Quintin Jardine's blog

Along with a fair chunk of the British population, I’ve been watching and reading news reports of Tony Blair’s appearance on Friday before the Chilcot Inquiry. Indeed since the whole pantomime began, I’ve watched as witnesses have been called and examined. I started off with disinterest, then boredom set in, but now it’s been replaced by anger. As an elector, my view of the Iraq invasion at the time was that our Government was doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Since then, I’ve come to believe that we placed too much faith on an allied administration that might  have been very good at ‘Shock and Awe’, but didn’t have a Scooby (a modern Glaswegian construct, Malcolm) about long-term planning, and I’ve much sympathy with the view that if the Iraqi people didn’t have the balls to rise up and remove the man Blair described as ‘a monster’, then it was over-generous on our part to do the  job for them. We’ve heard a lot over the last week about the legality or otherwise of regime change. That’s what most wars are about, but those wars usually begin in response to an act of aggression. The removal of  Saddam in the course of the 1992 Gulf War would have been logical; to do it ten years later after a decade of crippling sanctions against Iraq, was undoubtedly more controversial to say the least.

But that’s not why I’m angry. Like or loathe, Tony Blair was British Prime Minister  at the time of the Iraq invasion. The proposal to join the Americans was his. The decision to do so was taken by Parliament. That’s our governing body. Its oversight belongs to the people, not to a committee of five pigmies. We had a chance to consider Iraq five years ago, at the last General Election. We could have  thrown out Blair then, but we didn’t; we returned him to office. But the debate didn’t end. Now, facing an election, his successor, finding controversy continuing, has tried to take it out of the political arena by setting up an ‘Independent Inquiry’. Stone me, there have been independent inquiries under way in pubs and sewing circles all over Britain for the last six years. Taken together their findings will be the ones that count, for they’ll be expressed at the general election in a few weeks or months. The circus we’ve been watching for the last few months, a parade before a quintet of titled time-servers under a chairman so distinguished that a chunky section of the media are unable to spell his name correctly, is irrelevant, expensive, and most of all unconstitutional.

Worst of all, it’s diverting attention from the really pressing issue of the day. Afghanistan. Britain is out of Iraq now, but it’s not at peace. Instead its soldiers are facing death and disfigurement on a daily basis in a conflict with no end in sight, and not one of our political leaders, not Bob ‘who?’ Ainsworth, not David Millipede, not the shape-shifting creature that is Jack Straw, not the embattled, bunker-dweller  that Gordon Brown has been since he took unelected office as Prime Minister, no, not a single one, has offered a compelling, definitive reason for  their presence. We are spending people’s lives in a country where we do not belong, in a conflict that we do not understand, for a cause that’s medieval, a throw-back to the Great Crusades . . . and it has to stop!