Global Policy Forum

Scrutiny by MPs Is Not Enough. We Need a Royal Commission.

By Simon Tisdall

Speaking during his recent flying visit to Iraq, Tony Blair told British soldiers they were involved in an epic and historic undertaking. "I think that when people look back at this time and this conflict, I honestly believe they will see this as one of the defining moments of our century."

Blair offered no elaboration at the time. But his comment should not be dismissed as a throwaway line or mere headline-grabbing soundbite. For Blair is right. In numerous respects, Iraq was indeed a "defining moment", a global event that will crucially influence the conduct of international relations in the 21st century. Its causes and ramifications deserve the fullest possible examination.

Coming from a prime minister who waged an unpopular war, Blair's remark was partly self-justificatory. But it also spoke to his fundamentally moral view that Britain and like-minded states should act as a force for good in the world. Specifically, Blair may be presumed to have meant that a tyranny had been overthrown, a grave security threat eliminated and a people freed from bondage. More broadly, he appears to see Iraq as setting both a precedent and shining example. For him it demonstrated that freedom and democracy are not beyond any nation's reach. It served notice on dictators everywhere that their crimes may not go unpunished.

Examined from an opposing perspective, Blair's "defining moment" acquires a less rosy hue. Iraq marked the maiden outing of George Bush's new go-anywhere doctrine of pre-emptive war-making. Plainly put, post-9/11 America has assumed a right to attack, not merely to defend itself, whenever it feels threatened. Iraq was an assault by a powerful country on a much weaker but nevertheless independent sovereign state, a symbolic act with very real, destabilising implications.

Iraq was a "defining moment" because the US and Britain were ultimately prepared to bypass the UN security council, ignore their obligations to uphold the UN charter and cock a snook at international law. Iraq was truly remarkable, too, in that both countries showed themselves ready to break with long-standing friends, risk wrecking strategic alliances such as Nato that were previously considered sacrosanct and defy the great mass of global opinion. Iraq may have been fought in the name of democracy. But democracy was one of its great victims.

This list of ramifications is by no means complete. The impact of the conflict continues everywhere to be felt - at the G8 summit (a gigantic fudge occasioned by fear of more high-level fallings-out); in Africa and Afghanistan (denied the attention and resources that are now diverted elsewhere); and in Iraq itself, where the actions of the US neocolonial administration are, increasingly, both definitive and perilously momentous. One such is the suspension by the US viceroy, Paul Bremer, of plans to create an Iraqi-run interim authority. Instead, there is now something called the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose rotten borough electorate comprises not Iraqis but that well-known Baghdadi, Donald Rumsfeld, and a few quieter Americans. For the ungrateful residents of Falluja and similar hotbeds of discontent, defining moments arrive with regularity from the barrels of American guns.

It is futile to argue that Iraq has not done lasting damage across the board. But is this damage irreparable and even, in some quarters, welcome? Quite possibly. Blair's pride in his achievement, expressed most volubly during exchanges in the Commons last Wednesday, admits no hint of doubt that it was all worth it. Indeed, the prime minister's attitude suggests that, in similar circumstances, he would do it all again, and again, regardless. He even goes so far as to imply, ungraciously, that those who, before and after the war, questioned the wisdom of his actions are wrong-headed or choking on sour grapes. This confidence that such an epochal political, military and diplomatic reconfiguration, this veritable step-change in global affairs, can be accepted without de mur or dissent or even much debate is truly staggering. Either Blair is a very great, far-seeing statesman indeed - or else a fool of fools.

However the Iraq crisis is viewed, therefore - as triumph or disgrace, as brave new departure or dangerous setback - its watershed nature should surely not pass unscrutinised or without the fullest, informed public discussion. In such a heroic context, Downing Street's agreement to a Commons inquiry into prewar intelligence is too modest by far.

Before going any further down the Bush-Blair road, the British people have a right to know the whole story of why this country went to war, who decided what and when, and what the consequences of that policy have been and most likely will be in the future. Good-faith probing by MPs is not enough. Nothing less than a royal commission on the conflict in Iraq will do, working in public. And if Blair is as sure of his ground as he says, he will have no difficulty in agreeing, in all honour, to heed its conclusions.

Our commission will have a busy time of it. For starters there is the extent to which the Iraq imbroglio undermined global anti-proliferation efforts. But it should also look at the way the US effectively dictated British policy. It should inquire whether Bush was already set on war last summer, as Clare Short and others maintain. It should ask whether the American decision to go to the UN was a charade; and whether Blair and Jack Straw suspected this and if not, why not. Were the diplomatic processes and UN inspections used as mere cover for the military preparations? Despite Blair and Straw's endless protestations to the contrary, was the war inevitable all along?

Our commission should ask whether it was really in Britain's national interest to aid and abet diplomatic vandalism at the UN. And where does that leave the UN now? Does Britain believe in multilateralism as the basic organising principle in global affairs or does it truly prefer a unipolar world run from Washington? Why did ministers scapegoat France so shamelessly and short-sightedly? And should they not now take a closer look at a common EU foreign and defence policy to reduce Britain's chronic subservience to the US will?

Our commission might look at the sort of society now being created, or suppressed, in Iraq; and at Iraq's impact on western relations with the Muslim world. There is much else it could and should do. It is certainly a tall order. But if such an inquiry were fully to illuminate this whole sorry, cataclysmic episode, what lessons might be learned, what repeat errors yet avoided! What dangerously dubious, do-gooder schemes and hatching interventionist plots might the planet be spared! And what a defining moment that might be for Tony Blair's New Labour-New World.

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