Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry was doomed from the outset. Set up reluctantly by Gordon Brown in 2009 to deliver a whitewash within one year, Whitehall’s ruse crashed within weeks. Six years on, the inquiry is buckling under extreme pressure to produce its report. To salvage a credible account for the record will require at least nine months more.
The original intention, conjured by Sir Gus O’Donnell, the cabinet secretary, was that the inquiry would hold its hearings in secrecy. The report would be written in anodyne mandarin-speak and deny the media sensational headlines and bloodied culprits. Instead, Chilcot was persuaded by outrage in Westminster to hold his hearings in public. That exposed the personal weaknesses of him and his panellists. Daylight blew apart Whitehall’s desire for a cover-up.
Britain’s path towards the Iraq war and its aftermath was strewn with error, naivety, misjudgment and deception among an antagonistic cast of characters. As those civil servants, military supremos, politicians and intelligence officers directly involved began appearing for questioning, the members of the inquiry were revealed to lack the necessary skills of forensic examination. The panel of two eminent historians, Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir Lawrence Freedman, a retired senior diplomat, Sir Roderic Lyne, and Baroness Prashar, a token quangoist, were ill-equipped to speedily disentangle one of the most complex events in recent British history, covering nine years. The inquiry’s inherent flaw had begun with the appointment of Chilcot himself: an amiable but unexceptional civil servant, he was selected because he had served on a similar inquiry.
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In 2004 Tony Blair was forced to commission an inquiry into the intelligence failures leading up to the war. Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary, was asked to discover why Britain’s intelligence services had calamitously reported that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Butler’s report was a model of impenetrable mumbo-jumbo requiring a diligent reader to disentangle the smokescreen contrived by Downing Street to protect Blair. The mediator in the negotiations between Butler and Downing Street was Chilcot, a member of Butler’s inquiry committee. Butler had delivered his report within five months. Chilcot was expected to deliver within one year.
To help his task, Margaret Aldred, another insider, was appointed the inquiry’s secretary. Serving in the Ministry of Defence and later in the Cabinet Office, she had been directly involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It was unlikely that even with the best intentions she would forget the battles in Whitehall during those tumultuous years. Not only were the civil servants involved in the saga bruised by their arguments with the military and ministers, but some senior military officers had hated some MoD officials, and some politicians had loathed some military officers. Aldred’s appointment remains controversial, not only for her compilation of the report’s narrative and conclusions, but also for the route the inquiry took in Whitehall’s turf battles to gain full access to the vast collection of top-secret official documents recording the mistakes, obstruction and deceit over the nine years.
The complexities of war and its aftermath engaged a multiplicity of departments within the machinery of the state. To negotiate that maze of antagonistic interests required special skills and knowledge. The five panellists, honourable and benign, set off on their task without the necessary instinctive scepticism. Watching their first hearings during 2009 was to observe a pleasant conversation among guests at a Notting Hill dinner party rather than a discomfiting probe to establish, irrefutably, hard facts. Instead of asking themselves, “Why is the bugger lying to us?”, they posed questions that rarely ruffled a brow. Patent lies were never directly challenged; convenient lapses of memory passed without comment.
The obvious solution was to hire skilled lawyers to question the witnesses, but Chilcot, recalling the efficiency of the Butler inquiry, dispensed with lawyers. His error was to misjudge the difference between simply asking why Sir Richard Dearlove, while chief of MI6, wrongly reported that Iraq possessed WMDs, and unravelling the multifarious complications arising in wartime.
In both the public hearings and, more importantly, in the draft of the report sent to witnesses for their comments (the process known as “Maxwellisation”), Chilcot and Aldred revealed a skewed understanding of the relationship between the military and their political masters. In the draft the inquiry criticised the military for decisions that were quite clearly the responsibility of politicians. The generals and admirals protested that they had properly obeyed their legal orders. They complained further that the draft quoted hundreds of government documents that had not been shown to witnesses for their comments. Second, the inquiry had come to conclusions not only unsupported by facts, but also contradicted by other evidence. Third, the draft was so badly written that parts were incomprehensible. And then it got worse.
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In their early questions the panel showed a surprising naivety towards Blair’s determination to remove Saddam, without clearly revealing that ambition, soon after the attack on New York in September 2001. The consequence of the secrecy Blair imposed about his understandings with George W Bush became apparent to the inquiry only much later. Even then, it was only in 2011 that Blair was reinterviewed about the secrecy.
Three times, Lyne asked him why an “options paper” on alternative policies available towards Iraq, prepared by the Cabinet Office in early 2002, was not given to cabinet ministers. Each time, Blair spoke at length, but failed to answer the question. Without extracting an admission about his refusal to distribute the paper, the inquiry can criticise a symbol of the smokescreen during the road to war, but not properly consider Blair’s own reason for withholding the paper.
The aftermath of the war will be equally problematic for the inquiry. Last week Clare Short broke cover on the radio to attack the draft criticisms she had received about her conduct as development secretary in postwar Iraq. She blamed the inquiry’s misunderstanding of the law for what she said was unfounded criticism. In private, witnesses have blamed Short for obstructing reconstruction in the British zone. Yet, in the hearings, the panel failed to elicit fully those witnesses’ anger about her prejudices towards the military and the war. Nor were their complaints put to Short during her testimony. In the interest of truth and fairness, that is unacceptable.
The Maxwellisation process exposed the inquiry’s forlorn grope in the dark. As honourable people, the panel members have correctly chosen to re-examine the evidence. In other words, they are now undertaking a new inquiry. They should be given a deadline of next June to finish.
Tom Bower’s new book on the Blair government will be published in 2016