It appears we will finally get to read the two million words the Chilcott Enquiry is likely to contain some time next summer. But will any of those words really get to the nitty-gritty of the problem?
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on false information- lies in fact. Tony Blair has apologised, sort of, for basing Britain's actions on those lies, But he thought they were true at the time, so what can you do? To that I'd say, OK, but how hard did you try to verify those "facts"? As I understand it, much of the "dodgy dossier" was based on a PhD thesis by Ibrahim al-Marashi, who was known to have rabidly anti-Saddam views. And his totally spurious assertions were swallowed wholemeal by both the British and the Americans, because it suited their purposes.
When weapons expert David Kelly suggested the dossier had been "sexed up" he was found dead in a field, apparently by his own hand, using a tiny blunt penknife. Odd. Then in 2011 the Observer obtained under freedom of information legislation a memo from John Scarlett, head of the ISC at the time, to Blair's foreign affairs spokesman Sir David Manning. Written in March 2002 it said that "it would be beneficial if the dossier obscured the fact that in terms of WMDs Iraq is not that exceptional".
If that isn't sexing up, I don't know what is. We all know that George Bush II wanted a war in Iraq for all sorts of domestic and economic reasons, and dragged Blair along with him, how reluctantly we're not sure, to add credibility to his plan. We do know they also wanted the French to get on board and had a mother of a hissy fit when they didn't. France does not seem to have collapsed as a result. We wouldn't have either. But Blair was so keen to stay "in" with Dubya he almost fell over himself adopting the poodle position. That's the crime he's guilty of: literally deceiving us into a totally unnecessary war, a war that saw half a million Arabs murdered, destroyed Iraqi infrastructure for years to come, enabled the looting of museums and ancient sites and encouraging the blossoming of Al Qaida and the birth of IS. None of this, none, would have happened if we'd held off and insisted on getting the claims of the dossier verified, but it never happened. You could say people believe what they want to believe, but I say it's worse than that: they didn't believe it in the first place. I'd like to think Chilcott will at least hint at this truth, but I'm not an idiot. I know damn well it won't.
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