Iraq enquiry - Catharsis or cop-out?

It has been announced that an official enquiry into the Iraq War will be held 'after July', which is when British combat troops will have effectively left the country. David Miliband has said the government is 'committed to holding a comprehensive enquiry' and, if taken at face value, should be a source of celebration.

But I find the bile rising in my mouth already, sensing the prospect of just further betrayal. From a purely personal point of view, the decision to invade Iraq was the most sickening decision a Labour party of which I had been a member for 40 years had ever taken. It was then I left it. I didn't want to leave it but I felt I had little choice. I couldn't do a Robin Cook and leave the government. Nor was I part of a Constituency which I believed felt as I did. There were members who were as enraged as me and who made the last meeting with Gisela Stuart, our MP a difficult one. But by and large, the Constituency establishment - including the MP - and the Secretary were primarily concerned about backing Blair and screw the morality of the invasion.

I went to London for the protest and joined the million impotent people who this fucking Labour government simply ignored. For the next months and years until the truth was revealed about the absence of real justifications, and deprived of a political focus I watched with anger every time I saw Blair at his most 'sincere' justifying every decision he made.



I have never been so disgusted by politics in my life and it has lingered to this day. Now is there to be a catharsis? Are we to really take the lid off every aspect of the Iraq invasion? Are we to go back to basics, examining the root justifications, testing their weight, examining the evidence of legality and who said who to who? Are we in fact going to come anywhere near making a quasi legal decision about whether the justifications outweighed the negatives, whether we were blatantly lied to in order to appease an American agenda? Are the politicians responsible for prosecuting that war really going to have to answer for it?

My immediate response is - of course not. I have so little faith in this government that I believe it will be just another piece of stage management in order to try and appease the doubters with so many caveats on its scope of enquiry as to make it useless. At the end of the day I fear little would satisfy me except to see that bastard Blair facing an International Criminal Court. But as that ain't going to happen we might as well spend the money on the victims of the war rather than lining the pockets of yet more lawyers.