Yesterday Gordon Brown announced an “independent inquiry into the War on Iraq, its causes and the aftermath –in secret. Which is bad, but perhaps the panel itself will be of sufficient weight to make up for this deficiency? Who’s going to be on the panel anyway?
Sir John Chilcot, 70, is a former permanent under-secretary of state at the Northern Ireland Office who sat on the Butler Inquiry into the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
Also on the panel are former diplomat Sir Roderick Lyne, crossbench peer Baroness Prashar and historians Sir Lawrence Freedman and Sir Martin Gilbert.
So the chair will be somebody involved with the Butler report, not a model of transparancy itself, but hopefully the other participants will be better? Who is Lawrence Freedman for example?
The military historian Lawrence Freedman was invited, according to Kampfner, to craft, within two days, “a philosophy that Blair could call his own”, complete with benchmarks as to when countries should intervene in others’ affairs. Freedman obliged, thinking he was one of several people being consulted, and was amazed to read a speech that relied almost entirely on his proposals. Blair had announced “a new doctrine of international community” and proclaimed “we are all internationalists now”.
Oh.
But Martin Gilbert is a proper, old school historian. Surely he will be better? Wait, what’s this? Martin Gilbert: Statesmen for these times? “A leading historian argues that Bush and Blair may one day be seen as akin to Roosevelt and Churchill”. O-kaay.
that’s three out of the five named members of the panel looking somewhat dodgy. The other two look somewhat better, but are still thoroughly establishment. It’s a whitewash, but that was inevitable from the start. Whether it matters is another question. Nobody’s opinion will change because of it.