Last Straw

The Chil­cot Inquiry into the Iraq war is already run­ning a pro­pa­ganda cam­paign that it “won’t be a whitewash.”

But you only need to real­ise that its mem­bers were appoin­ted by Gor­don Brown — one of the per­pet­rat­ors — and read the terms of ref­er­ence to real­ise this is a white­wash before it even starts.

… the pur­pose of the Inquiry is to exam­ine the United Kingdom’s 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.

What about say­ing whether any­body involved in the Iraq con­flict should face crim­inal charges?

The Inquiry is not a court of law. The mem­bers of the Com­mit­tee are not judges, and nobody is on trial. But if the Com­mit­tee finds that mis­takes were made, that there were issues which could have been dealt with bet­ter, it will say so.

So this inquiry isn’t about find­ing out who did it and how to avoid such a crime in the future. It’s about learn­ing how to more effect­ively plan these crim­inal wars in the future.

No Right Turn:

It would be nice to think that this expos­ure of the truth might change some­thing and might lead to some justice. Unfor­tu­nately, the capa­city of the Brit­ish polit­ical sys­tem to ignore the crimes and fail­ings of its lead­ers is prac­tic­ally infin­ite. The terms of ref­er­ence for the inquiry are enough proof of that — it is about learn­ing how to plan a war based on lies in secret more effect­ively, not about stop­ping the gov­ern­ment from doing it in the first place. I have no doubt that this mater­ial will be explored at the hear­ings and men­tioned in the report that even­tu­ally emerges; I am equally cer­tain that that report will care­fully avoid blam­ing any spe­cific indi­vidual or hold­ing them to account. The fail­ings will be “sys­temic”, the crimes not attrib­ut­able. And so, with another thick layer of white­wash, the Brit­ish gov­ern­ment will tot­ter on, won­der­ing all the time why no-one believes in it (and push­ing for ever more repress­ive meas­ures to keep the faith­less proles in line)…

Though I would like very much to be proved wrong.

External links:

• A bio­graphy of some of the char­ac­ters involved in the inquiry.