Opinion - Chilcot: the price of being a loser

Apart from the star performance of Blair, the media coverage of the Chilcot inquiry has been dominated by the question of legality centred on an interpretation of UNSCR 1441. Two of Tony Blair’s previous conflicts, the Anglo-American air assault on Iraq in 1998 and the Kosovo War of 1999, were both legally questionable given the failure to get clear Chapter VII authorisation from the United Nations Security Council.

The vast majority of international lawyers who gave evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee inquiry into the Kosovo War considered that the war was illegal and the committee itself agreed, concluding that ‘Operation Allied Force was contrary to the specific terms of what might be termed the basic law of the international community — the UN Charter’. Yet Kosovo was not followed by a public inquiry because there was no discernible public upset, unlike that over Iraq.

There were differences, but the differences were political, not legal; not least amongst these differences was that Kosovo was seen as a success and Iraq as a failure:  Nato’s attack on the former Republic of Yugoslavia was greeted by mass ethnic cleansing, and the war created its own political justification; unlike the refugees, WMDs failed to show up in 2003 and the country slipped into civil war, amidst US and UK mismanagement of the occupation.

The last government was broadly unconcerned over the question of legality: it is a technical argument — one expert argues it is, another argues it is not.  The public, craving a technocratic fix that will pin the argument down to a certain conclusion, are left stranded in the opinions and views they have long held, but the last government was sheltered from the more vital political questions: an explanation as to the failure to properly plan, resource, and manage one of the most substantial and significant military and civil operations abroad since the Second World War.  It is when evidence has been given that pertains to this — Kevin Tebbit, the MoD Permanent Under Secretary and military commanders, for instance — that then government ministers looked most nervous.

This is the question that alarmed the Blair/Brown government, because incompetence, not legality, is far more politically damaging.  Tony Blair sought to close down questioning when he said that it was a judgment call and he made his decision. In other words, it was political.  Rather than close down discussion, this is exactly where questioning needs to start — an examination of his political judgment to take Britain to war in 2003, together with the management and resourcing of the war and occupation that followed.  

The legal argument has flooded the media and political space; with public hearings begining again and the final assessments being made in the run up to the inquiry’s report before the end of the year, it is time now for the political judgment to be made.  In the absence of an effective performance from the political parties, this is something that the Chilcot inquiry can provide — and at the very least support — by setting out the evidence and ensuring that the issue of competence is to the fore.  At the end of the day, the political judgment may well be that it was, to quote Talleyrand, ‘worse than a crime, it was a blunder’.