If the inquiry is to have any legitimacy, the prime architect of the decision to go to war in Iraq alongside George Bush should give his evidence in public under oath. I think anything less will make people feel this is just a grand cover-up for, after all, what was the biggest foreign policy mistake this country has made since Suez. The people demanding this inquiry already know what its conclusion must be. It is that we were ‘taken to war on a lie’ and that the whole British involvement in Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster from start to finish: unnecessary, illegal, mendacious and catastrophic. There can be no deviation from this conclusion. A show trial is required so that the guilty man, T Blair, can be strung up along with the corrupted spooks, law officers and spin merchants who supinely did his bidding in perpetrating this monstrous crime against the people. Personally, I do not believe the Iraq war was illegal; I do not believe it was unnecessary; I do not believe we were ’taken to war on a lie’. I do believe it was very badly handled by both America and Britain. If there is to be an inquiry, it makes no sense to hold it in secret. The point is there is no need for an inquiry. We have had several already. The only demand for this one is coming from those who are furious that all the previous ones have failed to come up with the correct conclusion and are determined to have an inquiry that does. It is behaviour which – what’s that maxim they chant over detention of suspects and every other measure taken to protect our security? – ‘undermines the very values we are supposed to be defending’. It is all the more striking that such attention is being focused upon events in 2003 while all but ignoring the tumultuous events going on now on the streets of Iran. An estimated ten dead yesterday; a population fighting for freedom and not backing down even under the sticks and bullets of the regime’s thugs and the boiling water from water cannon; a protest that started over a rigged election but is now an open confrontation with the regime and its Supreme Leader; a regime that is split and undecided and may well fall; an opposition leader who is just as much of a threat to the west but who is being swept along by quite different popular passions that he may not be able to control; the possibility of a counter-revolution in a country that right now is behind virtually every serious threat to the free world and is about to go nuclear. Yet it is the inquiry into the Iraq war which is today consuming the progressive classes in Britain, who are giving Iran barely a second glance. The deep yearning for freedom in the Middle East is just so embarrassing, isn’t it. As for Iran posing any threat to us, well that’s just another lie, isn’t it, just like over Iraq. We know this without any doubt. We know that all claims of threats to us from that part of the world are a lie. So while the people of Iran are dying on the streets for freedom, we’ll fearlessly take to the keyboards and TV studios until we get an inquiry to prove it.
Who Needs Evidence When We Already Know The Verdict ?
Weighing into the controversy over the British government's decision to hold the inquiry into the Iraq war in private, the LibDem leaderNick Clegg says:
Sunday, 21 June 2009
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