Only a full inquiry can avert another disaster like Iraq
The government must open up to find out why it could not foresee - and barely considered - the outcomes of occupation Jonathan Steele
Thursday January 24, 2008
The Guardian
The two main opposition parties will make another valiant effort today in the House of Lords to persuade the government to hold an inquiry into why its pre-war analysis of Iraq was so badly wrong. Valiant, because several previous attempts, including in the Commons, have failed.
The last try came close. The government defeated a motion by Welsh and Scottish nationalists by just 298 to 273 votes. That was in October 2006, and the then foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, used the spurious argument that an inquiry could send a dangerous signal to insurgents that Britain did not have the determination to stick it out in Iraq. It was the worst kind of macho plea: "Don't give aid and comfort to the enemy", an unmerited claim of security in order to censor discussion...
There has been no inquiry into the equally important issue of the political intelligence circulating in Whitehall about the consequences of an invasion, how Iraqis would react to an open-ended occupation by US and UK forces, and the
strong possibility that the post-Saddam vacuum would be filled by Islamists, some with close links to Iran, rather than the secular, pro-western exiles favored by Washington and London.A passionate advocate of invasion, he now says, "The first and the biggest American error was the idea of going for an occupation".http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2245758,00.html
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