Ministers urge Brown to launch Iraq inquiry

It strikes me as astonishing that some four years after the Iraq war began that there has never been any official enquiry into how the war began, how the intelligence proved to be so wrong; indeed, into whether or not the intelligence was cherry picked to arrive at a previously decided conclusion.

Oh, we've had the Butler enquiry and the enquiry into David Kelly's death, but both of those enquiries were deliberately framed in such a way as to leave the political process that led to the war out of bounds.

As Blair stands down the calls for such an enquiry are becoming deafening and it's looking as if the new Prime Minister may have no choice other than to launch such an enquiry as a way to draw a line under the festering wound of Iraq.

Tory leaders joined Labour deputy leadership candidates and military families against the war in stepping up calls for an inquiry to be announced by Mr Brown soon after he succeeds Tony Blair on 27 June. Those lobbying for an investigation claim it would restore trust in government in the post-Blair era.

The Government has been reluctant to accept the demands for an inquiry into the mistakes over Iraq, but supporters of Mr Brown believe it could help draw a line under the Blair years.

Labour deputy leadership candidates lined up to support an investigation after Alan Johnson expressed a personal belief at a hustings meeting that an inquiry would be held. Jon Cruddas, the first deputy leadership candidate to call for an inquiry said it would be "part of the reconciliation process and part of rebuilding trust in the Government".

Blair and his gang always resisted such an enquiry on the grounds that our troops were still employed in Iraq and that an enquiry might undermine them, although many of us believe that Blair actually simply wanted to be out of office before the sheer scale of the lies he told were revealed.

And there can be little doubt that Blair did lie. His own words condemn him.

He claimed that the "assessed intelligence" had "established beyond doubt" that Saddam had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons and was continuing to develop nuclear weapons. The facts on the ground proved that this statement was false. Indeed, Blair later admitted that the intelligence that he had described as "extensive, detailed and authoritative" was, in actual fact, "sporadic and patchy."

Indeed, even Lord Butler who led one of the former enquiries into Iraq, has now confirmed that Blair has lied to us.

In the UK House of Lords last month, Lord Butler was scathing about that - though his speech went largely unreported in the media.

He accused Tony Blair of being "disingenuous" in the way he used intelligence - Whitehall-speak for "deliberately misleading".

"[Mr Blair] told Parliament... that the picture painted by our intelligence services was 'extensive, detailed and authoritative'. Those words could simply not have been justified by the material that the intelligence community provided to him."

Indeed, Blair has even argued that the Attorney General said that the war in Iraq was lawful.

However, when the Attorney General's actual advice - advice that Blair withheld from Parliament and his cabinet - was finally released, it turned out that the Attorney General, far from baldly stating that the war was legal, actually stated, "That a reasonable case could be made that the action was lawful." He did, however, state that were the legality of this action ever to be challenged in a court of law, "We cannot be certain that they would not succeed."

In other words he was saying that they could argue it was legal but courts may not agree. It was hardly the ringing endorsement that Blair claimed it was. Nor did it confer upon the action the legality that Blair implied it did.

There are many reasons, now that Blair is stepping down, for Britain to finally hold an enquiry into the myriad of lies that were told before this conflict began. We would do well to finally wash this dirty laundry in public, from the Downing Street Memo through to why two civil servants felt the need to expose evidence that they say led them to believe a "madman" was in the White House.

All of these questions deserve, four years after the initial invasion, to finally be answered.

Brown would do well to make such an enquiry one of the first things he orders upon entering office.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Bush, Blair, Iraq war, enquiry, lies