Sunday Papers: The UK Iraq War Inquiry

We haven’t done this for awhile (and this isn’t exactly the Sunday papers), but this effort by the British to take a hard look at how they came to be involved in the Iraq War doesn’t seem to have gotten much press stateside. So far, I’ve seen one NYT article (this post written on 11/28, tho) and heard some NPR reports.

This Inquiry was ordered by PM Gordon Brown as the last of the UK troops were being withdrawn from Iraq. He was pressured for this inquiry almost as soon as he took office and even now he is criticized for not approving this earlier, as elections in the UK happen next spring. The Inquiry panel is headed by Sir Jon Chilcot, who is a very distinguished civil servant and composed of historians and other civil servants. There are no political actors on the panel and no legal scholars. This is also of some controversy in the UK, as there are folks who would want this panel to get beyond fact-finding and lessons-learned to real accountability for some of the players.

It has been fascinating to read and hear some of the reports of the progress to date. The panel has gone right to the big question surrounding:

whether the former prime minister, Tony Blair, and his government were drawn into the conflict — over the objections of Britain’s defense, intelligence and foreign policy establishments — by an eagerness to please the United States.

And in the process of this fact-finding, the Chilcot panel seems to be hearing that in spite of previews to the regime change policy coming from the Americans well before 9/11, and in spite of their own policies of containment and multilateralism it is looking as though somebody in Tony Blair’s government was quite bamboozled by BushCo on this war.

The UK paper The Guardian has a very nice on-line section completely devoted to The Iraq War Inquiry, where you can find their reporting and their editorials on this process. Start with:

• Five Key Questions to Be Answered
  1. What assurances did Tony Blair give George Bush about Britain’s involvement in the war with Iraq?
  2. Was Tony Blair warned by Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, and Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, that regime change was not a lawful justification for invasion? And what happened between 7 March and 17 March 2003 to make Goldsmith change his views about the legality of an invasion?
  3. Why did the intelligence agencies allow themselves to be used?
  4. Did the government delay military preparations?
  5. What plans were made for Iraq after the invasion?

• Summary of This Week’s Hearings

• Testimony from the former British Ambassador to the US that Tony Blair decided for the war a year ahead. Meyer notes that there wasn’t much pushback on the early push for war from BushCo. Blair decided that if he couldn’t change their minds, he would get on board and try to shape the effort. Admirable, but Blair got played in the same way lots of people who thought they would work with these people got played.

• Former British UN Ambassador says was was legal of of questionable legitimacy. Greenstock was apparently pushing for greater worldwide legitimacy for an Iraq War in the UN while Blair was apparently on board with the BushCo plans to ignore any real multilateralism.

One of the interesting things about this inquiry is the reaction of some in the UK to it — it seems to be a viewed as an exercise that won’t result in either accountability or change in policy posture. And it seems that folks in the UK are as interested in an accounting for the Iraq war as some here are. The difference, of course, is that the people in the UK are at least getting an officially-sanctioned questioning of the runup.

Spend part of your Sunday morning reading some of these articles. I am not so sure that there is much here that is really new so far, but it is instructive to see the narrative all in one place and to see the main actors discuss their roles and how their own government seemed to take on the behavior of the Bush people of rolling over dissenters.