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It is much to Sir John Chilcot's credit that the hearings of his Iraq inquiry will largely be held in public - starting tomorrow in Westminster.
Extraordinarily for a Prime Minister who makes so much of his supposed belief in transparency and accountability, Gordon Brown initially resisted this decision.
Sir John, an old Whitehall hand who knows precisely how far to push a politician, stood his ground. How right he was to do so.
This week's hearings open with the cross-examination tomorrow of Sir Peter Ricketts, former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and subsequently political director at the Foreign Office.
There will be more media interest in Sir Christopher Meyer's account on Thursday of his experience as our man in Washington before and during the war and, to close the week, Sir Jeremy Greenstock on his doomed mission at the UN.
As with all such hearings, the Chilcot inquiry will veer spectacularly from extreme tedium to gripping theatrics.
To what end? As I have written before, those who expect "closure", national psychotherapy or definitive truth and reconciliation from this investigation will be sorely disappointed.
The Iraq war was not (as so many want it to be) a unique episode: the awful folly of two Christian politicians consumed by a desire to recreate the Crusades in the 21st Century.
Rather, the conflict was but one, bleak chapter in a long saga involving global Islamist terror, rogue states and the proliferation of WMD: a saga that began on 9/11 and will be with us for decades to come.
That said, there are many lessons to be learned from this particular chapter. There were hints of what they could conceivably be in the intriguing dossier published yesterday in The Sunday Telegraph - extracts from specific "post-operational reports" written by commanders and more general papers compiled by the Army.
In the end, the question of whether Tony Blair lied to Parliament will rest on semantics.
In July 2002, he was asked by Donald Anderson, chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee: "Are we preparing for possible military action in Iraq?" To which Mr Blair replied: "No. There are no decisions which have been taken about military action."
Of course, that wasn't what Mr Anderson had asked. But Blair avoided his question about preparation because he was not yet able to answer it - or answer it honestly.
As the dossier shows, military preparations were well underway - not just "generic" planning either but "detailed advance planning." Only in December 2002 was the preparatory phase of the operation, code-named Telic, made public.
Therein lies an important clue to the greatest mystery and the greatest scandal of the Iraq conflict: why Britain's Government and armed forces did so little to plan for post-liberation reconstruction.
According to one of the newly-disclosed documents, "in Whitehall, the internal operational security regime, in which only very small numbers of officers and officials were allowed to become involved in Telic business, constrained broader planning for combat operations and subsequent phases effectively until 23 Dec, 2002."
This "caused serious difficulties for UK planners in US headquarters" - who spotted "structural shortcomings" in the Pentagon's plan for nation-building but were unable to do anything about it.
Worse, Whitehall left the military swinging in the wind. "We got absolutely no advice whatsoever," according to the testimony of Brig Bill Moore, the commander of 19 Mech Brigade.
"The lack of involvement by the FCO, the Home Office and the Department for International Development was appalling. We were just left to get on with the task of nation-building ourselves."
Why? Because those departments were covering their posteriors, because ministers were too consumed by the fissile domestic politics of the war - and because nation-building costs money.
"We did have the distinct impression," says Brig David Rutherford-Jones, the commander of 20 Armoured Brigade, in the documents, "that in London there was little care about the operational pressures we were under, only interest in the correct observance of financial procedures."
Well, now: who, do you suppose, might have been insisting upon "the correct observance of financial procedures" in March 2003 and thereafter? None other, of course, than Gordon Brown.
In his decade as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he earned an unenviable reputation as a man with little sympathy for the military, and a bank manager's understanding of the battlefield.
The temptation of the Chilcot Inquiry will be to stay in the comfort zone of Iraq War Studies: the legality of the conflict, the failure of intelligence, the Blair-Bush alliance, poodles, dodgy dossiers, and yellowcake.
These are legitimate and necessary areas for the inquiry's attentions. But they have all been addressed, repeatedly and, in some cases, ad nauseam.
The greatest tragedy of the Iraq war is that - had post-liberation reconstruction been properly planned, funded and executed - history might have taken a very different view of the conflict. One senior officer is quoted in the Telegraph dossier as fretting that "Iraq is a missed opportunity."
How true. And one's heart goes out to Brig Ian Dale, the commander of 101 Logistic Brigade, who observes the bitter irony "that we give troops deploying to Northern Ireland a mandatory two-month training package, whereas for Telic ours consisted of a CD-Rom."
What an outrage and what a waste: to think that British servicemen and the people of Iraq were so short-changed by a Government turning in on itself, and by a free-range Chancellor ill-disposed to help fund what he doubtless regarded as "Tony's war".
No wonder Mr Brown wanted this inquiry's hearings held in private.
Reader views (5)
Let's get to the heart of the matter: bliar definitely LIED to have Iraq invaded, and therefore cared absolutely NOTHING about our troops, knowing full well that in war our soldiers would be killed and injured. bliar and bush presented the case against SH as definitive, with absolutely NO doubt about the reality of those alleged WMDs, and they and various upper members of both Governments proclaimed the same.
Therefore, anything in addition like lack of post war planning and not providing the requisite kit etc for our troops are further proof of bliar's mendacity, lack of caring and vileness.
And neither bush nor bliar are Christians: they USED Christianity for their own evil purposes, contrary to Christ's teachings; they must be held to account for their own actions as evil men, more in common with satanic ways.
Something else of importance that you don't realise: like with Afghanistan, there was a deliberate policy of NOT wanting to have both countries made normal, simply because then the troops would have to be withdrawn, and because of oil and strategic signifigance, it is needed for both countries to simmer, thereby the excuse can be used that troops are needed there, and hence rumsfeld's aversion to increasing the troops to hundreds of thousands, as various generals recommended, and were fired for stating it.
- Ralph, London, 23/11/2009 15:30
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Trying to absolve your hero Blair from blame on this one and pinning it to Brown is ludicrous. Brown was his usual, cowardly, childish self. And Blair was his usual, deceitful, dishonest self.
And don't try to paint Iraq into the 9/11 narrative. The reasons for invading Iraq were no better on 12 Sept 01 than they were on 10 Sept 01 and Islamic terrorism had been with since at least the 1980s (Beirut Bombing anyone?)
- Richard, Suffolk, 23/11/2009 15:15
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DfID sent gender equity practitioners to Iraq to lecture poor benighted Iraqi women about their rights, instead of power engineers and technicians, and sewerage and water engineers. The poor Iraqi women who went to these DfId workshops have almost certainly all been killed. Same is happening in Afghan.
- Davidke, ramsey isle of man, 23/11/2009 15:08
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Time to stop procrastinating over Iraq. There is a more important need to deal with Afganistan. Use the money wasted on this enquiry and use it to support troops now.
Iraq is old news, learn from the mistakes, nothing can be done to change what happened. It is time to concern ourselves with the present and support our forces.
Ex soldier
- John Bandey, Cerilly . France, 23/11/2009 11:37
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Logic, not semantics, should be used to determine whether Tony Blair lied.
"Are we preparing for possible military action in Iraq?" asked Donald Anderson, chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee in July 2002.
"No. There are no decisions which have been taken about military action." replied Blair.
The first word of the reply is 'No', a clear answer to a direct question. Blair did lie if it can be proven that he was aware of preparations when he made that answer!
- Manny Goldstein, London, England, 23/11/2009 10:23
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