Were the problems with the Iraq war just the basis on which we went to war, or inappropriate equipment necessitating lots of UORs ?

Do we just want to know that the whole enterprise was a bad idea, or do we want to see where and why things were done badly or well?

The loudest opposition to the nature of the inquiry has largely come from the grouping around the Stop the War Coalition (a trading name of the Socialist Workers' Party ¹ ). It is worth remembering that this grouping was not only opposed to the war ² , not only opposed to the Labour government, but opposed to the entire system of government and nature of the state. That suggests that they would be opposed to the inquiry on some basis no matter what as, in their view, the government is necessarily corrupt and serving of capitalist interests.

The more reasoned problems come under three heads; timing, secrecy and outputs.

Timing

The 'why now' question is easily answered; British troops there have largely withdrawn. Conducting an honest inquiry would have been impossible if witnesses thought they were kicking the stool from underneath troops in the field.

The 'how long' question can only be answered in reference to other inquiries.

The Fingerprint Inquiry; announced 14 March 2008. Yet to report.
The Fraser Inquiry into the Holyrood building; announced July 8th 2003. Report published 15 September 2004.
The Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly; opened 1 August 2003. Report published 28 January 2004
The Cullen Inquiry into the Dunblane massacre; announced 21 March 1996. Report published 30 September 1996
The Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié; announced 20 April 2001. Report published 28 January 2003.
The Cullen Inquiry into the Ladbroke Grove rail disaster; announced 8 October 1999. Report published 17 April 2001
The Davies Inquiry into the Aberfan disaster; announced 26 October 1966. Report published 3 August 1967
The Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday; announced 29 January 1998. Yet to report.
The Butler Review into WMD in Iraq; announced 3 February 2004. Report published 14 July 2004.
The Redfern Report into the Alder Hey organs scandal; announced 3 December 1999. Report published 7 November 2000
The Scott Report into the Matrix Churchill affair; announced November 1992. Published 27 April 2004.

This will of necessity be a painstaking process. Setting an artificial limit of twelve months will not help anyone. I would reply to anyone who says it is being put back till after the election for political reasons that desiring it to report early, half-cock, so that it can be used to hit the Labour party is also a political reason.

Secrecy

Much of the criticism has been on the issue of secrecy.

For one thing, I understand and agree with the logic of certain things being secret. Beyond the obvious issues of national security, I would make two points.

Firstly, we did not cover ourselves in glory. I'm guessing that there are plenty of people who will want to tell their part of the story but will not, for various reasons, want to do it in public. Their own conduct or that of 'brother officers' might have been wanting, or they might be concerned about leaving interpreters and other locally employed civilians in the lurch again.

Equally, an honest investigation will have to take information from people who we cannot compel to appear - from the USA, for instance - and who are unlikely to appear if they feel they would compromise confidences. Similarly, would (say) a representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government be likely to appear to discuss oil if their words were ferried direct to Washington and Baghdad?

Outputs

The inquiry has many issues to consider. Off the top of my head, they could include the lead up to the war, WMD, intelligence qua intelligence, use of intelligence, lack of embassy, use of intelligence from allies, the march on Baghdad, de-baathification, troop numbers, mission objectives in Basra, relations with civilians, the Awakening, civil-military co-operation, troop equipment and so on and so forth.

Quite beyond the simple questions of 'were there WMD' and 'was the dodgy dossier sexed up', there are questions about everything that happened in Iraq. There is a general understanding that we didn't cover ourselves with glory, but after any operation of the size of Iraq, there is a need for a 'lessons learned' exercise. There are going to be two outputs, one public, one secret. As with the Dunblane inquiry, parts of the secret version may be declassified before the time limit to aid that process.

The ouput is not 'Tony Blair was wrong' but a whole range of comments, recommendations and criticisms. Those looking for an answer along the lines of 'Tony Blair was wrong' are missing the point and, ultimately, will make it harder for us to see where we went wrong, what lessons we can learn and how that affects and constrains future military conduct.

Ultimately, going to war in Iraq was a political decision. While an inquiry may do much, it cannot decide whether a policy was right or wrong. That is reserved for the electorate.

For the record, I opposed the Iraq war.

xD.

1 - they're not socialists, they're not workers and they don't know how to party
2 - even though it had no problems with declaring "we are all Hezbollah now"

This post originally appeared at davecole.org

"We also need guarantees that the Home Secretary's ‘Dustbin Stasi' won't use terrorism legislation to access retained Facebook data for frivolous purposes, such as identifying people who let their dogs foul the pavement."

How, exactly, would the Government do this? If you use Facebook to tell people you are letting your dogs foul the pavement, you're updating your status too often.

Hitler: Very keen on referendums and stuff like that.

"The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off."

