The Chilcot inquiry's focus on Bush-Blair secrets distracts us from disaster in plain sight

To have any relevance, the Chilcot inquiry should extend its brief to cover all UK military interventions since the alliance

The decision to keep secret the full correspondence between George W Bush and Tony Blair instead of allowing the Chilcot inquiry to publish it has been rightly pilloried as a self-serving, dishonest attempt by politicians and civil servants to conceal their role in a disastrous war in Iraq.

By focusing public attention on exchanges between Bush and Blair that are to remain secret, the agreement between Sir John Chilcot and Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, gives the impression that there are bodies still buried and yet to be unearthed. This diverts attention from the fact that the most evil-smelling of these bodies have always been in plain sight. Who really thinks that Blair and his coterie were truthful in saying they believed that Saddam Hussein with his weapons of mass destruction was a threat so great that it could not be contained without military action?

The Chilcot inquiry has turned into a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan comedy about the British establishment, dysfunctional in everything except hiding its own mistakes. More is at stake here than simply the evasion of responsibility for launching a war that turned into a fiasco. The ludicrous length of the inquiry shows a belief on the part of British politicians and civil service mandarins that they have nothing to learn from mistakes made in Iraq.

We know they learned nothing because the reasons and rhetoric used to justify the British part in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 were being trotted out again as British forces moved into Helmand Province in Afghanistan in 2006. A pretence of humanitarian concern for the Libyan people was used in 2011 to explain Nato’s intervention to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, much as had happened in Iraq. Recall how a hypothetical massacre by Gaddafi’s forces at Benghazi was used as justification for Nato airstrikes. But when militiamen we had installed in power later carried out real massacres by firing anti-aircraft guns into crowds of protesters in Benghazi and Tripoli, there were only mouse-squeaks of concern from Washington and London.

in full: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-chilcot-inquirys-focus-on-bushblair-secrets-distracts-us-from-disaster-in-plain-sight-9466421.html