Today the Guardian ask, in relation to the Chilcot Inquiry, whether the “real truth” will emerge at last. This, presumably, is distinct from the “false truth” which we have apparently been fed in previous inquiries.
Never has the saying “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” been more apt than in relation to Iraq-war inquiries, where success appears to be defined purely in relation to the finding of guilt or otherwise of specific individuals.
There is much to say on Iraq, Chilcot, Blair and the rest. But because they have already done it more eloquently than I could manage, I will quote from two recent web posts on the topic. First, Nick Cohen’s recent column on the Chilcot Inquiry:
However much [Europeans] loathed Bush and Blair, surely they would have offered unreserved support for Arabs and Kurds struggling to escape totalitarianism…
…And yet mainstream public opinion has never been interested in offering solidarity to the victims of Ba’athism and Islamism. Instead of talking about what happened to Iraq either before or after the invasion, it has remained stuck in the groove of spring 2003, endlessly scratching the record for a conspiratorial explanation for Britain’s decision to invade…
…We are now enduring our fifth Iraq inquiry… [Anti-war campaigners] do not seem to know it but if they hold inquiries until the crack of doom, the war’s opponents will never convict [Blair] or the Labour leadership. Their central allegation that the second Iraq war was “illegal” is unsustainable and not only because no competent court has validated it…
…However vigorously they seek to parse UN resolution 1,441, the use of “illegal” demonstrates that Tony Blair’s lawyerly critics believe that the Ba’athist regime, which was guilty of genocide and under UN sanctions, remained Iraq’s legitimate government, entitled by law to treat the country as its private prison.
Next, The Economist’s Bagehot, who wrote in a recent blog post:
THE question whether the Iraq war was legal in international law has never, I confess, been the aspect of the misadventure that most worried me. It always seemed to me that the legality issue was amenable to more subjective interpretation than whether Saddam Hussein had WMD, whether there was proper planning for the post-war occupation or whether a very large number of people have been killed.
While I admit we have learned some interesting things about the decision making process in relation to the Iraq war from Chilcot, we should not waste the opportunity the Inquiry affords us to learn concrete lessons for the future – whether these processes were sufficient, whether military planning was appropriate, whether sufficient resources were made available once troops were committed etc.
Sadly, though, I predict two things in relation to the Chilcot Inquiry.
First, irrespective of what Tony Blair says tomorrow, the headlines for Saturday’s newspapers and accompanying prose have probably already been written.
Second, if the anti-war campaigners are disappointed by Chilcot’s conclusions following this latest inquiry – if they receive the “false truth” once again – then they will try, and try again until they get the truth they want to hear. The “real truth”.
UPDATE: I’ve just been made aware of this Wall Street Journal article by Con Coughlin, the Daily Telegraph’s executive Foreign Editor, which is worth reading ahead of the Guardian piece.
Put simply, it means that nothing that is published once a case is 
