Chilcot Report: Justified Delay or Stitch-Up?

January 21, 2015, 1:30 PM GMT+0

It has been a long time coming and it is still not here. We learned this week that the long-delayed Chilcot Report into the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath is not going to be published now until after the general election. The announcement has caused outrage, not least to the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg. The Inquiry chairman, Sir John Chilcot, says the delay, though regrettable, is necessary and justified. Others think there is a conspiracy underway to shield politicians from embarrassment in the run-up to the election. What’s the truth?

The decision of Tony Blair’s Labour government, with Conservative support, to join the Americans and other allies in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was hugely controversial at the time and remains so. The aim was to topple its leader, Saddam Hussein, seen as a threat to regional and indeed international security. That was achieved; but the aftermath, far from establishing a stable democracy in the country, has been a disaster and still is.

Well over a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians are believed to have lost their lives as a result of the invasion. One hundred and seventy nine British military personnel lost theirs. Iraq has collapsed into bouts of civil war and now much of the west of the country, including its second city, Mosul, is under the control of ISIS, the fanatical Islamic terrorist group responsible for most of the humanitarian outrages, including brutal beheadings and crucifixions, we have seen in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere over the last few months. Many regard Britain’s involvement in this disaster as being as great a foreign policy fiasco as Suez, if not worse.

It was a Labour government, under Gordon Brown, that set up the Chilcot Inquiry in 2009 to establish what had gone wrong and who was to blame. Sir John and his colleagues not only pored over reams of documentary evidence but interviewed around a hundred witnesses, including Tony Blair. The last of these witnesses gave evidence in February, 2011 and Sir John then said that his report would be produced in ‘some months’. Now, nearly four years later, we are still waiting for it.

The delay has long been a source of public outrage. The former Conservative foreign secretary, Lord Hurd, said recently that the delay had gone beyond ‘questions of mere negligence’ and was now a ‘scandal’. Many others have expressed the same view.

Initially the cause of the delay was a stand-off between Sir John and the government, in the form of the Cabinet Office, as to which classified government documents he would be allowed to publish in his report. Although Sir John and his colleagues had been allowed to see all the documents they thought pertinent, his wish to publish some extracts he thought necessary to make public in order to justify the conclusions his inquiry had reached, was resisted on the grounds that it would jeopardise national security and harm our relations with the United States. In particular Sir John wanted to publish some of the private correspondence between Tony Blair and George W Bush, the US president at the time.

Eventually, last summer, agreement was reached that Sir John’s report could publicly record the ‘gist’ of relevant communications between Bush and Blair without quoting them directly. Many thought this agreement would put an end to the delay in publication and that we would have the report before Christmas. Now it has been kicked beyond the election and those most keen to see it have reacted with fury.

Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat former minister, said: ‘This is a shocking development. It is a betrayal of the British public who are entitled to see this report before the election.’ David Davis, the Conservative former shadow home secretary, said: ‘Frankly, this isn’t good enough … It is incomprehensible as to why this is being delayed.’

The reason that Sir John gives for the delay is that those criticised in the report need time to study what is said about them in order to correct any factual errors that may have been made and to prepare their defence once the report goes public. But this cuts no ice with Nick Clegg. The LibDem leader and deputy prime minister wrote to Sir John on Tuesday, saying: ‘If the findings are not published with a sense of immediacy, there is a real danger the public will assume the report is being ‘sexed down’ by individuals rebutting criticisms put to them by the inquiry, whether that is the case or not.’

Mr Clegg’s choice of language is very deliberate. It was the suggestion voiced on the BBC in 2002 that the government was ‘sexing up’ the evidence against Saddam Hussein, specifically regarding his possession or otherwise of weapons of mass destruction, that got the corporation into such hot water and ultimately claimed the scalps of its chairman and director-general. Many still believe the BBC was right in what it reported and are looking to the Chilcot Report to settle the issue once and for all.

Many too suspect the hand of Tony Blair behind the delay. It is widely expected that he will be criticised in the report and they believe that it is he who is kicking publication beyond the election in order to postpone embarrassment to him and to his party. Mr Blair vehemently denies this, protesting that he has long wanted the report to be published as soon as possible. His allies instead place responsibility for delay on civil servants and on continued nervousness in Washington.

But it is not only the former prime minister who is likely to be criticised. Many others are expected to be put in the dock and the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, has been speaking to some of them. He reports that they claim they were handed the draft of the passages concerning them only just before Christmas and that the report is ‘ludicrously long’. In other words, they endorse Sir John’s claim that they do indeed more time to scrutinise what is being said about them before it all comes out into the public domain.

Those who are protesting about the delay, however, argue that those criticised will still have an opportunity to defend themselves after publication and that it is much more important that the report comes out straightaway because further delay will simply stoke public cynicism. They argue that official reports into the failures of government have in the past been widely regarded, rightly or wrongly, as exercises in whitewashing and that what is going on over Chilcot will confirm this impression. In other words, there is another establishment stitch-up going on.

Sir John protests that this is not the case and that the proper and justified procedures have to be gone through even if it takes far longer than anyone would wish.

The House of Commons will be debating the whole issue of Chilcot and the delay next week. What questions do you want answering? And do you believe that delay in publication until after the election is justified or not?

Let us know your views.