Have I Missed The Point About Inquiries?

I always got the impression that an inquiry was like a miniature, but less strong, courtroom, where people have to face some damned tough questions about their part in controversial events. Take the big one in the media at the moment, the Chilcot inquiry over the legitimacy of the war in Iraq, for instance. I welcomed it, thinking that the smug bastards who set the whole thing in motion and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians in order to, basically, steal oil and sell rebuilding contracts to their own people, would have to face a hard line in inquisition for their actions. I for one was looking forward to seeing Tony Blair actually shit himself on live television from the fear of knowing just how indefensible his own position really was.

It looked like I might be in luck when he arrived; the Guardian describes him as looking quite terrified; pale and shaking visibly as he poured himself a glass of water. And so he should, because he knows that there are questions he could face that would strip his story to the bone and reveal it for the tissue of lies and misdirections that it is - and despite his training as a barrister, a good attack would leave him writhing like an upturned tortoise, with nowhere to go.

How fortunate for him that the panel of questioners seemed almost sympathetic to his plight, and appeared to be trying really hard to make him feel at ease; firstly by feeding him huge, vague and safe questions that allowed him to obfuscate to the point of insanity (even I wasn't sure which question he was answering half the time because a) the questions were so long-winded and unfollowable that they stuck in your mind like, oh, what's the name of that fellow on TV whose name you can never remember? and b) Blair turned every answer into a miniature lecture on 'doing the right thing' and 'feeling beyond any doubt' that he was 'doing the right thing'). He visibly relaxed when he realised that this was a panel he could dominate with ease. The questioners might as well have just said to him "Well, you feel that you've done the right thing, obviously, and you certainly think that Iraq is better off now than it was in 2002, is that correct?" To which he could then have just answered "Yes" and we'd know just about as much as we do today, after 6 hours of hearing the smug prick drone on with endless misdirections and cheap get-outs (it's so easy to shirk responsibility for over half a million deaths by saying that you were absolutely convinced that you were doing the right thing over and over again). Only Lord Lawrence Freedman seemed to make him squirm when he told the ex Prime Minister the death tolls for just the months of January in Iraq in 2004, 2005 and 2006, and yet instead of turning this into a fierce attack on whether or not Blair still felt that the Iraqi people were better off by comparing how many of his own countryfolk Saddam killed in the previous twenty years with the total death toll caused by the US and UK invasion and the subsequent occupation, he instead let Blair, once more, dominate the floor by leading them somewhere else.

I personally would have loved to ask him some questions. For instance, I would have suggested that, on the basis of intelligence alone, there is a country in the world with a high number of known Al Qaeda operatives within its borders; a large number of sympathetic Muslim extremists; an active and well-known nuclear weapons program; and, compared to the Western nations, a fairly lax security setup around that nuclear program. Yet it doesn't seem that at any point anybody considered invading Pakistan and demanding that they get rid of their weapons of mass destruction. But then Pakistan doesn't have much in the way of lucrative oil reserves, does it? 

So despite the very real threat of Al Qaeda managing to steal a nuclear weapon from Pakistan with the intent of using it in a terror attack, Blair and Bush instead chose to invade a country who have never particularly shown any great belligerence to anyone outside of their immediate vicinity (they warred with Iran, and invaded Kuwait, but I don't ever remember hearing about Saddam wanting to attack the US or UK or any other non-local country) and who didn't actually have any weapons of mass destruction anyway. Iraq, did, however, have a huge number of oil fields, and even in the early weeks of the war, I recall seeing a press conference at which one of the US generals declared that "controlling the oil wells is our number one priority" which I recall made me bitterly laugh out loud at the brutal honesty of it. The politicians can wriggle and slime all they want, but even the grunts on the ground there knew what their real priorities were. Regime change? Meh. The US in particular has a great track record for regime change, but it's usually been in toppling democratically elected but slightly socialist governments to replace them with oppressive and brutal regimes that they can then make deals with more effectively. Weapons of mass destruction? Meh. Pakistan has them, India have them, Israel has them, and I don't see anyone calling for them to disarm, despite the way that Israel likes to throw it's US purchased military might at Palestinian civilians in their endless tit-for-tat battles. 

I would have attacked his assertion that Iraq now is better off than it was under Saddam Hussein by throwing the figure of people killed by Saddam himself in Iraq. Many figures are bandied about, some claim that 800,000 people died under Saddam's reign, but that actually breaks down to about 500,000 killed in the war against Iran, 100,000 killed by us in the first Gulf War, and possibly up to 200,000 in Iraq's gulags. So technically, Saddam can only really be held to be responsible for about 200,000 of those deaths, because the US funded his war against Iran, and we massacred 100,000 ourselves the first time round. Yet since 2003, the deaths from violence are estimated to be as high as 600,000, in a peer-reviewed Lancet study. Official Iraqi (and therefore heavily tainted by the presence of their occupiers - sorry, their best friends, the UK and US forces - suggest lower figures of just over 100,000. No surprise there. Even if the Lancet, who are not usually known for making things up out of thin air, are exaggerating, I'd take the figure as a midway point and say actual casualties are more like 400,000, that's still a shitload more than Saddam himself killed. Twice as many, in fact. Three times as many, if you believe the Lancet's figure. So 200,000 died as a direct result of Saddam's general cunty-dictatorness, which is never good, but at least 400,000 died as a result of our invasion. Hm. Difficult to say there whether the people are better off than they were. I mean, obviously the dead ones are not better off, and the living ones who have lost children or parents or siblings, they're not better off either and are probably already signed up to some insurgency group in order to avenge the wrongs done to them. And the living ones who didn't lose anybody, but now have to face an Iraq dominated by religious fundamentalists shooting at each other and at them, I'm not too sure they're better off either. But at least they don't have to worry about ending up in one of Saddam's gulags anymore. They just have to worry about being killed by US or UK troops or insurgents. Brilliant. Welcome to our Vietnam, folk.

Nobody questioned Blair either about the unfeasibly complicated and dense arrangements he has built around his finances. He has created, apparently, an impenetrable web of off-the-shelf companies and special companies, formed partnerships with himself at various points, and left it so mangled that nobody seems to be able to track where money is coming from and where it goes to. How convenient. If he had nothing to hide, why go to such incredible lengths to hide his income? Because it might show large payments from the sale of stolen oil, perhaps? Backhand payments through Bush's similarly convoluted arrangements for his part in the war? Or is it just to sidestep tax and hand over millions to his children? Whatever the arrangements, not many ex PMs, even hard-nosed capitalist Thatcher, managed to blag over £14 million in the short time after leaving office. Where is it all coming from? And where is it all being funnelled to?

There were no hard questions about the legality of the war, despite the testimony of senior legal experts earlier in the week suggesting that it was made quite clear that the war would be illegal without a second UN resolution - again, the panel allowed Blair to wax eloquent on the topic, subverting their questions and again performing sleight of hand misdirections.

You have to ask why. Why did they go so easy on Blair? Why were the questions of even the usually more effective members of the panel so wishy-washy and easy to hijack? Why did they let him hijack the questions? The general consensus in the press backs up what I thought as I watched the performance yesterday; Blair was deliberately given an easy ride. I want to know why.