 'unimpeachable integrity', 'words of honour', 'solemn promises', 'gentlemen's agreements' that belong in imperial public schools of the 19th century rather than in a harsh, unforgiving present.

It provides a glimpse into an archaic, but far from abandoned, notion of service to the nation by personages of privilege: this regards duty to administer the fate of the rest of us as a way of paying back the wealth and esteem they enjoy. Significantly, the democratisation of political leaders - starting with Harold Wilson, through Edward Heath, James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher and John Major - has had little effect upon the nature of those to whom the onerous duty of ruling has reverted: more humble servants of the people have been so overawed by the inherited majesty of pomp and power that they are as eager to yield to their demands as any noble 19th-century lord who reluctantly took time out from his estate to take Britain to war or to condemn malefactors to transportation or the gallows.

Tony Blair, bag-carrier to the small coterie of US neo-cons who produced and stage-managed the Iraq war - the supreme war of whim, as it has been described - is these days a pale but hyperactive figure, a wandering minstrel of a Quartet designed to 'lead mediation in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process'. No wonder he has the air of a ghost in this spectral, almost surreal, activity. He is an embodiment of the public afterlife of power, the loss of which is a near-death experience to those accustomed to strutting self-importantly across the 'world stage'. The fabulous sums of money Blair is said to have earned since leaving 'office' are a contemporary form of redemption: the ransom, perhaps, of a troubled soul, still reluctant to acknowledge the mendacity and folly of the invasion of Iraq, and still defending it as worthwhile in the ousting of Saddam. In a blistering speech in the House of Commons on 29 January 2015, George Galloway derided the well-educated parliamentarians who had 'looked into the Bambi eyes of Tony Blair and believed his claims about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein'.

There are many others anxious not to divulge the full story of this disaster, including, perhaps, David Cameron, since the Conservatives (under the then leadership of that noted humanitarian Iain Duncan-Smith) were not conspicuous dissidents in the rush to war. The general story of what happened is so well known that it is difficult to conceive what the publication of the delayed Chilcot report could reveal that is not already familiar. It is part of a mysterious process, whereby what becomes 'known' only gains official status once it has passed through a triage by eminent men (mostly men) who must certificate the authenticity of the obvious before it can be accepted. These are the landlords of truth, the proprietors of revelation, which may be permitted to enter 'the public realm' only in such ways as will not harm the keepers of secrets of democracy.       

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK. His latest book is The Song of the Shirt (published by Navayana).

*Third World Resurgence No. 293/294, January/February 2015, pp 60-61