No one doubts the courage of those British soldiers who died in Iraq, but the integrity of those who sent them to their deaths is very much open to question. That it has taken the Chilcot inquiry six years and counting, with no answers to this sacrifice, does the British state no more credit than Mr Blair’s remarkably fancy footwork in the months leading up to the war 12 years ago.
Billions of pounds have been spent and hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died — all to disarm a dictator of weapons we soon learnt he didn’t possess in the first place. This certainly seems a suitable topic for inquiry.
Yet a process intended to help the country come to some shared understanding of how we allowed this disaster to unfold is now mired in delay, bringing bitterness and recrimination instead of solace.
Amazingly, its publication date remains in the stars.
There is no legal justification for this crawl. We are told, repeatedly, that a process of “Maxwellisation” is to blame, that those whom the inquiry intends to criticise must have an opportunity to respond and to put the record straight, if they can. And while this is not a legal requirement, one can quite see why Sir John Chilcot wants to allow senior figures this opportunity before he publishes his findings. It is, perhaps, only fair.
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But this doesn’t mean gifting the prize of control over the inquiry’s timetable to its subjects, proffering a bounty bound to be grasped by anyone with a past calculation to hide; such is a recipe for the chaos that’s now unfolding. The men and women who are the subject of this inquiry are not there to be indulged, they are there to be investigated; they are due not deference but the thrust of forensic examination.
In reality, rigour and fairness are not in tension. By all means invite comment from the targets of your disapproval, but only within the discipline of a strict timetable. If people won’t co-operate, that’s up to them, and their recalcitrance can be laid bare in due course. Even in this momentous case, three months would have been quite sufficient. And to those who suggest that legal action might have been taken in the face of such a time limit: well, good luck with that. The courts know how to keep litigation moving, and judges well understand the destructive scale of your error when you reward obduracy with obeisance.
In the face of death gangs rampaging across borders, and a Shia ascendancy that threatens regional chaos, Mr Blair’s increasingly forlorn attempts to justify his war verge on the embarrassing. It is in this context that the importance of Chilcot’s work cannot be over-stated: it amounts to the British establishment investigating itself in the shadow of war graves.
And the urgency is this: people are not just waiting for an elaborate lesson in their country’s recent history, they are waiting to judge for themselves whether our institutions are at ease with honesty.
Ken Macdonald QC is warden of Wadham College Oxford and a former director of public prosecutions