In this morning's ToryDiary, the Editors ask: "Should a call for an inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war really be the top priority of the Conservative Opposition?"
In my view an inquiry into the "origins of the Iraq war" would be too limited in scope. It seems very clear to me that the war itself was fought on a perfectly transparent basis that secured wide agreement - Saddam had messed us about and we weren't going to put up with it any more.
What there should be an inquiry into was how we came to believe (falsely) that Saddam had messed us about during the mid to late 1990s, and hence why we maintained sanctions on that country for so long. This must be one of the worst intelligence failures in history, and surely merits an investigation.
If you say no, Editors, are you expecting anyone to support any wars in the future?
When, for example, someone tells us that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, or that Zimbabwe has a bad human rights record, we are depending on intelligence assessments. Since the Iraqi assessments were so spectacularly wrong for such an amazingly long time, with such terrible consequences for the Iraqis (the sanctions regime caused great suffering), if we don't even try to find out why it all went wrong, on what are we to base the future decisions over military interventions that I want us to pursue?
One more way to put this, somewhat provocatively: I have a slightly nutty friend with whom I argued extensively concerning Iraq during 2002 and 2003. I said to her that the Iraqis may well not have WMD now (i.e. in 2002) but certainly had been trying to develop them in the late 1990s - and that everybody agreed that this was so. She said no, not everybody agrees; some articles in the Palestinian press denied this. I said some articles in the Texan press denied that men landed on the moon - and they were just as reliable.
So, when it turned out that Iraq didn't try to develop WMD in the late 1990s, I had to eat quite a bit of humble pie with my friend. She even invited me to reconsider this whole men landing on the moon thing (about which she has considerable doubts)...
That Iraq has turned out not to have had any WMD programme in the late 1990s - that it didn't defy us; that our sanctions regime on it was wholly unfair and unjustified - really is as wacky a fact as that. If that humiliation for us isn't something that justifies an inquiry, how are we to re-establish any credibility with the non-aligned world, or be believed in any of our intelligence-based military ventures in the future?
