Azara Blog: Brown launches another likely pointless Iraq inquiry

Date published: 2009/06/15

An independent inquiry into the Iraq war will be held in private, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has told MPs.
Opposition parties - and many Labour MPs - have been calling for the probe since shortly after the 2003 invasion.
It will start next month and take at least a year, Mr Brown said. It will not aim to "apportion blame", he added.
...
The government had been urged to hold the inquiry in public, but Mr Brown said he must take into account national security, and avoid damaging Britain's military capability.
It was designed on a similar basis, he added, to the Franks inquiry into the 1982 Falklands War, and it would aim to identify "lessons learned".
He added it would hear evidence in private so witnesses could be "as candid as possible".

The telling phrase is "as candid as possible". So in a private inquiry it is only "decent chaps" who will be involved, so witnesses can be as sloppy or as "economical" with the truth as desired, without much fear of being called out on it. In a public inquiry everyone can point out fallacies and distortions in the evidence. Needless to say, civil servants and politicians do not like the thought of that. On the other hand, everyone already knows that the country became embroiled in this illegal war based on evidence that was at best misleading and at worst downright lies and propaganda. The only possible point of any inquiry is if the establishment is finally ready to admit this, and that seems unlikely, so this inquiry is likely to be pointless. Brown didn't have the guts not to back Blair in this misadventure, so Brown is not much freer from guilt than Blair himself. But neither are the Tories, who at the time were happy to wave flags and not provide any critical analysis of this disasterous policy decision.

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