Evelyn Waugh - Men at Arms

Like a lot of English people in the grip of Posh People’s Disease at the time, Evelyn Waugh had a few wobbles in the 1930s.

He and his chinless associates were tempted by Franco in Spanish Civil War, and briefly saw something benign and civilised in Mussolini’s apparent ultra-Conservatism.

But Hitler, Waugh finally concluded, was plainly both mad and bad – and the degree to which the wider European far-right was prepared to collude spoke volumes. Waugh repented some of his earlier folly.

Now I know that any comparison between Hitler and David Cameron would rightly be written off as hysterical. But like the penitent Conservative Waugh, many of the lefties amongst us need to ask themselves a few questions about their complicity in overlooking some spectacularly reactionary stuff.

I’d go further than that: This week, the Conservatives promoted perhaps the most reactionary and dangerous set of proposals that any party with a realistic prospect of victory has ever announced in this country. 

In their local government proposals, they have adopted the very worst excesses of populism. And by populist, I don’t mean any half-arsed Phillip Gould-type attempt-to-push-the-party-where-focus-groups-tell-them sort of populism.

No. The Tories are looking to universalise the kind of populism that the Germans made illegal after the war because they knew where it took them in the 1930s. 

This week, the Tories were shown in their true light: Hateful, with all disguise cast off.

They are proposing:

• an extension of the concept of ‘elected officials’ - particularly police commissioners
• referendums on council tax rises
• referendums on any issues on which citizens demand them
• directly elected mayors (at the behest of a local referendum, if I understand their position correctly?)
• direct participation in structural change at a local level

In each case, these measures provide a veneer of accountability while removing the deliberative policy making processes. These will be replaced with tools that will only further empower the most active privileged citizens in any community (and, of course, those with access to the media or the resources provided by pressure groups).

In addition, the general attack on regional government can only be seen as a means by which central government can obtain further control over local government. I hope it’s not a cheap and partisan point to make when I say that the Conservative government of the 1980s was responsible for an unparalleled degree of political centralisation?

For a party that has done so much to ‘detoxify it’s brand’ on many of the issues that it was responsible for during these years, you would think that the complacency on the question of centralisation may be one that could come back and bite them?

Apparently not.

The plans to sideline local councillors – and this is what these proposals add up to – are indicative of a poisonous disregard for everything that is good about democracy. 

That these measures will result in worse policymaking goes without saying. But the most interesting point – for me – has been the silence with which our liberties-obsessed commentariat have greeted this. Some years ago, Matthew Parris illustrated just how poisonously illiberal unmediated public opinion can be.

For those of us who believe that collective action can bear valuable fruits of some kind, the creeping populism of the referendum and the directly-elected officials (the promotion of which Labour have not been entirely innocent) presents a huge danger.

Imagine the nightmare of a thoughtful train of policymaking on a huge issue like .... say .... climate change .... being entirely derailed because a demagogic right-wing newspaper decided to poke its readers into an oppositional frenzy.

I know, I know. That could never happen here.

Paraphrasing Tim Garton-Ash a while ago, when politicians were able to win elections and start the process of government, they often exhibited what Machiavelli called virtù - the capacity for collective action and historical vitality.

Referendums remove that capacity at a stroke. If you are looking for an explanation for illiberalism – for the promotion of a bureaucratic / policing agenda – look no further than a Parliament along with local and regional assemblies that have had the  virtù sucked out of them by the constant imperative to consult with stakeholders, negotiate with veto-wielding vested interests, disruptive agenda-led newspapers, opinion-polls, well-heeled pressure groups, bureaucrats and managerialists. 

It is these players that now hold a collective whip-hand over an almost friendless political class. Only the distributed moral wisdom of Parliament can protect civil liberties and good government. Yet the self-styled crusaders that seek to defend our liberties have nothing to say on the subject.

How many members of Unite would scrub a toilet? How many would work 12-hour shifts serving drunks at a Christmas party? Not a single one.

John Rentoul spots another silly one here.

"The trade unions "have turned into the government's nodding dogs"; social democracy "has gone"; NGOs "good at raising public awareness, less good at building sustained, multifaceted campaigns". Few escape his disapproval. And finally he offers the solution to the decline in political culture: a new website modelled on MoveOn.org in the US, which helps to mobilise people to lobby their senators and congressmen and women."

It's a very good no-nonsense piece that Hazel's colleagues could do with copying. At this stage of the government, a small part of Labour's problem is that it's activist base is often demoralised by the kind of witless demagogic attacks of the type that Monbiot churns out. Hazel rightly picks up on the lack of any real alternative offered by Moonbat, but I think she misses out the most important point: That if progressive people think that they can sort things out by boosting the dubious legitimacy of single-issue campaigns, they are forgetting where that kind of thinking leads.

This would not advance the George Monbiot agenda. It would be much more useful to the Richard Littlecock one.