From the start I had low expectations of the Iraq Inquiry. Gordon Brown, who loved to fix things, asked a group of establishment figures to carry out a “lessons learned” inquiry that was not supposed to reach a finding on the legality of the 2003 invasion.
It’s a truism to which I’ve often resorted that the tendency of any establishment inquiry is to assume that, while mistakes were made, everyone acted in good faith and no one lied. Thus, after the Chilcot report was published this week, we had Blair crowing: there had been no lies; parliament and the cabinet had not been misled; there had been no secret commitment to war; intelligence had not been falsified; and the decision had been made in good faith.
This was Blair’s spin on what the report said. In fact, it avoided making any judgments that suggested Blair misled anyone. For me the key test was whether the inquiry would nail the lie that Blair was seeking to achieve a resolution of the issue of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction by peaceful means.
For a while, the knowledge that the inquiry would publish the previously leaked Downing Street documents suggested that it would acknowledge the truth: that Blair had from the outset signed up for regime change. But it didn’t.
The Chilcot report quotes Blair as acknowledging that there were two distinct options within the Iraq Options Paper in March 2002: containment or regime change. It then quotes Blair’s evidence that the option he picked was to “confront and change” rather than continue to manage the issue.
But it then asserts that Blair’s government fused the two options together by issuing an ultimatum to Iraq – and ‘reconcile[d] its objective of disarming Iraq, if possible by peaceful means, with the US goal of regime change’.
Other documents show that regime change was Blair’s approach from the outset. For example his foreign affairs adviser, David Manning, told the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, the same month that Blair “would not budge in [his] support for regime change”.
In the report, Chilcot seems to accept Manning’s implausible claim that this unequivocal commitment was actually about setting conditions. Worse, the fact that the then British ambassador to the US, Christopher Meyer, told another Bush official about “the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the [UN] inspectors” does not get a mention.
It has now been confirmed that in July 2002 Blair told Bush, whose public policy was regime change: “I will be with you, whatever”. The “whatever” meant participating in regime change, even without going to the UN.
Fast-forward to February 2003, when Saddam had allowed the inspectors in via UN resolution 1441. In another note to Bush, Blair suggested a new resolution setting out what full co-operation from Saddam looked like. He listed among “the disadvantages of this… he might conceivably comply fully”.
Chilcot’s narrative makes plain this duplicity but does not describe it as such, instead bending over backwards to excuse the way the Government’s public statements on Iraq’s alleged WMD “were understandably written in more direct and less nuanced language than the JIC [Join Intelligence Committee] Assessments on which they drew”.
Understandably? Chilcot is not shy about editorialising.
He does go on to criticise Blair’s claim in the notorious dossier that intelligence had “established beyond doubt” that Saddam had WMD, and comes close to calling him a liar. But he gives Blair two get-out-of-jail-free cards.
He notes that Blair expressed this unjustified certainty as his “belief” and states that he will not question this, while noting that the “deliberate selection” of the “I believe” formulation “indicates a distinction between his beliefs and the JIC’s actual judgements”.
The logical implication of this formulation is an awareness of the distinction – “an intent to mislead”, as Clare Short would say. Chilcot won’t say so, choosing in addition to blame intelligence officers for not preventing the exaggeration.
On both regime change and WMD, Chilcot’s determination to pull his punches is unsurprising given his role on the panel of an earlier whitewash, the 2004 Butler inquiry. That inquiry fudged the issue of Blair’s intent and his responsibility for overstating the certainty of intelligence.
But Chilcot also avoids addressing the falsity of Blair’s claim – a key part of his pitch for parliamentary backing – that President Jacques Chirac of France’s alleged threat to veto “any” second resolution had scuppered Britain’s chances of getting one. Although the report sets out the many facts that make it clear this claim was untrue – including the expectation that in the unlikely event that the required “nine positive votes” were gained, Russia would use its veto – it studiously avoids making any “key findings” on this part of the story.
Chilcot’s perverse refusal to acknowledge Blair’s duplicity is infuriating, not least because this creates a culture in which such behaviour flourishes. But ultimately what we needed from Chilcot was the facts of what happened over Iraq. Now we have (most of) those, we can make up our own minds.
