For the fifth time since Britain went to war against Iraq in 2003, diplomats and civil servants are being questioned to discover how and why the government embarked on this disastrous venture. There have been two parliamentary investigations and two public inquiries, yet still there is a feeling in Britain that the establishment is hiding the truth. The mood in the media is for the guilty men to be named and shamed.
The Iraq Inquiry is streamed on the internet, so theoretically an Iraqi with a spare hour could follow the proceedings as a lesson in democratic openness. I would not recommend this course. The hearing is not a court of law, and will not apportion guilt. Its deliberations have none of the drama of a trial – no preening lawyers, no swearing of oaths and no cross-examinations.
Rather it consists of four knights and a baroness putting polite questions to the type of people they rub up against every day – ambassadors and top civil servants. There are two historians on the panel but they are not attack dogs who will draw blood from Tony Blair, the former prime minister, when he appears before the inquiry next year. One of them is Sir Martin Gilbert who wrote in 2004 that George Bush and Mr Blair “may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill”.
